Thread by @Slasher

Regarding the state of Overwatch: I've been playing OW since closed beta day 1 (Oct 27, 2015). I have more hours of ranked play in Top 500/GM/M than some OWL players. I've watched every tournament.

Overwatch might be the most frustrating playing experience in all of esports.

I've played tens of thousands of hours of high level Quake. Thousands of hours of CSGO and Starcraft/SC2. And watched esports games for more than half my life. None of those games have brought me to the level of helplessness that I get from playing Overwatch. For a few reasons.

Overwatch stands atop the now deserted mountain of the 'hero shooter' genre which merges FPS gameplay, modes and maps with MOBA gameplay, most notably abilities and ultimates. All this combined with Blizzard's Team 4 philosophy on the game:

Spoiler: You're gonna have a bad time.

Purely on the game design perspective, Overwatch and hero shooters in general are likely the most team reliant games of all the major team esport titles, with the least amount of ability to individually carry the game yourself. This makes for a really rough experience.

Sure League of Legends and Dota have similar problems if someone is trolling, griefing, throwing. But Overwatch's issues are exacerbated by a range of shields, barriers, and stuns in a FPS game, and a vastly smaller total hero pool leading to stagnant metas and mirror matchups.

Overwatch and hero shooters are predicated on elements such as CC and stuns that are just not fun for FPS players. OW has no movement mechanics, only abilities. Movement + positioning reign king. Add in lack of heroes and OW has always had one or two 'best' compositions to win.

Overwatch's main game mode is payload, borrowing from older class-based shooters such as TFC and TF2. I would argue that TF2's main 5CP game mode is a better standard for a competitive game than OW's payload or control. And OW's own idea - 2CP - has been a disaster since launch.

So the core of OW gameplay:

-Unfun mechanics to traditional FPS players; ultimates, abilities
-Poorly implemented game modes; 2CP, spawn system, map chokes
-Small hero pool and unfun hero mechanics; stuns, defense matrix

And then you get Blizzard's approach to online gaming.

Jeff Kaplan and the Blizzard Overwatch team really want everyone to 'play how they want to'. It just doesn't work. Jeff wanted no hero limit in Overwatch against the wishes of both pro players and casuals. It took seeing 5 Dvas and Tracers stalling games to finally overturn it.

Jeff Kaplan and the Overwatch team have/had the following philosophies:

- No soloq (wants you to play with friends)
- Play any hero you want no matter team comp (freedom)
- No scoreboard or stats (increases toxicity)
- No custom game automation (PUGs/FPL/RankS)

They don't work.

You take the above issues regarding Overwatch gameplay. Add in how Blizzard balances the game. Combine all this with Jeff Kaplan's overall game design philosophy and for online Overwatch.

You get one of worst online ranked experiences in gaming and OWL is a nonstop mirror meta.

The competitive/pro Overwatch community of OWL and Top 500/GM/M players is so split from the larger more casual OW community that there is rarely consensus or concrete data for Blizzard on what to address. The community must unite for specific requests to better the game.