As the title states, former Overwatch Central, a rather large source of content creation and news for Overwatch on youtube seem to be done posting videos for Overwatch. This isn't huge news on its own, but I'm afraid that a trend has been at play recently with the figureheads of Overwatch. Since this reddit is pretty much only potg's I wanted to start some dialogue about what people are thinking with the recent departure of many man T2 contenders teams, sinatraa to valorant, Hitscan (Overwatch Central) to valorant, many other pro players ditching the game, and the massive lack of content coming out way following Echo's release as were not to get another hero until OW2 which does not have a release date.
Personally, I find this very troubling for Overwatch. It feels as if the devs have been trying to put bandaids on the game every since GOATS took over.
Some reasons for my last statement:
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2-2-2 was implemented because OW is incapable of being balanced and diverse (no game is really). 2-2-2 squashed the goats meta and somewhat opened up the game to new characters being played who were largely left behind, such as reaper, mei, and Torbjorn. The devs want hero diversity and it seems like they will gun for this at all costs. They want no characters to be throw picks, they want metas to not exist in order to prevent staleness or the throw picks I mentioned. Evidence for this is the many times where we've been told from the devs that they want people to play the game however they want, yes, even in a ranked scenario. This meant that one-tricking torbjorn, for example, before he was meta wasn't seen as a problem by the devs, even though it was a problem to a large portion of the community. Further evidence for their want for diversity and want to neutralize the idea of having a meta in Overwatch is the recent implementation of hero pools.
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Hero pools are a beast of their own but I have some points to make regarding it and will leave the discussion to everyone else after. Firstly, the addition of hero pools can easily be seen as a way to prevent a singular meta taking the game by storm ever again like how Goats did for a whole year. It can also be seen as a way to force the diversity of heroes being played in the game. However, it is largely unsuccessful at both of these points, and it contradicts Blizzard's original intentions behind balancing the game which is allowing players to play what they want. As we've seen in the Overwatch League, meta still heavily exists, there are just two metas now. One for one week, and another for the next. The third week tends to be a repeat of the first week due to the nature of how the bans work. Thus, meta is still pervasive. Next, many of the heroes at the top of the meta, namely reaper, mei, and Torbjorn, are not being played at a high rate in competitive matches which is what the hero pool bans are based on. Hero pools thus are punishing players who are playing characters that they think are fun instead of banning out the meta heroes. This does nothing to curb the meta or provide diversity. In fact, players who have their favorite heroes banned often just stop playing the game entirely for the week that they are banned.
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Lastly for hero pools, Blizzard has said that they want all heroes to be played, and they want every player to play what they want and how they want. Banning heroes for an entire week is a direct contradiction to this philosophy. These reasons are why I said that I feel that blizzard is continuously putting bandaids on the game rather than creating true fixes. Maybe this is because their resources for development are hard at work on OW2, I'm not sure, but my fear is that with games like valorant taking large portions of our player base OW might not be able to survive, at least healthily, till OW2 comes out. I'm no doomsayer, but signs are showing and we've gotten little transparency from Blizzard regarding any of the recent events.
All of this said, I was very impressed and appreciative of the few weeks that blizzard was implementing their "aggressive rebalancing", but that seems to be all for not given the implementation of hero pools.
What do you all think?
