WoW down to 1.9 million active players, only 23% have done the latest timegate quest

WoW is going on thirteen years old.
Hotbar MMO gameplay is stale trash.
So is content gating.

I think Blizzard knows this, but they don't care. Overwatch is their baby now, so they don't really need to depend on WoW anymore. It was a relic of the time, but people have moved on from MMOs. Anyone that still plays them seems to have gone to XIV.

1.9 is still a good number from an MMO standpoint though, even WoW's lowest is still a respectable point for any other game, which really says a lot about how much Blizzard not only bloated the genre, but effectively ruined it overnight.

I often think about what the gaming landscape would be like today if WoW never existed. Everquest 2 sure as hell never would see WoW's numbers if that were the case. City of Heroes probably still would've died regardless because gooks.

Still fun to think about.

LoL is not a MMORPG. I specifically said MMORPG there. And LoL being more profitable doesn't mean WoW isn't profitable by any means

That is because the game reached so outlandish numbers in its peak for some reason though. Only comparing to its past 1.9 million active players is dead, comparing to other MMORPGs, it's still the most populated one, would likely still be if it lost half of its players, and still would be more profitable than others

gayfur pandaren poster i know its you.

runescape 4 lyfe faggots

Well… obviously the answer to that is to make WoW more inclusive.

Isn't overwatch the same thing? It uses the same hotbar/cooldown mechanic as WoW which is why most of the players are ex-WoW faggots.

Well we would have been spared the legions of WoW Clones but I dread to think what else would have taken it's place.

I don't think the hotbar or the fact that it's thirteen years old mean anything.

I mean, they release expansion packs. They upgrade graphics. Some parts of that game are less than a year old.

I think the problem is that their design philosophy is the exact opposite of an MMO.

No focus on improving inter-player interactions, expanding functionality in the world, or even going over and fixing or otherwise cleaning up old content. Instead they spend every dollar they can on raids. Every raid more or less negates the previous raid and all of them are functionally removed from the game outside of a source for re-skinning items the second a new expansion comes out.

I literally couldn't try and figure out a better way to push money into a furnace faster than to develop a game like WoW does.

This poster is completely right.
The cashcow for blizzard shifted from WoW, to hearthstone, then to Overwatch.
As of May 4th, Overwatch alone has made 1 billion dollars

In the past three months, Activision Blizzard has made 1.73 billion dollars.

I think WoW's biggest problem was listening to fucking retards on their forums who begged for shit like my class can't beat every other class when I get jumped with less than 30% hp and no cooldowns.
Why aren't their instances for people who can't find groups, you know one man instances?
All of that dumb shit, seems to gets into game somehow.

it can't die soon enough. i gave legion a chance because of the hype they dropped for it and learned a valuable lesson: everyone with anything approaching talent is long gone from the wow team and is likely working on overkike

Waste of dubs. Someone save this thread and start posting orc porn.

I don't know what to say user. What did you expect was going to happen?

pleb.

Why would I want girls? I want hot, throbbing cocks, on either men or women.

It still blows my fucking mind that Tigule is the head of Overwatch. Motherfucker never wrote a single line of code in his life. All he did was lead a raid guild in EQ1, wrote shitty forum posts and got lucky.

What a time to be alive. I guess.

Didn't EQ have some kind of scripting or macro system? If you were gonna be king of raids, I think you would want to master that.

Is this guy a genius programmer too?

I don't know how old you are, but you better learn this now if you haven't already.
Life is all about 'who you know, not what you know'.
I've seen countless people get hired/promoted into positions they didn't have any understanding of their duties, or ability to do them.
I even recall during vanilla WoW and guild leader getting one of his guilds healer a job across country working for a company he was fairly high up at.
So he would stay in the guild, and also be the guild healing bitch.

Not just WoW, but lots of games play an absurd amount into people's lives.
EVE Online is full of stories that sound insane, ranging from backstabbing their entire clan to sell their assets and buy a house.
Getting someone to commit suicide, and everything in between with plenty of lesser real life ramifications.
Counter Strike has had plenty of violence, even advance wars has had a murder directly related to it, which the perpetrator had to cross into a different country to reach their victim.

He's the VP of Blizzard.
He started off as a tester, I believe.
Dude's only ever worked on four fucking games.

everything they were saying alluded to "we know we've been fucking up. we're going to bring it back down to earth and start doing those things that you liked from the older expansions/vanilla". i guess they did that with the unbelievably boring "rep" grind for artifact points or whatever that currency is called to upgrade your weapon, but they just kept with the mobile game cancer from warlords, kept the garbage power creep moving, and continued casualizing things even more than before. i didn't expect it to be good, but i expected it to at least be better than warlords

Can you name a single instance of a dev saying "we learned from this and will improve in future" where they followed through on this promise?

...

Many times when it comes to developing new techniques at jewing their customers.

That's still massive.

It is by over a million.

That isn't an mmo and FFXIV had like 600k at its peak.

WOW was a freak of nature that's going to last 20 years with subs even with how much it's currently hemorrhaging players.

How long will Overwatch last? It's not like you can see your character in a match, so skins are pretty pointless.
It would have died a better death had NCSoft not jewed their players.

That's what happened to just about every mmo. The devs will always cater to the casual retards.

I highly doubt he does anything other than count his shekels.

Payday 2.

I'm afraid the reported number is actually around 6 million.

Where's the sauce?

This is some serious casual faggotry here. Raging against the "top 1% hardcore players" for making the game "too hard". If there's one thing WoW ever did right it was hardcore raiding, and its decline comes primarily from catering to casuals. All the best stuff should be exclusive to only the best of the best of the playerbase, not made accessible to every fucking mouthbreather who can click to join a queue. What keeps people going is the drive to improve, and for that you need the carrot of what they can do when they are finally good enough to be just out of reach, and it needs to be good, exclusive stuff that they will never see until they get better, not the same old shit with stats tweaked.

Elysium has ~20,000 online at any given peak time, meaning thousands more likely active players overall

That's over 1% of retail WoW's population.

On a private server.

I feel like it'll happen next year. Maybe with an announcement later this year.

No. This is exactly what killed WoW in the long term.

Not that the hardcore 'top raiders' didn't deserve content. But they got all of it, while casuals got nothing. In fact it was because of this that Blizzard started shoving Casual players into the Raiding scene that most of them were vocally stating they didn't want to take part of.

And that 'elitism' stuff was always fake. Most of the 'difficulty' in WoW up to and through Burning Crusade was mostly as an attempt to hide unfinished content with broken fights. The reason Twin Emps was so hard (back in the day with the shitty shitty shitty basic interfaces where 90% of a raids success came down to how many actually downloaded tools to assist them) is because it was designed never to be beaten. C'thun had permanent 99% damage reduction for gods sake, his mechanic for removing it wasn't working right.

What WoW needed was to be treated like an actual MMO and not a really fancy level select to go into a raid. I, and a lot of players, don't play an MMO for a shiney bauble. The bigger number on another player with some stupid floating crystals on his shoulders isn't important. I'd much rather have… I don't know… basic customization? At a minimum?

What is the appeal of MMOs? I tried getting into some but all it seemed to be was click buttons on things and wait until bars fill up.

World of Warcraft is older than Youtube.

Some people like the social aspect. Some just want something they can waist a shitload of time on. All of them are retarded.

So people create like a subscription based chat room and other treat as a time waster.

1. Why not just go on a chat room or forum if you are that socially inept you cannot even muster going to dedicated safe place nerd hovel.

2. Why not just read a fucking book if you want to advance time without sleeping or watching television like everyone else?

It's active subs. No one believes 6 gorillion or 15 million

This kike's face makes me wanna puke. I swear I'll go to Commiefornia one of these days and I'll shot this kike right in his yiddish face.

Because those aren't vidya.

Well, you have to remember that MMO's started when games like Daggerfall were coming out and the idea was that their systems and content would expand and grow, not contract and be removed.

So instead of necromancy expanding into a full system in which you collect certain body parts, souls and materials to create and maintain your undead minions you at best have a button that summons a skeleton from a random part of the earth and if you're lucky will require a corpse nearby (but you wont get a skeleton or zombie based on the corpse it is, that would just be silly)

Instead of mages traveling the world, studying and figuring out how to tap into magical laylines for more power, and how to manage mana efficiency vs power. You instead just have 'magic' type damage on the skill you click. Likewise rather than swordsman travel the lands, learning techniques and practicing them to bring out unique latent abilities you just have 'physical' type damage on the skill you click.

So, you're fully right in not being happy with the shit they call MMO's right now.

Just be aware that in a lot of peoples opinion, the very idea that a priest or healer gets the exact same quests to kill shit that a ranger or warrior does is unacceptable.

Gee, thanks user, you reminded me why I'm so depressed with these shit games.

I'd like to believe it but no sauce makes me leery

Who gives a shit?
All the Blizzdrone cocksuckers are too busy fellating the overly viral marketet disposable trash that is Overcuck nowadays.

Activision knows how to milk this hobby full of idiots and they'll wast more millions on the marketing than the actual games while delivering a mediocre product.

They have Density, Cowadoody and Overcuck and they don't need anything else considering each of them pretty much makes the money of one of R*s releases without nearly half the quality, whats even sadder is that the first and last normalfag tier shit is enjoyed by several retards here who will gladly waste literally hundreds of hours into these shallow soulless turds and actually advertise freely for them.

Source? I really hope this is true.

They should just end it and make a Starcraft MMO.

Can anyone explain to me why Overwatch is shit? I am genuinely trying to analyze it and see why Holla Forums is shitting on it.

Yes, that is indeed shitty.

Now I am not that great of an FPS player I am the guy who picks medic cause I suck at shooting, but I played some TF2 and a bit of Unreal Tournament. I understand that UT/Quake model is better because it involves controlling territory, getting the weapons/armors, and generally putting mental pressure + overpower opponents with sheer gymnastics and movements. TF2 before it became a fucking hat simulator is pretty gud because every class has his own abilities/weapons, but unlike Overwatch, there are no ultimates that you rely on to make a comeback.

I played Overwatch few games from a friend and what I felt is that while the overall design isn't that terrible, I felt that the meta of the game will be terrible. I believe that it will revolve around timing your ultimate moves instead of relying on your skills

Fucking garbage. Whoever kike thought of this should be put on a spike.

Light-novel tier of garbage. Fucking hell.

So yeah, is there anything else that I am missing for why this game is objectively shit? I really didn't give it that much attention since I play Splatoon and I never read Overwatch's generals to know what the fuck is going on.

Its objectively shit, Esports pandering ASSFAGGOTS in FPS form and an ever changing ever shitty meta.

Can you elaborate more, please? I just want to improve my analysis and critical thinking about what makes a game shit or not, I don't want to just shit on it without giving detailed reasons.

And as you have said, the problems with ASSFAGGOTS games is that they center the game on cooldown locked abilities instead of constant use of skills throughout the game.

Thats the main problem with the fucking game, the skill ceiling is extremely low for all characters even if it changes between them because the whole fucking thing revolves around one prompt activated skills instead of your actual skill beyond knowing the meta and having a non braindead team, theres only one main attack with very few exceptions and that shit is 90% of the time just left mouse clicking.

It also lacks content, even TF2 at launch had more content than this year old turd.

Where's the source faggot?

...

huh, thought it was older

the only sjw shit I can think of was remove the suggestive mags from a outhouse and making widowmakers fat ass slightly smaller.
and making tracer lesbian which was kinda of funny cause someone in the Overwatch general basically was promoting tracer was his waifu all the time

thread got bumped but anybody got the Elysium server info?

didn't they make Mei less curvy and fatter?

no they made her back less messed up.

The skins also apply to the weapon on your screen, which appeals to its own subset of vanity. (See CS:GO)

Says who, faggot?

Well, I'm not much of a FPS arena faggot but there was one very big problem with the game coming from the absolute lack of ammo.

You see, without ammo there's absolutely no reason, pretty much ever, to hold back. When it's actually possible for the rocket launcher to run out of ammo and require you to go get more somehow, then there's incentive to conserve it.

For why this is a good thing all I have to say is look at TF2 and demo-man spam on a choke point. Yes, the problem is way reduced on characters with bullets or hitscan weapons, but it absolutely busts AoE attacks when they can more or less be spammed with impunity. Though it also heavily favors the game for characters able to push out a huge amount of damage all at once rather than someone who can settle in for the long haul. Why else do you think Overwatch has from what on the outside looks like an eternal Tank meta.

Additionally, it's a balance dependent game run by blizzard. It's always going to be shit. They'll refuse to fix something that's blatantly overpowered because the devs like it and refuse to buff other things cause it might threaten their precious favored class.

And if you want a third reason I personally despise the game any anyone who plays it? The ability to re-pick fucking characters mid match being used as an end all excuse for all problems a character has. No need to actually balance a character, if someone buttfucks you no matter how well you play the game simply by being a certain character then you just got 'counter-picked' and you need to change. Why allow a situation in a class based game to let a team completely change its composition? WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE IF I GET COUNTERPICKED THE FIRST TIME OR THE 20TH? At least if I get counterpicked in a que it's just bad luck and might add a little depth to who I want to play.

Of course, I've played exactly 1 hour of the game at the insistence of a friend back when it launched, never touched it again. My info is off because the game looks stupid and I don't need a game shoving competition level play down my throat.

https : / / elysium-project dot org

enjoy!

Think OP meant this, mmo-chumps tracked down achievements and active accounts mmo-champion.com/content/ so far the drones are still begging for more content, fucking junkies.

...

They will just make a dumbed down pay2win mobile WoW and then they have their money back

Or a Diablo MMOARPG. Then again i still think Lost Ark will be a better game if they dont ruin it with pay2win

Spotted the blizzdrone

WoW was never good and never will be
half of them are bots and the rest are paying for their subs with gold.

When he was making Metal Gear 1 and 2 Kojima relied on progarmmers to implement his ideas but they kept doing it the way they thought it should go instead of how Kojima told them to do it. So he created his own scripting language he could do the scenes himself and we ended up with Snatcher and Policenauts.

I now realize old MMO's never really died. I just needed to up my grinding skills instead.

WoW is the most profitable vidya in history, it's the most played game of it's age by far and faggots on Holla Forums still act like it losing players after 13 years and nearly $12,000,000,000 in profit is somehow a failure.

Love it or hate it you can't deny it's been the most successful vidya ever.

buying rune scim 30k

Not a failure, just a bad game and a leading cause of genre and industry-wide cancer. Its death is to be celebrated.

I can't relate at all, I agree it's been a curse on MMORPGs but don't think it's death is going to magically wind back the clock 13 years.

It won't wind back the clock. The industry has earned the attention of shekel-hungry kikes and been infested with varying forms of cancer and AIDS and nothing can change that now.
We can simply celebrate the fact that what many identify as patient zero will finally succumb to its own bastard cocktail of disease.

WoW was never hardcore. Fucking WoWbabies

wew

F2P would be cool. I could go back and visit old friends

Well good, the faster it dies, the faster something better can take its place. It will probably be worse though.

WoW didn't just ruin the MMOs though. How many games would have been made if everyone wasn't trying to make a damn WoW killer. They sunk more money into Tortanic that I recall a dev saying that actually had 2 or 3 games worth of budget. So many game companies where saying "me too", that games that where suppose to be single player where being forced into MMO cancer, Elder scroll is another go example. All of them just being raid simulators. Not to mention being a contributing factor of Blizzards decline for other series. Especially Diablo 3. One dev stating they where working more on "end game content" for D3. The whole game should have been "end game content". Maybe have players actually want to get to the fucking end game. Biggest issue though, how everything wanted to be an mmo for the mmo pie that no one even got a slice of in the end.

WoW isn't an MMO anymore. It started shifting away from MMO status mid WotlK with the cross-realm dungeon finder and completely ditched its MMO roots when that garrison stuff was added. MMOs are about community and player interaction. WoW's current state is a game about grinding, but you're forced to grind with, as someone more eloquent than me put it: "a bunch of very rude NPCs".

I remember when making a name for yourself on your server was important, or in TBC when you actually had to see if the people you invited to your group were geared enough to run heroics. As in, inspect their gear and then tell them if they were geared enough to both survive and contribute meaningfully to the run. Even if interactions were mostly limited to your own guild, you still interacted with others in a meaningful fashion. Hence, a MMO.

Yeah, it was always bare bones but for a time it at least existed. Then rather than improve systems for players to interact, they simply removed those features to promote more shiny items in raids

That's like saying Deus Ex and CoD is the same type of game because you level up in them.
Overcrotch is shit, but not because of a hotbar.

Except that's wrong

He didn't do shit himself

I am very glad to see WoW dying.

Blizzard were making a replacement MMO called Titan but it went into development hell (diversity hires, failed wannabe hollywood writers and authors, no real programmers). The salvaged ruins of that became Overwatch. I think it's interesting that even though a new Blizzard MMO would make billions of dollars they were unable to create one due to incompetence. As many have pointed out, they don't care because luckily Overwatch turned out to be a success. However a WoW replacement would have made much more money. Many people who play MMOs don't want to play CRAPCUNTS.

I left wow a couple of month after Ulduar opening. Been dead to me since then. I miss leveling my first char in vanilla; That's about it.

If you didn't clear Ulduar's hard modes, especially before the nerfs, you missed out on peak WoW (for raiding). That was a grand finale by A team and it showed. I'm glad I got to experience it, and also glad I saw the writing on the wall and left before Cataclysm.

Were you one of the chosen few to kill pre-nerf Yogg0?

We're done here. You're not supposed to accept your weaknesses, you're supposed overcome them. Go play your healer in faggotwatch.

Well you're posting Homestuck, so I believe you.
Faggot

I love good shooters so I could talk for hours about this, but Overwatch gets so much wrong I could ramble for a geological age and not cover it all, so I'll give myself half an hour and we'll see where we get. Overwatch has many technical, design, and paratexual problems, to the point where covering all of them would be an odyssey, so I'll talk about the lesser number of technical problems first and then we'll move onto broader design and paratexual problems.

Disclaimer: I don't play shitty games, so everything here is based on documentation and footage from other people as well as developer statements. Don't bother telling me to git gud, since I don't give a fuck, but I would appreciate being corrected.

20 tick servers means the game updates the game state every 3 frames, using interpolation and/or rollback to determine what happened in the meantime before checking it against the servers to verify such events were possible. Frankly, this number is far too low for any competitive game which wants to take itself seriously. 60 is the absolute minimum, so the events actually sync up with your fucking frame rate, but more competitive games like CS and Quake have higher tickrates so the player's experience is as consistent as possible. Blizzard have fixed this problem and the game now has (I believe) 60 tick servers, but they were more than happy to take your money for mediocrity when the game launched.

Can't verify this because the game calculates it differently, and from what I can tell the FoV setting in the options menu is simply the horizontal measurement on a 16:9 ratio, which is an ostensibly larger number. However, some other people have run the math on this, and they discovered Overwatch only gives you a maximum of 70 FoV, which is the minimum in any self-respecting game and unplayable for people with eyes. Either technical incompetence or an effect of console ports or both.

Initially, they didn't plan to allow players to adjust the fucking FoV for fear people who did would gain a competitive advantage. Retards. archive.fo/EQ9QM

First, watch the embedded video.
Many characters in Overwatch have giant viewmodels, either to obscure the screen to maintain performance or because the developers don't understand it looks like trash. Winston is the most egregious example, since his viewmodels depict not only his weapon but his other arm. I believe they did this to help immerse players (Winston is the only character who walks on three limbs), but if that were truly the reason then anyone involved in the decision should be shot.

Why does anyone benefit from remembering Winston walks with the help of his arm? Why would that be relevant in gameplay, since there are no mechanics related to footsteps or anything similar? Furthermore, why would it be worth it to obscure a quarter of the screen in addition to the other quarter on the right side being obscured by Winston's weapon? The animation is awful, too: it implies that Winston brings his fist up in front of his fucking face every time he moves it forward, which is unbelievably stupid, and it doesn't even sync up with his footsteps or movement speed.

Overwatch hitboxes are roughly 1.5 times the radius of any given part of any given character model, which is atrocious, so that actually shooting people is easier because you don't need to take into account the different walking/running animations of the various characters. Even a casual-friendly game like Team Fortress 2 lets you shoot a rocket through someone's feet by accident, but Overwatch seems to have been designed to prevent this.

As though this weren't bad enough, the hitboxes were so awful at launch that you could be shot around corners even though you had no line of sight to your attacker and thus no reason to know you were under attack. Widowmaker and Hanzo were especially bad since Widowmaker could see through walls and Hanzo's arrows had a hitbox roughly as large as seven or eight arrows bundled together.

This has since been “fixed” in that you won't be shot around corners because the game will calculate whether or not your attacker had line of sight to you when the shot was fired. While your head is behind a wall, the rest of your body has hitboxes which align with your character's model. The end result is Overwatch went from a situation where the hitboxes were stupidly large to a situation where the hitboxes are stupidly large when neither player has cover, and fluctuate unpredictably the rest of the time. Awful game design.

Roadhog's hook deserves a special mention. Words won't do it justice, so have a look at the attached webms. They have since “fixed” this, or at least they plan to, but why would anyone let it be released like this in the first place?

From what I can gather, Overwatch recently had an update which retooled how matchmaking works. Now matchmaking will try to put players in games in such a way as to maintain a “50/50” split of wins and losses over their last 100 games. While this is fine in theory, because two teams of evenly skilled players will each win roughly half the time, it falls apart in practice.

Real matchmaking has many more factors deciding a match than raw player skill, such as a player on offence playing Junkrat against a defending team of long-range hitscan characters and refusing to switch off, thus negatively impacting your team. The end result is player experience ricochets between stomping and being stomped so the 50/50 average is maintained, which is either poor design or a side effect of a broken system.

Anyway, that's all I have for now, and I even went over my self-imposed time limit. If people aren't sick of me I can talk about the broader design problems as well as the flaws in the game's overall marketing and image (which is what I meant by “paratexual” stuff at the start), which I would enjoy. It's surprisingly cathartic to rip into a game wholesale like this.

please go on so i can more effectively get people to realize that overwatch is bad

I have to step out for a bit but I'll write more when I return. Have a webm in the meantime.

Total number of people who have played the game totals 10 million. As to active players, on FFXIV that number is currently around 500k.

The only good thing about OW is the porn.

What patch, how frequent are the bugs, or is it just a 1 in a million bug since those will become more frequent larger the amount of people there are, what was the players ping while playing? So many questions, but its just a video to watch for laughs like those old 2006 halo 3 fail videos, and every single play game bugs video. I thought you guys would stop shitting on this game and move on once paladins failed to gain people. But i guess you're very adamant at caring about a game you dont care about. :3

How?

He wrote walls for you, make an argument or fuck off.

ALRIGHT Holla Forums
GAMES THAT SCRATCH THE SAME ITCH AS WOW BUT ARE BETTER
HIT ME

i played legion in the starting months. the exact, sole reason people didn't abandon ship after the first two months of the expansion was because you could easily buy the subscription just by playing the game. that's when they decided to turn the jew on and inflate the wow token prices drastically to a point where you had to invest significant time and effort to afford the monthly subscription and it's also when their subs started dropping rapidly. the thing is, wow's now a theme park. you go on a few "rides", you do a bunch of time gated content but there's nothing to really keep you there. there's no immersion and no actual RPG experience. it's just still in their genre tag for some reason. their plight for casualisation worked since it brought in a bunch of casuals but ironically (and expectedly) it also ruined the feeling of a real and living game world and poisoned the game for any dedicated players. there's no way but down for this jew-coaster.

Alright. Let's assume WoW dies next week. What will replace it?

can you explain why overwatch type loot crates annoy you so much? this is the one thing i don't understand, to be honest. i like the idea of loot crates for cosmetic unlocks much more than say the tf2 store where you could just buy them outright. i never cared much about cosmetics and the way i see it neither should anyone else. however, if there are autistic idiots out there willing to spend money on cosmetics, why not take advantage of them? these people are so stupid they will find ways to waste money, so why not let them waste it on you? they're gonna give it to streamers or some other dumb shit like that otherwise.

They changed that
You can change it to like 100 at most in the options
Fair enough, they really should give you the option to make then smalled like Tribes Ascend did.
They fixed those, even then you still cherry picked the roadhog hook, the weapon that has the worst hitboxes in the game, even then, those clips are from a year ago.
The game certainly has issues, but damn you guys rag on this game to hell. I mean hell, in my opinion it gets pretty repetitive, but it's still a solid game, it's just that it's made by Blizzard, and they are fucking up with it like you would expect Blizzard to do.
Yeah, in my opinion it should be unranked random matchmaking. but the problem is that Blizz wants casualfags and would rather just have a skinner box

Overwatch is not a bad game in the slightest. And it's most certainly a step up to get a fun colourful game with a fair bit of speed and movement compared to the slow grey garbage we have had for the last 10 years.

Do you like Final Fantasy? If yes, FFXIV, if no, you're basically out of luck.

nah

that's the problem
you can't take meth to placate your heroin addiction.
I'm just sorry your dealers being cutting your meth with shit

Forgot to reply to you.
Nothing with scratch the same itch, because the reason why you hate modern WoW is that there is no social aspect or sense of progression to the game anymore, itt's just a shitty RPG. I mean hell, look at Vanilla. The gameplay was shit but what kept you coming back was your sense of investment, your friends, and the psychological effect progression had on you. It had next to nothing to do with the gameplay.
Sadly the only real option is private server Vanilla WoW

...

TRENDMILL FOR NERDS

But ammo doesn't curb spam. I have never played an FPS where people have not spammed explosives.

Nigger you and I both know the sticky launcher was mostly a spam gun. i get what you're saying but Overwatch is just a completely different game.

In most fpses it most certainly does. In games even like battlefield, having only one or two grenades or a few RPGs curbs it extremely well, and only when someone has set up a supply crate or dispenser (giving them unlimited ammo) do they start to spam. And you haven't addressed the movement is super simplified. Junkrat's sticky mine only facilitates one kind of maneuver, a big arc up and down. Using it to push you to the side or using it again is largely impossible as you can't throw out more than one in rapid succession, and you can't surf or jump with your grenades in any meaningful way.

still too many

death to mmoshit

Indeed, dumbed down TF2 is a pretty new low.

Dude, ammo spam for explosives is a valid strategy. It just came with a cost. That cost being that you would run out and would have to move or get someone to help you.

If you see someone spamming explosions on a choke point, you just have to wait for them to run out of ammo or when they have to leave to get a resupply.

It also vastly affects trigger discipline. I can't count the amount of bad players that would waste ammo, take the ammo crates from the map, and thus cause other players on their team to become resource starved and lose. So instead of Mr. Lone Wolf KDA whore fucking over his team by his selfish playstyle, he's rewarded for it at every level. He can go all in, in every situation. He is not punished by it or slowed down in the slightest.

And as easy as it would be to just say that because the ammo rule applies to everyone on the map, it doesn't. It really doesn't. It massively incentivizes high area/time weapons. IE: Automatic weapons with huge fire rates and AOE attacks.

This is because an automatic weapon that fires lots of bullets and damage is punished severely in an ammo system if they play poorly. As they fire from bad positions or without properly aiming they can waste a good % of their ammo. Meanwhile high damage, limited shot firearms, mainly shotguns but also high ammo and low damage automatics, are punished far less.

And the biggest problems is that these faults are sloppily patched over via 'skills' that work outside of the base rules per character. Or the classic "Bastion is balanced, just counter pick him" argument. The problems with these characters that can lock down zones with explosives or concentrated fire isn't to exude pressure on the area until they exhaust resources or even set up for a massive push. It's to pop a characters 'skill' that will remove the obstacle. Which results in either that player dying when the rest of their team kills them, or the complete destruction of an entire teams defense in the span of maybe 2 seconds.

I hear my friends talk during overwatch and it's nothing like what I heard back when I had a case of the TF2. It's all about someone 'using this skill' to eliminate a problem, followed mostly by co-ordinated team ults.

...

Is this a typical screen during a raid? Thank god I never got into this shit.

(cont.)
I probably should have begun this endeavour with paratext and then funnelled down to the crunch, but we've already embarked upon this journey so what's done is done. Overwatch's paratextual elements (that is, its marketing, presentation, cultivated public image – everything that isn't actually part of the gameplay but still related to it) are almost universally either 1) bland and uninteresting, or 2) actively harmful to the industry as a whole, if not both. Let's dig in.

Overwatch was Blizzard's next big IP from day one of its marketing. While there is evidence to suggest they made the game from the salvaged pieces of Project Titan, that does not mean they were quietly turning a failed project into a minor offering like Heroes of the Storm or a goodwill gift like the Starcraft 2 arcade. They had sunk a lot of money into development, and Overwatch needed to recoup its costs.

To that end, Overwatch had an enormous marketing campaign. There were statues everywhere, and huge booths set up in cities around the world. Anyone should be skeptical of a game with this much marketing and press hype leading up to its launch: as we all know, marketing is what you do when your product isn't very good. Overwatch's marketing cycle reminded me of every AAA garbage shooter I'd seen since CoD4 ruined the industry, and that reason alone is enough to distrust it. I'm sure the marketers thought they were breaking new ground, but massive marketing campaigns are the standard these days and Overwatch didn't do anything to tell me it would be more than an uninteresting shooter, which it is.

Do you remember when they revealed Zarya? They made a huge deal about her not being “conventionally beautiful” and “subverting expectations,” and how she could crush you like bug, leetle man. But they never realized they were just making Heavy Weapons Guy with tits and tumblr hair. You replaced a sexist stereotype with a racist stereotype. Congratulations.

You remember this gaffe, right? Some waifufag complains an obviously unsexy pose is too sexy, and Blizzard agrees to change it so he (and apparently his daughter of seven who doesn't play video games) won't be offended. In doing so, they ignored heartfelt testimony from a 30-year-old mother who loved the presence of the sexy characters in their games.
archive.is/MYveG

I won't get political, since the whole issue was a laughingstock from start to finish and not worth being worked up over, but you have to understand this is not the behaviour of a company that actually gives a shit about its players. They listen to the loudest, whiniest faggots first without a thought as to the millions of people who don't give a shit, or like it the way it is. In striving to avoid “misogyny,” they actually became misogynists and ignored a woman's viewpoint on a woman's body in favour of a man's.

This happened during the closed beta and was likely preemptive, but it's still the kind of play-it-safe bullshit that screams “no fun allowed.” Everything has to go, no matter how abstract a joke might be and no matter how inconsequential it might be. No rough edges for the masses to get stuck on.
youtube.com/watch?v=VabQ-LiJjhY

(cont.)
This topic is a bit more nuanced than the previous ones because there isn't a clear-cut case of theft, like Borderlands and Code Hunters. Furthemore, I am only speaking to the game's aesthetics, and I know many people are of the impression graphics are secondary concerns in video games, assuming they should be acknowledged at all. While I would never want a video game to focus on graphics over gameplay, a good game with good graphics is infinitely better than the same game with grey boxes and purple and black squares for textures. Graphics (and art, and presentation) are the seasoning on a good video game meal, and ought to be considered with the care they deserve.

Overwatch did not consider its graphics: it observed what was popular, observed why it was popular, then imitated it like some kind of video game changeling. The art style is the same toyetic, plastic crap you've seen in every animated movie since Toy Story; even YouTube commenters made the comparisons to Pixar when the short films were released. Why did they choose this art style? Because it doesn't offend people.

Furthermore, every single character on the roster (I'm not exaggerating here, every single one) is either a ripoff of an existing character or a walking cliche. The animations and models are all fine, but it's obvious to any man with an ounce of romance in his soul that the characters were designed by committee to appeal to the average millennial, with a heaping helping of DIVERSITY on the side. Token blacks, token Asians, token Indians, token lesbians – the only thing it doesn't have is a token tranny but I wouldn't put anything past Blizzard at this point.

I wanted to include an image with this post comparing each Overwatch character to his progenitor to drive the point home, but it is quite late where I am so I will do that tomorrow. For now, I will say goodnight and draw my autistic rambling to a close. I was unsure how to end with the point regarding artistic bankruptcy, since it's prevalent outside of video games as well, so I'm open to suggestions as to how to argue it more effectively.

Look forward to tomorrow when I talk about the infinitely shitty gameplay.

I don't really give a shit about Overwatch one way or the other but I enjoyed your walls of text. Thanks user.

Thanks. I've been meaning to do something like this for a while now.

It's ogre.

JoJo doesn't deserve that edit.

Junkrat is basically I.M. meen. The people who worked on the CD-i got a commission with Blizzard, but the project went nowhere. Knowing more about Blizzard they wouldn't just say "your project is shit" they would also keep your folder of projects and steal whatever they think it's good and tell you that "fuck it, were done, but we'll keep some of your shit because of the contract agreement"

I finally realized the difference between the 2 designs in the first image. it's the eyes I just can't figure out why the artist took 2 paragraphs to talk about character design without really explaining what the edit was or why she did it.

This is some good shit user, I hope I'm around when you continue.

WoW was good around the beginning not only because it was new and shiny for many people, but it forced players to group, a trait of EQ at the time, in order to progress.

You were pushed to interact, push to learn your class, to make guilds, in order to move through the game.

Once Blizzard encouraged single player, it was over.

Because at their heart, MMO's "gameplay" and "progression" is about building social links and in-game reputation. Rather than anything on the mechanical side.

WoW was never good

I think it was doomed as soon as BC hit, meaning the game that actually caused all the hype was only around for a couple of short years before going off the rails.
I'm referring to the nerfing of old world content and the XP curve, and also the model where expansion packs were built around easily marketable new features and gimmicks.

It won't go F2P instantly. Expect next month, around the launch of Final Fantasy XIV's new expansion for them to launch a new Overwatch skin which you need to level up to a certain level in WoW to get.
If not next month, then sometime in the future. They will do this to boost numbers, since they don't want to lose anymore people to FFXIV. WoW shitters can stay for all I care. Terrible players.

More like downright delusional.

These people need to die.

Where did I say I play Overwatch? All I'm saying is that they're going to use that game's audience and send them off to WoW for a while to get a skin.

WoW's biggest flaw right now is that there isn't anything to do. Everything is behind time gates that allow a little trickle of content. You log in, do one quest, log out and wait for next week. Nighthold isn't fun anymore unless you are a mythic guild, I don't know, my guild thinks its pro as fuck but keeps wiping to trash on normal.

Sure 7.2 was a big patch, but its been stretched so thin it might as well been a hotfix. The best blizz game to play right now is fucking Star Craft.

Its funny how a nearly 20 year old game is still their best game and they made it free.

Nothing.

The MMO market is moving in another direction, its those stupid phone games where you battle random assholes.

If my ID got a reset, I am the user of

user, in my entire life I couldn't git fucking gud at shooters. I am just bad at them. I played Unreal, Halo, Tribes, TF2, Geist Splatoon, Metroid Prime Hunters, and I am just naturally bad at aiming.

It's because back in the good ol' days, everything was unlockable in a fairly decent matter that did not force you to waste shekels. Loot crates are a shitty model for unlockables. Players should be able to unlock stuff by choosing and not fucking random shit, not to mention, loot crates is a pretty kiked up move because they INTENDED for the shit in the crates to be hard to get/frustrating in order for people to fork shekels.

I bet that you read and watch light novel tier faggotry for the plot, faggot.

Fucking saved, thanks, man. Keep the walls coming, please. I wish Holla Forums would make more great posts like these Could you please compare it more with Unreal, Quake, Tribes? Can you also elaborate on types of health (pickup, regeneration)?

Looking forward to your next posts.

They fired that fucking tablet using loser yet?

no just a shit ton of mods

I recall playing WoW when I was young and being too shy to talk to anyone in-game, instead trying to solo everything. It was a very boring experience.

WoW is too polished of a game to go F2P

even with 2million active players you need to think of subs, that's where the money is.

Blizzard won't go free to play for a long while. Not until there's at least less than a million SUBSCRIBERS.

With that said, Legion is fucking boring because they keep spouting they will throw content faster, but players are going to be stuck in nighthold for MORE THAN HALF A YEAR.
No fucking SHIT they're dropping players. They think making them endlessly grind Artifact Power is fun and will suffice. Fucking retards.
Every Raid cannot last more than 4 months. That's how stale and little replayability the game has thanks to Celestalon's dumbing down of the game. Raids have no substance, neither does the gameplay.

Sad part is WoW has a lot of potential to be fun if they kept the fast paced gameplay before WoD and kept the PvP fast paced. Before WoD there was a deeper meta with CC and satisfying damage. Now the game is so dumbed down the strat is pop your cooldowns and burst the healer for 99% of the compositions in Arena. What a joke.

Well you're dumb. Vanilla is pretty much a team based game.

The casualization of the game started, or at least was truly palpable, with WotLK.
The raids were so good not many noticed until players had to wait a while for ICC. But the Looking for Dungeon and easy Heroics and the Valor point farming made it clear it wasn't a team based game anymore. As a result Heroic Icecrown Citadel was puggable with randoms from trade and there were weekly Gold DKP runs (auction drops, all money goes to pot, pot is split between the raid at the end) and everybody got filthy fucking rich. Getting that large sum of gold was fun but the game was a joke with no difficulty or sense of progression or team based effort.
WOTLK had broken pvp but it was fun. I prefer PvP that is fast paced and fun over boring and bland. Making it 1.5 GCD instead of 1 for the sake of catering to soccer moms was a mistake.
With haste you can make it almost 1GCD but its not the same. Fuck celestalon.

The Tomb of Sargeras raid is actually scheduled to be opened up on the same day that Stormblood launches, June 20th. Blizzard does this a lot when it comes to their competitors in the MMO market.

And this is why Blizzard always trying to line their release schedule up with their competitors is a terrible idea. If Tomb of Sargeras had been opened up by, say, week four of 7.2, the majority of complaints about the lack of content would've been silenced. Instead they're holding it off until week 11-12 just to compete with FF14.

I'm pretty sure FFXIV has more active players now. Probably because they keep releasing new fun content all the time.

I dont think they're that jewish, maybe it's jut not finished yet

If by "the good ol' days" you mean TF2 (which was used for comparison in my argument) then I haven't got a clue of what you're talking about. I've had an infinitely easier time unlocking OW cosmetics than TF2 cosmetics. Whenever you get duplicate cosmetics in OW you get coins instead. There's also a chance for coins to drop in your crates. If you decide to look at it only from the "buying skins with in-game coins" standpoint and choose to ignore that they also just drop randomly it's already infinitely easier to get a skin you want just by playing the game than crafting a cosmetic item in TF2. I want to remind you that getting cosmetic items (only by playing the game) in TF2 is also time gated. You can only get a set amount of items which you can transform into scrap per week. Meanwhile, in OW there is no such thing. All of your playtime counts to boxes which get you cosmetics and coins for purchasing cosmetics of your choice. It honestly is a lot faster.

most of the "skill" you need for the game boils down to activating your cooldown ability at the right moment. It looks nice or so ive heard, i get eyecancer from the disney style graphics and it plays smoothly, but it has about as much depth as your average puddle.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that when you finally do get to crafting a cosmetic item in TF2, you get to craft a random one. You don't get to choose what you're gonna craft you just have to hope it's not shit. You can buy whatever you want directly with coins in OW. I suppose you could usually get what you wanted for around the price of a crafted cosmetic in TF2 via trading but in that case the game forced you to do other things than actually play the game. To me trading was an annoying, tedious process. Even still, gathering up 1000 coins to buy the rarest type of cosmetics in OW is much faster than gathering up 3 refined metals (that's 54 weapon drops) you'll use to trade for an average cosmetic of your choice.

user, I meant other games. I already stated that TF2 was ruined by the fucking cosmetics. A great example of cosmetics would be WoW's challenge mode runs, Pandaria gave you sets and WoD gave you weapons. That's the kind of model I'd like, even though Jewzird introduced transmog gears for shekels.

ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS PLAY MY CHARACTER THAT I THOUGHT WAS FUN NOT PLAY FUCKING MUSICAL CHAIRS IN VIDEO GAME FORM

What the fuck?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Pyke
It wasn't really because of Advance Wars, it was just how they knew each other.

What the fuck
Fucking krauts
Limburg is Dutch, don't give me that shit

This is good criticism of Overwatch. Capped for posterity.

I hope Hotbar MMOs die with WoW, only a just a bit more and the game will hit critical point where it's truly dead. The MMO genre needs to be revitalized from the ashes of WoW.

average overwatch game only lasts 10 minutes, what kind of retards are you playing with?! overwatch is still a shit game

they've always pulled this shit, every WoW xpac release date coincided with some other MMO which they saw as the closest thing to a threat.

They've had 4 bad expansions in a row, that's definitely a failure to live up to potential.

Four in a row? That seems like a lot.
Oh, that's where you fucked up, Mists was fine. Cata was awful at launch, really good in the middle and trash at the end, not really an all out failure. I'm all for talking shit about Blizz and WoW, but let's keep it factually correct. No need to exaggerate.

This was a good read. Please return

Source?
Blizzard stopped reducing wow subscriber numbers YEARS ago.

Source?

not surprising considering even FFXIV's consolized world full of invisible borders feels more alive than this piece of shit

6 million/10

No, you didn't. The computer might have been on, the game might have been running, and you might have been sitting in front of it with your hands on the mouse and keyboard, but whatever the fuck you were doing cannot be described as playing.
Everybody is "naturally bad at aiming". Get a big mousepad, turn your sensitivity down, turn off all acceleration, watch videos from pros on how to improve your aim, download training maps, and then train, every day before you even start playing, train for several hours, and train properly- there's a right way and a wrong way to train your aim: the wrong way is consciously trying to adjust your aim with what you see your crosshair doing on the screen; the right way is making the shot and noting if you overshot or undershot the target, and adjusting the force of your hand movement accordingly next time. Wrist only for small adjustments, forearm movements for turning/large adjustments. Consistency of training beats intensity. Discipline yourself, and stop being so mediocre.

Alright, this is where the real shit goes down. Gameplay. It's what we're all here for, and it's the single most important thing in a video game. Some genres such as RPGs and sims can pass with lacklustre gameplay, but a second-to-second shooter like Overwatch needs to have good gameplay backed by smart game design in order to be palatable. While I could ask and answer a rhetorical question here, I don't feel like being a ponce and we all know the gameplay is garbage anyway so let's just get down to brass tacks.

There will be two broad parts to this, and I have borrowed the terms from a developer at Respawn who spoke at GDC recently about the differences between what he called atomic, tactical, and strategic decisionmaking. Atomic decisions are made in less than a second, such as aiming or target switching; tactical decisions are made about every 10 seconds, such as choosing what doorway to go through to get to a given spot on a map; and strategic decisions are made about every minute, such as choosing what area of a map to survey or whether or not to switch classes. The problems with atomic decisionmaking mostly occur at a technical level – hitboxes, server issues, Roadhog's hook, and the like – which I already discussed. To that end, I will be speaking more to the tactical and strategic decisions in the following posts. Everybody understand? Cool.

Strategy – Overwatch's Schizophrenic Philosophy

As I established earlier, and as I imagine would be obvious to anyone who has seen the game, Overwatch is trying to be a strategic shooter which emphasizes positioning, team co-ordination, and map knowledge and control over twitch shooting. That's fine; many games have had such a focus, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. However, looking at Overwatch's maps, it's obvious to me they suffer from a number of common problems – namely, overly simple design and a lack of resources to pick fights over.

I got my map overviews from a random blogspot blog I found on Qwant, which you can see in the attached images. It may have been run by some BR, but even though the maps are made with clip art I think they're overall pretty accurate. Even if there are some discrepancies between the map overview and the map layout, I think the general gist of each map is accurate enough to trust.

As you can see (and as I have heard from people who've spoken about Overwatch's map design), many of the maps are straight lines with small doglegs left or right. This is a lazy way to design maps, which results in poor gameplay since all you're doing is walking forward. You can tell the Overwatch team were at least partially aware of this, since every level has a lot of fluff and clutter in it to distract you from the simplicity of the game. In fairness, making an area feel dense is a skill and they execute it well, but Team Fortress 2's team made Badwater Basin feel dense in 2008 and all it took was a spiralling payload track and a shortcut leading outwards from the centre. There are still huge corridors in the map, but it's built around a single spawn point so it doesn't feel like a flat expanse of buildings.

Hanemura and King's Row are the worst offenders for this awful philosophy – seriously, fucking LOOK at King's Row; I can't make this shit up – but even a more complex map like Dorado still has one huge door for you to push towards, which literally cuts the map in half once you're past it and it shuts. It's the exact opposite of a map like Badwater; you can dance around in the alleys all you want, but only as long as you're pushing the first point. A good Spy in TF2 can live behind enemy lines and retreat into the negative space at the front of the map to find ammo to refill cloak, but that dynamic doesn't exist in Overwatch with any class. Presumably they didn't want people wandering off and forgetting how to play the game.

(cont.)
This brings me to my next point: Overwatch's lack of meaningful map resources. Let's compare Overwatch to some other games, shall we? Specifically, let's look at how Team Fortress 2 handled map resources 10 years ago as of this October (feel old yet?), and how a “twitch shooter” like Quake 3 handled it back in the dark ages of inaccessible video games.

I'm not a Quake junkie, but Quake 3 Arena is kind of the de facto arena shooter, or at least the last relevant one in this contemporary age of ours. If you want to know what high-level Quake 3 looks like, look up the famous Rapha vs Cooler championship match with Rapha's commentary. To my knowledge, no competitive maps in Quake 3 use powerups like quad damage or regeneration, so you have the following resouces:
As well as all the weapons on a map, and their respective ammo crates, but given that Overwatch is more a loadout shooter than an arena shooter, I'm not counting those pickups even though they shape a lot of the strategy involved. Note that it's a pain in the ass to pick up the shards and you get very little armour for doing so, which softly encourages players to contest the other health and armour pickups. Furthermore, these health/armour pickups are always relevant because you can overheal yourself up to 200 health and 200 armour. In addition to all this, Quake 3's maps were fucking three-dimensional mazes – far removed from the flat, blocky straits of Overwatch.

It's also worth mentioning that many of the tactical decisions in Quake 3 originate from item control, especially around health, armour, and rockets. You have a large timer at the top of the screen, so if you can see an enemy fight you away from red armour, you know it'll take X seconds for it to respawn, so it'll appear at 3:37. Of course, your enemy knows this, so he may intentionally delay his pickup timing so you show up early to the next fight over that pickup and can't use it to help yourself during the fight. Of course, you know he knows that, so there's an entire mental chess game going on behind the atomic decisions of patrolling space.

(cont.)
Team Fortress 2 is a class-based shooter, but each class has a number of different unlockable weapons to modify his abilities and roles. Given that unlockables were planned from the beginning (and required achievements of all fucking things, so good luck getting the Medic's unlockables if you didn't have friends), a universal ammo system was necessary. Thus, Team Fortress 2 has:
Note the Engineer gets the corresponding amount of metal when picking up one of the ammo crates, which informs his sentry/dispenser/teleporter placement. Also note the Spy can refill his cloak by collecting ammo pickups, which he can do at a moment's notice by flicking his cloak on and off, which enables him to deny the enemy team resources, if only slightly. Also note that you can only pick up health or ammo if you aren't full. This is a soft encouragement to think about the health packs as a resource to be used judiciously, and potentially left for teammates, rather than collected at every possible opportunity.

While the ammo and health pickups are close to Quake 3's, TF2 does a few subtle things differently with its reloading mechanics to add depth to the experience. Many weapons in TF2 are single shot weapons which must be reloaded one round at a time. This is a pretty awful way for a weapon to reload, so powerful weapons like the rocket launcher, grenade launcher, sticky bomb launcher, and scattergun have this reload mechanic as a way to balance out their power.

Furthermore, many weapons in TF2 have longer startup times for the reload than they do for each subsequent round/rocket/whatever loaded. For instance, it might take the Scout .76 seconds to reload the first shell in his scattergun, but only .41 seconds for each subsequent shell; the same is true of the Soldier, the Demoman, and every shotgun. The end result of this system is that TF2 encourages you to pick your spots and makes reloading more of a chore if you stay back and spam mindlessly at an enemy across the map. It's not a huge difference, but it's definitely affected the way I play when I ran out of ammo and had to make a decision to keep firing with a huge delay in between each shot or reload a couple shots for more insurance and juke my opponent in the meantime.

Let's see what pickups Overwatch has.
Fuck me, who designed this? The only thing worth noting here is that the health packs restore set values rather than percentages, so classes with

WoW dying won't do any good for the genre. All it will represent is a containment breach as players flee WoW and flood into other games, then loudly demand the same WoW cancer that led to people wanting to play those other games in the first place. WoW dying would be the rapefugee migrant crisis of videogames.

Well to be honest, the edited Hanzo does look Japanese while the original one from the game looks like a white man.

Observe these other pictures of white men.

Those are some Yakuza character looking motherfuckers.

The upper ranks of Blizzard are heavily infested by Jews. You would think WoW players would be redpilled on the juden given they always complain about the ever increasing presence of the cash shop.

Isn't Hiroshi Abe mixed race, though?
I don't actually know, I always assumed he was.

original looks japanese but the edited hanzo actually looks retarded. give him slightly less defined jaw bones and you got yourself a downs hanzo. would be appropriate tbh since most people playing him are retarded

Were my latest posts too unfocused? I wrote them past midnight so I'm sorry if they're less compelling than my earlier stuff. The last subject of criticism will be more specific gameplay examples and how they lead to a stale meta, so I hope that will be more digestible.

Yo, on a shit comp at the moment, could I get a screencap of these so I can explain to people how Overwatch is a simplification of what was?

Also, balance is almost as bad as WoW so only play if you have WoW withdrawals.

Tactics – Overwatch's Broken Balance

As I have explained in my previous posts, Overwatch clearly fails when it comes to its technical elements, its design and presentation elements. So now we will be talking about mechanical failings: the atomic and tactical mechanics, if you will.

If the game is meant to be strategic, it should place more emphasis on controlling the map, with gameplay elements such as bases to control, or perhaps a capture point system which would involve both offence and defence on multiple points rather than the glorified king of the hill mode currently in the game. Maybe they could even reward players with towers that attacked enemies on sight or which spawned minions to help the team, or have three central lanes with a bunch of obscured architecture in between to– Wait a minute.

As I mentioned in my earlier posts, Team Fortress 2 had its most powerful weapons use the slowest, most awkward reload methods as a way to provide a drawback and softly discourage spam. Many CoD titles and their imitators make the player need to chamber a round as part of the reload animation if the reload happens when the magazine is completely dry – not revolutionary, but something which encourages you to pick your shots more carefully. Gears of War introduced the active/perfect reload, which sped up reload times and (I believe) increased damage if you timed it right, while punishing you for getting it wrong with a jammed gun. Hell, there was even a Rambo rail shooter released a few years ago which gave you extra ammo in a magazine if you timed the reload correctly.

Overwatch has less reload depth than any of them: not only is there no variety in weapon reload mechanics, every single weapon reloads with a magazine, assuming it needs to reload at all. In addition to being lazy design, this does nothing to discourage spam and thus indirectly encourages it. If a Junkrat player who unloads five grenades has the same reload time as a Junkrat player who unloads two, then barring situations where it would be unwise to do so, a player should always empty the entire magazine.

As a matter of fact, it will. MisterCaption made a comparison video between TF2 and Overwatch (which I have embedded) recently which had some details regarding the overall usage of the different heroes in different game modes. From his commentary and the insight I have read/heard from devoted players, the game's meta is extremely stale because some characters have gamebreaking abilities compared to others. And since every hero is unique, you can't make up for it with other characters.

The most notable example is Reinhardt's shield. For those of you who don't know, a character in Overwatch is considered “tanky” with 400-600 health. Reinhardt has 500 and an ability which lets him put up a shield roughly four times the size of his body which he carries around in front of him. He can't attack while holding the shield, but his teammates can fire through it. The shield has 2000 health and regenerates whenever he isn't using it, which gives Reinhardt effectively upwards of 2500 health, which is roughly four times as much as anyone else. This health extends to his teammates since they can be shielded, so he effectively gives his teammates that much as well.

There are other tanks in the game with other shields, but Winston can only put a weaker, stationary bubble on the ground, Zarya can only shield one teammate at a atime, and D.Va only nullifies projectiles for four seconds. Reinhardt's shield is more flexible and stronger than all of these and has an unlimited duration, which means you're at a severe disadvantage without him.

FFXIV > WoW

(cont.)
Pudge– sorry, I mean Roadhog has 600 health and the ability to heal himself for most of it. That alone is quite strong, but when you combine it with his hook and an extremely powerful shotgun, you get a tank who's just too good at reaching across the universe and grabbing someone from the opposing team for a guaranteed kill. Leaving aside the broken hit detection on his hook, it's baffling to me that nobody else can do this. The ability to say “no, you're dead” to someone so far outside of his effective range is insanely powerful, and he is one of the most-used characters for that very reason.

Mercy's ultimate can bring people back from the dead.

Think about that for a minute. Mercy can bring her entire team BACK FROM THE DEAD. At full health. With no penalties to damage. Your opponents can do everything right, have perfect co-ordination, use their abilities and land their shots, and all of their progress is undone with a single button. I am not opposed to having strong abilities or characters in a game, but an ability which so flagrantly breaks a fundamental rule of shooters – namely, that you DIE if your opponent is better than you – is completely unacceptable. Nobody else has corpse mechanics. No other character can pulp a dead body and prevent Mercy from doing this. There exists no counterplay except winning a second time (with your abilities on cooldown and your ultimates spent) because Mercy pushed a single button.

Retarded. This ability is indefensible and your team is crippled without it.

Soldier 76 has some of the highest DPS in the game, great burst damage, a group heal that can effect his entire team, and is one of the few characters who can move faster than a crawl. He has no weaknesses, isn't hard countered by any character, and his ultimate is a fucking aimbot. He isn't necessary in the same way Reinhardt's shield is, but he's never a bad choice and provides so much utility on top of his amazing damage you'd be stupid not to have him.

All the characters I've mentioned share a common theme: they don't play by the rules. Roadhog makes mediocre positioning into deadly positioning, Reinhardt prevents thousands of damage for his team, and the less said about Mercy the better. In order to understand why Lucio doesn't play by the rules, you need to understand how fucking slow Overwatch is.

Every character in Overwatch except Tracer and Genji has the same base movement speed. Those two characters are meant to be the “fast” ones, but they move at about 110% the speed of any other character (5.5m/s compared to 5.0 m/s). Note that because everybody else is so fucking slow, an additional 10% doesn't amount to much of anything. In addition to being a lost opportunity for character gameplay diversity, it means Lucio is indispensable to any team worth a damn.

Lucio can give his entire team within a certain radius a passive boost to their speed, and then switch that at will to a passive healing boost. There are a handful of characters that can use their abilities to move quickly, but Lucio gives speed to characters without it, enabling your team to roll out more quickly and generally position far more effectively than any individual character can. Once that's no longer an issue, he heals everybody automatically while still spraying projectiles at the enemy team.

Nah, they're fine. You did a hell of a lot better explaining the resource problem than I did. And your pointing out the larger levels and 'uncommonly used' space in TF2 maps was something I hadn't even considered that bugs the ever loving FUCK out of me.

Overwatch usually has a 'back door' past it's fuck you doors, but it's almost always a bad idea to take them other than the first rush forward. Because if you don't time it perfectly with your team, then you're just fighting the whole enemy team solo.

In TF2 you can approach points from two or three directions that give different firing angles and exposure at pretty much every point of the map.

(cont.)
This would be true if it weren't for characters like Junkrat, who clearly demonstrate what happens when you get shallow end of the Overwatch gene pool. Junkrat has a projectile which can be easily dodged. Junkrat's abilities require players to walk in an extremely specific spot (trap), or be unaware of their environment (concussion mine). Both of them can be destroyed by enemy players. Junkrat's ultimate requires him to be completely defenceless while he's controlling it, can be destroyed (causing no explosion), and can be heard from miles away.

Why does Mercy get to resurrect five people without interference but Junkrat's fucking ultimate and traps can be destroyed? A drawback like that implies they're more powerful, not less. Perhaps Junkrat was meant to be awful because he stomps public games in the same way Bastion does, but if that's the case then the design is inherently broken. The Smash Bros. games balance characters with items in mind, which inevitably results in half the cast being awful in a competitive setting. Why should Overwatch get a free pass?

So now that you have five of your six slots decided for you, feel free to use the one remaining slot for your variety fun pick or whatever you feel like rolling with except Junkrat. That is, until you see [character] on the enemy team, who hard counters your character. Then you can switch out to [character]'s hard counter and stomp them for a couple lives until they switch to your new hard counter, and you switch to their new hard counter, and they . . .

Does anyone seriously find this stimulating? Counterpicking is boring as shit. Don't fucking tell me “just play a different character” or “just don't be in a bad position.” The entire point of skill as a deciding factor in a game is that is lets players overcome adversity in their own ways. If the solution to a bad situation is not to be in that situation, then that situation – and the potential for interactive gameplay related to it – doesn't have a solution, and thus needs fixing. It's basic game theory: if Junkrat had an answer for Pharah's jump, then the Pharah player would have to consider how the Junkrat player would approach using it. Because he doesn't, the correct move is for him to run away and pick a different character.

It's one of the really distinct things about TF2 maps which I loved so much when I played that game; once you see it you begin to realize that many of the maps make great use of space like this by curling around a central area. It sounds lazy, but it works. Badwater Basin, for instance, just has this giant backyard of shipping containers and rocks behind the third point so that there's a bit more room for spies to approach the obligatory sentry nest up top, or for flanking routes in general. Christ, I didn't even touch on the differences between Torblerone's turret and the Engineer's sentry gun.

(cont.)
ADDENDUM
The following are assorted points which I did not cover in their appropriate segments. I wrote this essay over the course of several days and structured it poorly, so you'll have to forgive the lack of proper organization.

Pretty straightforward. Activision-Blizzard do not need to nickel and dime their audience for cosmetics, and microtransactions have no place in anything presented as a complete product. Several alternate skins completely change the silhouette and “read value” of a character, which makes the visual language of the game muddier than it should be. Look at the attached images of Soldier 76 and tell me if you think those two men are the same character.

The reliance on ultimates also introduces a bizarre balancing act to the game: instead of your characters or skill being the deciding factor, ultimate availability is much more important. Games are decided by which team can expend enough ultimates to stomp each team fight while hoarding enough ultimates to stomp the next. Obviously skill usage should be important, but they're so fucking powerful (like MERCY) they warp the entire balance of the game.

Not losing any ultimate meter on death is also insulting: Splatoon, a game made by Nintendo which was so intensely designed for babies it locked out the ranked mode until enough people reached level 10, at least has the common decency to take away a chunk of your special meter upon death. A Nintendo shooter punishes you more for dying than a Blizzard game. Think about that for a minute.

Lazy level design, and it makes the levels even less intricate than they appear initially since there will always be a higher tier of terrain available to certain characters. Like anything else related to abilities, it's a binary: either you can jump up to Widowmaker's perch and engage her at a more favourable range, or you can't and you can go fuck yourself while trying to dodge her shots. And good luck with that, given how gigantic your hitboxes are.

This marks the end of my autistic rants about Overwatch's awful balance. While my structure wasn't the best due to the spontaneity of the writing, I think I made my point clear enough: Overwatch fails as a game for casuals due to awful technical aspects, it fails as an artistic product due to its calculated mass market appeal and borderline theft, and it fails as a game because you're kneecapping yourself unless you pick and abuse the most broken characters and abilities; the overreliance on counterpicking as what appears to be a safety valve for dominant strategies is noteworthy for being both incredibly lazy and extremely boring.

Thank you for reading and for capping my earlier posts. I didn't know when I started out I would end up writing 11 pages and 5800 words about a shitty normalfag game – yet here we are. I hope this is useful to someone, somewhere, so that my legacy of shitposting may outlive me and that at least one user's normalfag friend may see the light regarding Overwatch and its ilk.

...

Good shit, textdump user, it's always good to see solid deconstruction from a design perspective around these parts.
I've written about Overwatch's failings in the past, and it's nice to see others undiscouraged by the same excuses slung the way of any criticism of their full-price F2P-tier shooter.

Nice meme. Into the bog you go.

Given that you're having fun writing the essay, I'd like to add something.

The reason why Roadhog's hook was ESPECIALLY broken was because of how lazily it was implemented.

When you press the hotkey for hook, at that instant it would perform a hitscan to determine whether it would connect or not. It takes a moment for the hook to actually fly out, and then it magically connects to whatever your earlier hitscan actually hit. (And this is also the part that was fixed. You have to hit people with the actual hook now.)

It's because of this that Roadhog's hook, especially in combination with the shitty hitboxes, behaves so incredibly oddly. It meant that as long as you hitscan-hit someone, it would always connect. This often produced the "pull from behind the wall" behavior that the hook is so famous for.
Your Roadhog is the very extreme cases, but hooking someone around the wall is actually very common. Almost every game where you play Roadhog, you would have this happen multiple times. It wasn't just rarely retarded, it was consistently retarded.

This delayed-hit behavior also caused a second bug. You could actually pull people further behind walls. This was simply because pulled enemies still collide with terrain, sliding around edges of walls.The amazing drawing in Oekaki describes an example.
This was also pretty frequent, and occured roughly every other game.

The hitboxes in Overwatch are bad, but Roadhog's hook was just beyond retarded. Even the casual masses found it bullshit.

Someone should screen cap all of these

You're either a paladin or a monk main, aren't you?

Good read. Even if it is obvious that the game is not designed well, it's always nice to see it laid out so thoroughly. I understand the autistic drive to deconstruct something even if it is obviously bad, I once wrote an eleven page dissertation on why Benchwarmers was one of the worst movies I'd ever seen. It's fun shit.

To my knowledge they've since amended the hook to where it disengages once the target leaves Roadhog's line of vision.

I'll even drop proof on you motherfuckers.

This image here is from the Story of Overwatch; the fall of Titan. I'm going to break it into a wall of text for convenience.

(Jesus, one in and I already feel sick)

You guys noticing how vague all of this shit is? Additionally, a lot of goals they had in here aren't present in the game, which means they don't understand how to achieve what was in the design doc.

(1/2)

(2/2)

The main goal of the level design in Overwatch was to make the environmental art and skyboxes interesting. This shit is mounted on their wall, so they're obviously proud of it, but it reads like something written by a middle schooler, who doesn't understand anything about game design. There's just vague intentions and buzzwords. It's actually impressive how bad it is.

It's almost like some SJW from the marketing team wrote this shit, it's nothing but empty buzzwords without absolutely any content or useful design philosophy into it at all.

14 is worse than WoW

It's nu-Blizzard. That's exactly what this is.

Welcome to future. Modern bullshit is so much worse than oldschool nerds who made games back in the day. It was fucking pleasant to hear how they made decisions and everything. Things used to be so clever. Not just endless buzzwords.

They're not hotbar mmos, they're microsoft excel mmos.
Hotbar mmos include anything with a hotbar whereas everyone will understand microsoft excel mmos are mmos where the gameplay is managing the little squares on a plain field you're given.
If WoW wasn't born I think gaming would be cursed with an even bigger stream of faggots, though.

I guess I'll just do it myself, then. There was a lot of good discussion and criticism in this thread; I am happy to have gotten the ball rolling.

Thumbs up, user.

I appreciate you going in depth through all that, but it's fucking overwatch I dont need to lose 10 minutes reading all that crap to know I dont have to buy it

Obviously a game like this should never be purchased. However, Overwatch will influence the industry in the years to come, possibly even more than CoD4 did 10 years ago. To that end, I think it will be helpful to have a coherent, concise list of all the game's problems.

I put it together so people could use it to talk to their friends and convince them the game was bad. It was also cathartic to type.

saddest thing is that Overwatch has become gold standard in arena/multiplayer FPS. Even newest quake has taken lot from Overwatch.

It takes a special kind of stupid to believe the numbers Blizzard reports to the public

It takes a special kind of stupid to believe the numbers jews report to the public

But user, I don't believe the jewish lie.

It's like tf2 mannconomy, but this time, they did fuck up the character designs.

Nintendo games are meaner that Overwatch.

That girl looks she's 4 year to a mid 20 years old, what the fuck?

You're fucking retarded.

Look at the picture.

It's criticising the trend of mmos basing their gameplay around constant endgame raiding.

Look at wow for fucks sake.

All it is now is endgame, just a bunch of burned out autists who compete for world firsts grabbing gear that will be worthless within a few months.

Most people have woken up to how hollow the experience has become

What is that spacing?

Any of you faggots playing on Elysium? Bored already of trying to play it alone.

Leave it up to Holla Forums to turn a Blizzard thread into another Holocaust and "muh jews" thread. You retards bring that shit up more than the jews.

Maybe they're not the problem, user.

kek butthurt kike detected

I have a 2000 word essay due soon and you just slapped my shit silly. Good fucking shit user.

If I do it 4 more times I will probably re-sub and level every one of those alts to 50-60 and level them up once every day eating up a blue bar, keeping the dungeons varied before going back to rep grind / drop grind bullshit on my main and primary faction alts.
I don't want to do that, but I have this sick bi-annual serial killer like compulsion to play it.

...

WoW has been around for more than a god damned decade so of course its going to have seen continual decline.
I don't see how you faggots seem to think that WoW's decline is going to bring down Blizzard in any way.

But this is the same group that has been decrying the great second coming of the video game industry crash for about a decade as well.

I wonder how many people on Holla Forums suffer from some sort of delusional problems or "magical thinking"?