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>Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes. The compe

>Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes. The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games. There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained about the slow trickle of balance changes and the casual community has always complained about the lack of new content (maps, events, heroes). The communication was decent at first then fell off a giant cliff. A lot of competitive players and streamers burned out of playing boring and/or frustrating metas (for a year or more) and casual players ultimately got bored. My theory is (I'm stealing this from someone else) is essentially Activision saw they had a huge player base who paid $60 once and never again. The extremely consumer-positive loot box system (you can get ample loot boxes by just playing the game, and loot boxes avoid giving you items you already have) means that most players didn't need to buy loot boxes; in fact if you played the game a lot (as a potential whale) you didn't need to pay at all for your favorite skins. Activision saw that after Year 2/Year 3 the revenue growth for OW fell off a cliff and deprioritized people who would have been making new art/content for the game. In order reclaim that revenue those people were then moved to "Overwatch 2" and all new content was focused on that game. However that game has been delayed (again, and again) so now the player base is hemoragging even harder. I say this as someone who loves the game, and doesn't play any other game. The game might have lasted longer if they followed Riot's model and made it free to play with micro transactions.

phillryu 6y ago
It seems like they're setting up for that with OW1 being compatible with OW2 multiplayer. They'll probably just make OW1 free to play shortly following launch of OW2.
vkou 6y ago
The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun. Forcing two tanks, two healers, two DPS characters leads to eight minute DPS queues. But if you don't force this kind of team composition, the game becomes incredibly unfun for the team that has five DPS characters and no tank. You'd figure that this would drive DPS players to switch to the other roles, to reduce the time they spend in queue - but no, the queues today are as long as they ever were. It's probably because a lot of people don't find the support roles fun to play. Contrast it to something like League of Legends, where queues for each role are much closer in length - probably because a large portion of the player-base finds supporting roles fun in that game.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  Yeah, they originally had it all open and found out that it was a mess. Having very distinct and static characters is a neat idea but the problem is that there is usually one set of them that everyone wants to play. I've started just playing tanks to get short queues, but it gets boring quick since there are so few of them and not much difference in play style. The other issue is that if you play casually and get a terrible healer, then you will almost certainly lose. Being a fantastic player only gets you so far. Other people mentioned Valorant, and it appears it has a very different style with exchangeable weapons that apply to all classes, but just different abilities and more strategic games. It seems like a really good player can make a bigger difference and play solo. I'm going to look into that now.
- nemothekid 6y ago
  >The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun. This has been a criticism of Overwatch since day one. If the core problem was the actual core formula it wouldn't have grown so large to begin with. Millions of people wouldn't have billions of hours into the game in the first place if the core formula wasn't fun. I think you have a valid point, but I don't think it's why Overwatch hemorrhages players. None of the issues your brought up are any different than they were for the past 5 years (except role queue). Also, you can't point to queue times, then mention League has a better system. It wasn't rare at one point (I don't play League anymore) to have 30 minute queues even in diamond. DPS queues in OW currently are 10 minutes max even in GrandMaster.
  - ev1 6y ago
    For the first year of overwatch, me and my friends played for hours. Every night. Every day. Then they started restricting your team choices. You could no longer have two of the same hero. You then had to be forced into meta-roles ONLY. You then had to queue specific roles and were not allowed to pick anything else at all. All lack of balance and content aside, what the hell?
    - pizza 6y ago
tokipin 6y ago
Overwatch is a frustrating game to play because they almost have it right. It's almost there, if they could just tweak a couple things. A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into. For one, it creates artificial and spiky emotions in players, which just burns people out. It's amazing they don't realize basic things like that, which means they actually haven't had the right talent for a long while. The company also has a lot of hubris. They spend tons of effort on things like trying to make healers and tanks fun. There's many good reasons to do that and they gave it a good try, but the conclusion should have been: we aren't able to make healers and tanks fun, let's try something else. Instead, they forced people to play them. Other mistakes include not understanding "the meta." Once they think the meta is balanced in a game, they get conservative and don't want to tweak things too much. They don't realize that the meta is an equilibrium state found by the players. Change the game, a new meta will be found. They don't seem to get this and just let their games run stale because they think the competitive scene drives the player base, instead of the other way around. Overall the facepalm factor has been too high for too long. Blizzard has always understood the science of game design, but since at least SC2 they lost the art.
- xxpor 6y ago
  This is the first time I'm hearing any complaints about the modern overtime system. It seems totally fair to me, the defending team has to actually win the final fight. What would you change about it?
  - blibble 6y ago
    oh it's fair, but extremely frustrating to lose after 60 seconds of overtime
    - xxpor 6y ago
      To me those are the best games, it feels like you were evenly matched :) I hate getting just completely run over way more, personally.
captaincurrie 6y ago
>The extremely consumer-positive loot box system No loot box system is consumer-positive. Its legalized gambling and its wrong. The Riot model is correct (except for putting new summoners behind a paywall): F2P, with the ability to buy exactly the cosmetics you want and nothing else. I spent quite a bit of money on LOL when i played it and i didn't feel bad about it. Overwatch could have done the same thing and it would have been great!
darth_avocado 6y ago
> The game is incredibly stale This is what I would describe as the state of Overwatch. After sinking thousands of hours in this game, I stopped playing my favorite game because Blizzard didn't care. 1. They pretty much gave up on any new content for OW2 development. 2. Competitive was broken from the beginning. Good behavior was rarely rewarded and bad behavior was rarely punished. Most of my games were grind really hard to win and get 100SR, only to have two consecutive games where people would leave early and then lose 4v6 or 3v6 and have that SR disappear. 3. Elo hell was real. I was in Bronze because that's where I started from when I began the game, but eventually when I got better, I could never jump out of the ELO hell. I ultimately had to create a new account, and lo and behold I was immediately placed in Diamond. 4. SR awards were bs. I was a Moira main who'd get 40 kills and pretty much own the game, but just because Moira is rewarded on healing and there was a Lucio on the team, you barely get any SR for carrying your team, meanwhile Lucio reaps all the SR. 5. The event based content was so bad, recycled game modes from 3 years ago, recycled skins, recycled pretty much everything. 6. PvE modes were garbage. 7. Lootboxes were so frustrating, I at one point spent $50 to buy a fuck ton on lootboxes for a special event that had a ton of legendary skins, I managed to get just 1. Had a ton of repeats, that have minimal payoff. 8. Constant meta changes were brutal towards the end. Everything that came after Brig was just ridiculous. 9. 2-2-2 was BS. 3-3 was worse. 10. Everything, EVERYTHING was more catered to OWL than the player base. At some point these MBA types who don't game, decided what's best for making more money and went ahead on executing in that direction. Player base was forgotten. And that has been pretty much the state of OW and all the Blizzard IP.
- blibble 6y ago
  you have a warped view of how the MMR/SR systems function essentially all that matters is your win-rate, if you can win more than 50% of your games over a reasonable stretch of time your MMR will increase and your SR will follow it performance based SR is only a very small bonus (up-to diamond) initial placement is essentially a guess: over 25 or so games your MMR will converge to where you're supposed to be (4200 support main)
  - darth_avocado 6y ago
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Why is it that online video games require these steady streams of updates to be viable? Chess hasn't seen an update in, well, I don't actually know the history, a thousand years maybe? Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...
- sweettea 6y ago
  Chess was actually most recently updated around 1860, when en passant was standardized: https://www.chess.com/news/view/breaking-official-rules-of-chess-updated https://www.chess.com/news/view/breaking-official-rules-of-c... .
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    (I don't think that's the link you thought it was!)
- me_me_me 6y ago
  Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike. Both really old both almost unchanged for years and both have big active communities.
  - cloverich 6y ago
    OW is more complex (outside of high ranks). In many cases the changes are meant to balance characters so more combinations are equally viable. when i played TFC way back when, pyro was a worthless character, effectively unused for years. they eventually balanced him; so probably just the far higher number of characters and abilities and desire to make more things viable. OW is gets stale at high elo but at lower ranks it’s whatever people are best at that tend to work within reason. (i quit just before 2/2/2. played silver to diamond)

phillryu 6y ago

It seems like they're setting up for that with OW1 being compatible with OW2 multiplayer. They'll probably just make OW1 free to play shortly following launch of OW2.

vkou 6y ago

The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun. Forcing two tanks, two healers, two DPS characters leads to eight minute DPS queues. But if you don't force this kind of team composition, the game becomes incredibly unfun for the team that has five DPS characters and no tank. You'd figure that this would drive DPS players to switch to the other roles, to reduce the time they spend in queue - but no, the queues today are as long as they ever were. It's probably because a lot of people don't find the support roles fun to play. Contrast it to something like League of Legends, where queues for each role are much closer in length - probably because a large portion of the player-base finds supporting roles fun in that game.

brobdingnagians 6y ago
Yeah, they originally had it all open and found out that it was a mess. Having very distinct and static characters is a neat idea but the problem is that there is usually one set of them that everyone wants to play. I've started just playing tanks to get short queues, but it gets boring quick since there are so few of them and not much difference in play style. The other issue is that if you play casually and get a terrible healer, then you will almost certainly lose. Being a fantastic player only gets you so far. Other people mentioned Valorant, and it appears it has a very different style with exchangeable weapons that apply to all classes, but just different abilities and more strategic games. It seems like a really good player can make a bigger difference and play solo. I'm going to look into that now.
nemothekid 6y ago
>The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun. This has been a criticism of Overwatch since day one. If the core problem was the actual core formula it wouldn't have grown so large to begin with. Millions of people wouldn't have billions of hours into the game in the first place if the core formula wasn't fun. I think you have a valid point, but I don't think it's why Overwatch hemorrhages players. None of the issues your brought up are any different than they were for the past 5 years (except role queue). Also, you can't point to queue times, then mention League has a better system. It wasn't rare at one point (I don't play League anymore) to have 30 minute queues even in diamond. DPS queues in OW currently are 10 minutes max even in GrandMaster.
- ev1 6y ago
  For the first year of overwatch, me and my friends played for hours. Every night. Every day. Then they started restricting your team choices. You could no longer have two of the same hero. You then had to be forced into meta-roles ONLY. You then had to queue specific roles and were not allowed to pick anything else at all. All lack of balance and content aside, what the hell?
  - pizza 6y ago

tokipin 6y ago

Overwatch is a frustrating game to play because they almost have it right. It's almost there, if they could just tweak a couple things. A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into. For one, it creates artificial and spiky emotions in players, which just burns people out. It's amazing they don't realize basic things like that, which means they actually haven't had the right talent for a long while. The company also has a lot of hubris. They spend tons of effort on things like trying to make healers and tanks fun. There's many good reasons to do that and they gave it a good try, but the conclusion should have been: we aren't able to make healers and tanks fun, let's try something else. Instead, they forced people to play them. Other mistakes include not understanding "the meta." Once they think the meta is balanced in a game, they get conservative and don't want to tweak things too much. They don't realize that the meta is an equilibrium state found by the players. Change the game, a new meta will be found. They don't seem to get this and just let their games run stale because they think the competitive scene drives the player base, instead of the other way around. Overall the facepalm factor has been too high for too long. Blizzard has always understood the science of game design, but since at least SC2 they lost the art.

xxpor 6y ago
This is the first time I'm hearing any complaints about the modern overtime system. It seems totally fair to me, the defending team has to actually win the final fight. What would you change about it?
- blibble 6y ago
  oh it's fair, but extremely frustrating to lose after 60 seconds of overtime
  - xxpor 6y ago
    To me those are the best games, it feels like you were evenly matched :) I hate getting just completely run over way more, personally.

captaincurrie 6y ago

>The extremely consumer-positive loot box system No loot box system is consumer-positive. Its legalized gambling and its wrong. The Riot model is correct (except for putting new summoners behind a paywall): F2P, with the ability to buy exactly the cosmetics you want and nothing else. I spent quite a bit of money on LOL when i played it and i didn't feel bad about it. Overwatch could have done the same thing and it would have been great!

darth_avocado 6y ago

> The game is incredibly stale This is what I would describe as the state of Overwatch. After sinking thousands of hours in this game, I stopped playing my favorite game because Blizzard didn't care. 1. They pretty much gave up on any new content for OW2 development. 2. Competitive was broken from the beginning. Good behavior was rarely rewarded and bad behavior was rarely punished. Most of my games were grind really hard to win and get 100SR, only to have two consecutive games where people would leave early and then lose 4v6 or 3v6 and have that SR disappear. 3. Elo hell was real. I was in Bronze because that's where I started from when I began the game, but eventually when I got better, I could never jump out of the ELO hell. I ultimately had to create a new account, and lo and behold I was immediately placed in Diamond. 4. SR awards were bs. I was a Moira main who'd get 40 kills and pretty much own the game, but just because Moira is rewarded on healing and there was a Lucio on the team, you barely get any SR for carrying your team, meanwhile Lucio reaps all the SR. 5. The event based content was so bad, recycled game modes from 3 years ago, recycled skins, recycled pretty much everything. 6. PvE modes were garbage. 7. Lootboxes were so frustrating, I at one point spent $50 to buy a fuck ton on lootboxes for a special event that had a ton of legendary skins, I managed to get just 1. Had a ton of repeats, that have minimal payoff. 8. Constant meta changes were brutal towards the end. Everything that came after Brig was just ridiculous. 9. 2-2-2 was BS. 3-3 was worse. 10. Everything, EVERYTHING was more catered to OWL than the player base. At some point these MBA types who don't game, decided what's best for making more money and went ahead on executing in that direction. Player base was forgotten. And that has been pretty much the state of OW and all the Blizzard IP.

blibble 6y ago
you have a warped view of how the MMR/SR systems function essentially all that matters is your win-rate, if you can win more than 50% of your games over a reasonable stretch of time your MMR will increase and your SR will follow it performance based SR is only a very small bonus (up-to diamond) initial placement is essentially a guess: over 25 or so games your MMR will converge to where you're supposed to be (4200 support main)
- darth_avocado 6y ago

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Why is it that online video games require these steady streams of updates to be viable? Chess hasn't seen an update in, well, I don't actually know the history, a thousand years maybe? Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...

sweettea 6y ago
Chess was actually most recently updated around 1860, when en passant was standardized: https://www.chess.com/news/view/breaking-official-rules-of-chess-updated https://www.chess.com/news/view/breaking-official-rules-of-c... .
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  (I don't think that's the link you thought it was!)
me_me_me 6y ago
Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike. Both really old both almost unchanged for years and both have big active communities.
- cloverich 6y ago
  OW is more complex (outside of high ranks). In many cases the changes are meant to balance characters so more combinations are equally viable. when i played TFC way back when, pyro was a worthless character, effectively unused for years. they eventually balanced him; so probably just the far higher number of characters and abilities and desire to make more things viable. OW is gets stale at high elo but at lower ranks it’s whatever people are best at that tend to work within reason. (i quit just before 2/2/2. played silver to diamond)