Today we are going to talk about some areas of the game that we feel need a little bit more direct attention from Blizzard. There are things about the state of the game that concern us a little bit one of those is that the game might be becoming too easy in certain ways. Now hold, Overwatch is still a very hard game with loads of heroes and skill sets to learn and apply, it has challenges aplenty for sure but there is an aspect of the game that illustrates a larger trend.
To use Brigitte as a current example some heroes and synergies are very strong and be relatively simple to pull off and the problem comes when those easier strats become so powerful they take over the game in comparison to harder alternatives it might be factually possible to use skill heroes to counter a comp brawling to any objective but the latter is so easy nobody wants to bother so they just mirror it.
The balance between ease of use and power level is possibly trending a little bit too much in one direction many of you will probably be happy that flank a DPS like tracer and Genji got nerfed but I don’t think it’s reasonable to make them virtually unplayable in the current meta and say that is okay. Overwatch can be viewed as high-level problem solving, picking the right comps are making the right place at the right time to succeed but at the moment there are only a few right plays that really counts filled rally faster than your opponent and maybe the same with grab and dragon strike hands for sure does take skill and it’s not like skill impact has completely disappeared from the game it’s just nowhere near as required as it was in say dive meta for example.
That might not be the most popular opinion in the world but I do think it’s true I for one want hero 28 to be a skilled hero of some kind it’s been a while since we got a truly mechanically demanding one.
Now if we return to the Overwatch League for a moment there are definitely things that need more attention, one of the biggest is play a disconnect with how the game is played at the pro level compared with the matches that we all play on public servers. Players use Pro play to learn from to use as a teaching tool but that is rendered virtually useless when what they are watching on the Overwatch league no longer applies to the pitch that they are on. There is a real chance that it could negatively affect engagement as well if the gap between the pro and the regular games gets any wider.
