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

The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games.

There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained about the slow trickle of balance changes and the casual community has always complained about the lack of new content (maps, events, heroes). The communication was decent at first then fell off a giant cliff. A lot of competitive players and streamers burned out of playing boring and/or frustrating metas (for a year or more) and casual players ultimately got bored.

My theory is (I'm stealing this from someone else) is essentially Activision saw they had a huge player base who paid $60 once and never again. The extremely consumer-positive loot box system (you can get ample loot boxes by just playing the game, and loot boxes avoid giving you items you already have) means that most players didn't need to buy loot boxes; in fact if you played the game a lot (as a potential whale) you didn't need to pay at all for your favorite skins.

Activision saw that after Year 2/Year 3 the revenue growth for OW fell off a cliff and deprioritized people who would have been making new art/content for the game. In order reclaim that revenue those people were then moved to "Overwatch 2" and all new content was focused on that game. However that game has been delayed (again, and again) so now the player base is hemoragging even harder.

I say this as someone who loves the game, and doesn't play any other game. The game might have lasted longer if they followed Riot's model and made it free to play with micro transactions.

Overwatch is a frustrating game to play because they almost have it right. It's almost there, if they could just tweak a couple things. A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into. For one, it creates artificial and spiky emotions in players, which just burns people out. It's amazing they don't realize basic things like that, which means they actually haven't had the right talent for a long while.

The company also has a lot of hubris. They spend tons of effort on things like trying to make healers and tanks fun. There's many good reasons to do that and they gave it a good try, but the conclusion should have been: we aren't able to make healers and tanks fun, let's try something else. Instead, they forced people to play them.

Other mistakes include not understanding "the meta." Once they think the meta is balanced in a game, they get conservative and don't want to tweak things too much. They don't realize that the meta is an equilibrium state found by the players. Change the game, a new meta will be found. They don't seem to get this and just let their games run stale because they think the competitive scene drives the player base, instead of the other way around.

Overall the facepalm factor has been too high for too long. Blizzard has always understood the science of game design, but since at least SC2 they lost the art.

For me, as someone who played OW just to have fun, what pushed me away was just the lack of things to do. No mode diversity meant stuff got stale really fast.

Remember OW was supposed to be a different game, one that they cancelled. They reused a lot of the assets and so on and hashed them together with the ultra-popular genre of the time. It mostly worked at the start but it was pretty clear to me after a little while that they didn't really have any clear idea about where to take it. It always felt like a "recovery" game, a "we spent a huge sum of money building these assets, let's at least get something out of them" rather than something with a well-thought out long term plan behind it.

> ... just the lack of things to do. No mode diversity meant stuff got stale really fast

Overwatch has one of the best custom game mode designers I've seen in a game since Garry's Mod. The amount of things that people are able to do with the custom games in Overwatch is incredible and I'd recommend checking them out if that's what you're looking for.

> the conclusion should have been: we aren't able to make healers and tanks fun, let's try something else. Instead, they forced people to play them

Healers and tanks are fun! The problem is that they keep introducing balance changes that make it incredibly frustrating to play certain tanks/supports. With DPS, this isn't an issue, because there are literally more DPS characters than there are healers and supports combined, so there are more to choose from.

If they made the experience of playing tank/support more consistent, or if they actually expanded the pool of tanks/supports by having more than 8 tanks and 7 supports, there would be more interest in playing those roles.

2/3's of the player base disagrees that healers and support are fun. Well more than the majority prefers dps.

If I were going to single out one thing that I've never seen anyone mention it is that shields are 1 way only. It makes tanks too powerful and stable, thus support is needed, thus dps is third tier.

It's hard to theorize because Blizzard made so few tweaks to the game. I can't speak on "fun", but before 2/2/2 the problem was supports were way too powerful (Overwatch has always had a problem with supports being too powerful). The GOATS meta was a reflection of this where you were borderline throwing if you chose DPS. It's telling how many metas were driven by a support that was too powerful (Brigette; GOATS, Moth meta; Mercy, Nanoblade/Beyblade; Ana). Having too powerful supports means that ultimates are the only thing that kills anyone.

Of course Blizzard had a challenge designing supports - if they were too weak they were unfun to play but if they are too strong then your entire dedicated player base complains for months.

Ultimately I think the problem was the lack of diversity among the other supports/tanks. The relatively few amount of tanks/supports ultimately meant that the community would quickly coealesce on an optimal tank setup (Rein/zarya, Winston/dva, etc), and as a tank/support player it became boring to play because picking an off-meta tank would be seen as a throw. There's little that is worse than queing to play your favorite tank and the other 5 players yelling at you to switch to $meta.

> There's little that is worse than queing to play your favorite tank and the other 5 players yelling at you to switch to $meta.

*Healing teammates*

Team mate: I need healing

Me: Im already healing teammate

Team mate: I need healing

Team mate: I need healing

Team mate: I need healing

*hasn’t stopped healing*

*Team mate dies*

LITERALLY NO HEALS. FFS HEAL!

End of Match

FFS HEALS UNINSTALL THE GAME.

Cards land.

Top healer of the match, 40% of damage recovered.

Me: What more do you fucking want???

For me, that’s I enjoy the least as being healer. I would rather have 0 comms than that. And the thing is, there is fuck all bliss can do to fix it. Dicks are gonna be dicks, idiots are always gonna be idiots.

EDIT: The other “fun” one is this.

Healers: “We have tracer and or doom fist fucking up out back line”

*tumbleweeds*

Healers: “hey, we are seriously getting are arses handed to us in the back line, can we get a bit of help just so they lay off our back line for a bit?”

*tumbleweeds*

Rest of the team: WHERE THE FUCK ARE RHE HEALERS?

Healers: “Dead, we are both dead. We can’t heal if we are dead or having to attack in order to keep ourselves alive because we have not backup. They have a Rein camping the spawn so I had to switch JUST to get out of the spawn room alive”

Rest of the team: FFS LITERALLY 0 HEALS.

ALSO GROUP THE FUCK UP. And don't spam "I need healing" and then go the opposite way to your healers (If we can't get to you or have LOS on you, we can not heal you), or spam it when you don't need healing (it takes our attenstion off those who do).

Oh and my personal fav(s).. Ask for heals, get a small heal then run away 2 sec's later and than complain you are not at full health, Or be a widowmaker way back away from the team snipping, spamming heals when you are standing 5 meters away from a large medipack. Or be a high mobility char getting healed, take 25% of damage thing "Fuck this PEACE", Leave by a means your healer can't only for your healer to then been stomped on (bonus points if you then complain about healing 0.5 seconds after leaving your healer).

And you wonder why we flip the fuck out, say fuck it and turn into a DPS Moria or a well booping Lucio?

> 2/3's of the player base disagrees that healers and support are fun.

[citation needed]

> Well more than the majority prefers dps.

Well more than the majority of characters are DPS characters. If Blizzard provided the same variety in tank and support characters that they do in DPS, there'd be more of a draw to play those roles.

The extremely lengthy queues and support and tanks playing like dps indicate i'm correct.

Agree. I've been playing DPS a lot since priority passes came out, and every time I do I wish I was playing tank instead. (I think I have the most fun playing Echo, copying one of the tanks and making a play. Ever eaten a grav as Echo? Very enjoyable. The enemy Zarya is going to be mad at the game for the rest of the afternoon.)

The problem with DPS is that you can either pick a fun one with a ton of weaknesses that loses your team the game, or you can play hitscan. Pro players and people with a background in other games really love the hitscans, and Blizzard obliges them, to the point where it's kind of throwing to not pick one. (Have you ever been upset to have a McCree on your team? Stun the dive. Cancel ults. Two tap someone across the map. Flank around and McRightclick a support. The dude does everything!) That's not to say you can't win games with the off-DPS -- there is someone out there streaming how you can pick Symmetra or Bastion every game and win 60% of them against the pros.

Support is a fun role. I've always said that Ana is the sniper for people that think Widowmaker is too easy. There's a character where if you play perfectly, you win the game. You make a mistake, or your mechanics falter, you lose the game. (Does anyone ever watch ML7 play and not want to play Ana immediately afterwards? You can do so much... if you're good.)

I'm pretty happy about the current state of tanks. It wasn't always this way, but you can pretty much pair any two of them and not instantly lose. Both players can pick "a fun one". Shields were once pretty much mandatory, but people got better at the game (and they shields got nerfed into the ground), and they have less effectiveness than they once did.So you can get away with the weird combinations. Ball/Hog was meta for quite a while. Winston/D.va has always been good with the right players and coordination. Rein/Zarya is of course a lot of fun for the Zarya player. I've even lost some games to Hog/D.va, though I'm not sure I'd personally pick one of those if the other was already locked in ;)

Anyway, I keep reading that nobody wants to play tanks, and I don't get it. You can spend 15 minutes in DPS queue, pick Widowmaker, get one sick kill for your montage, and then spend the remaining 8 minutes of the game being chased around by some Wrecking Ball spamming "Ho ho ho!" with a D.va in tow that shows up from time to time to remind you that it's the perfect weather for a hotteok. I'd personally rather spend 30 seconds in the queue and be able to switch between 8 dramatically different heroes depending on the situation that unfolds.

This is the first time I'm hearing any complaints about the modern overtime system. It seems totally fair to me, the defending team has to actually win the final fight. What would you change about it?

oh it's fair, but extremely frustrating to lose after 60 seconds of overtime

To me those are the best games, it feels like you were evenly matched :)

I hate getting just completely run over way more, personally.

people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time

of course the numbers don't work when you're exclusively playing against other people

this is why smurfing is so popular

I find smurfing funny. I’ve never tried it in overwatch, but in other games with good match making smurfing doesn’t last very long. You rise to the level of incompetence really fast. I think the last time I smurfed in LoL I got about a dozen games before I started to hit a wall, which was like half as long as my previous attempt.

I actually wonder a little if smurfs in a game like overwatch with a steep starting cost are tracked and treated special to keep that revenue stream.

That's why buying low mmr accounts for a couple of bucks is a thing, you get tens if not hundred+ relaxing matches for few cents each

Maybe things have changed, but up until recently Smurf detection usually didn't work all that well

"people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time"

This is why I think PvE is more sustainable for a player base and more conservatively solid as a business plan. WoW for instance.

But then by definition it isn't PvP and isn't going to get the same player base.

Designing a game around PvE is hard though. It's difficult to create an AI challenge that's interesting and can simultaneously challenge extremely good and mediocre players without feeling impossible.

I think the future of PvE games is going to be in AI. If game developers could put a DeepMind-playing-StarCraft level of AI into games without immense cost, then it's going to change games quite a lot. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could have AI offer a challenge to players for longer without feeling unfair. (It's still AI that doesn't learn based on the player though, which means that the players would eventually figure out the puzzle of the AI.)

Better AI is always a good thing in PvE, but as you say, hard to do.

I think the immediate future is asymmetrical roles for humans.

For example, one side is playing FPS for a Kill/death ratio basically, the other side is a single person playing RTS for a win/loss ratio.

IE Mechwarrior team deathmatch. Team of multiple human FPS players against a single human MechCommander-with-basic-AI-team.

It'd give scenarios more flexibility and allow for human intelligence to combat the meta.

And allow the FPS people to get a 2 or 3 to one kill ratio.

I think you are touching on some interesting points, but don't go deep enough.

(Just as a point of reference I played up until the hamster release)

I would say that the core design of characters with cooldown skills and very powerful ultimates that need to be chain to team wipe opposition ARE the crux of why everything is impossible to do right in the Overwatch.

I have played ladder for first few seasons and its essentially, get a 'pick kill' and save ultimates, combo ultimates to push through a chokepoint.

That is very cookie cutter experience that gets old really quickly.

They pushed themselves into making characters that have to have a spike impact in the game (their ultimate) or they are garbage tier character.

Adding new heros that need to follow the same design principles further locks them down into that principle, or they would have to rework +20 characters in one go.

Also the cancel and force movement abilities are extremely frustrating. I remember reading Team Fortress 2 dev blogs and they made a design point of never doing those, and limit the one shot kill experiences (since then I believe there are couple mechanics like that in TF2 and they are unfun).

There is nothing more frustrating that getting hooked and spending next 2 seconds knowing you will die. Taking away player agency is frustrating experience.

As you mentioned the characters are locked into set meta, railroading players into who you pick and how you played given hero. No flexibility, no verity.

I haven't played CS or TF2 in a long time but on odd occasion I would watch a twitch stream of some tournaments. CS is one of the best competitive esport to watch - hands down. Its very easy to understand, rounds are quick and economy makes sure that there is some verity to available weapons and tactics from round to round.

Despite playing overwatch their esport is not fun to watch. Its messy, hard to follow. Again due to ultimates you have game of hide and seek into all ults are out screen is flashing and after dust settles back to hide and seek.

... man I care way too much about this

On the other hand, one of the things I like so much about Overwatch and TF2 is the importance of mobility and crazy movement patterns - with some characters you can be flying around the map, ending up in odd places, and characters usually have enough HP to be in a good fight with someone when they land.

By contrast CS offers nothing like this - movement is always strictly along the ground/ladders/stairs etc, and gunfights are more like who saw who first. It just feels boring to play in comparison - sure the tactics are interesting, but there’s nothing like the feeling of freedom you get from some other games.

I’d like there to be more of a focus on games that are fun to play, in terms of movement and combat mechanics just feeling awesome. Horizon Zero Dawn is another great example of making combat awesome.

I haven't played Halo 5 multiplayer (no PC release) but I've seen movement-videos and they look _incredible_. Incredibly fun even just to watch! I'm curious to see if an improvement on that, plus the possible addition of grappling, can do in Infinite.

Very similar thing plays out in MOBAs. CC is always powerful because it removes agency. Getting killed with no counter isn’t fun. Playing against a ton of healers isn’t fun. Yet for all those things in combination it’s a lot better than a counterstrike-like experience of whoever sees the pixel first wins.

Having a mechanic that forces fights during inopportune times helps, that’s why I tend to like Mobas with creeps and side objectives. That’s something that OW could add that might force a less “everyone push down mid” mentality.

CS as a pixel hunter is very shallow view of the game, its like saying that Starcraft is just click per minute competition or football just kicking a ball.

CS is about reading opponent, creating opportunities and reacting to what is happening.

Pixel hunting is very last step.

That said, DotA is by far the best esport to watch if and only if you played it before and can follow what's happening.

It’s an absolutely gross oversimplification of course, and my intention wasn’t to disparage it. Your description could of course be applied to any pvp game :p

> A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into.

I like the overtime mechanic. It feels fair -- you're about to win, but you ran out of time. But there's overtime, so you don't just insta-lose. I agree that it brings out the worst in players. The calm and methodical team always wins here. (I haven't heard the term "Route 66 effect" for a while, but it's a thing. Players panic, forget everything they know about the game, and lose 2 checkpoints while they stagger in. Don't do that.)

> They spend tons of effort on things like trying to make healers and tanks fun. Instead, they forced people to play them.

Role queue was to force people to play DPS. The problem OWL and the high ranks were suffering from was that 3 tanks and 3 supports won every game against any team that had a DPS character on it. They nerfed the tanks into the ground and buffed the DPS to nightmare levels, and they still couldn't fix it. (They made the mistake of creating the most oppressive meta ever on the same day they introduced role queue. Sigma/Orisa. That was not great, even as someone with Sigma and Orsia at the top of their favorite character list.)

> Once they think the meta is balanced in a game, they get conservative and don't want to tweak things too much. They don't realize that the meta is an equilibrium state found by the players. Change the game, a new meta will be found.

Some of this is the community's fault. They get locked into thinking they have to do certain things, and the result is that they make the game stale for themselves. Blizzard changes something, and it has a totally random effect. Most recently, Orisa got that buff where she can't take critical hits during Fortify, and the meta became Rein/Zarya again. What? It always amuses me.

(Speaking of shaking up the meta, did you play that April Fools experimental card at all? Even though it was an unbalanced shitfest, I found it incredibly fun. I love those kinds of experiments.)

I think a lot of people think they've figured out Overwatch, but they don't play like they have. There's still a lot to unlock there, with or without Blizzard's help.

I also think that Blizzard is often too hasty to adjust things that players complain about. 2CP and Mercy have long been points of contention. The way the attackers win 2CP is to walk onto the second point and use 0 ults (even when it looks good!) to bait out defender ults. You all die horrible deaths, and then walk in and use all 6 ults to get a clean wipe. You win. The counter for this kind of overcommitting was Mercy's team rez. She sneaks away in the heat of battle, people kill everyone they can see, and she then flies in to resurrect everyone. By the time the attackers realize, it's too late. All 6 enemy players alive and well, and 33% of the point not captured. All those ults wasted, and then you just spend the rest of the game losing the ult economy and eventually lose the match. Someone should have noticed that they only killed 5 people and sent someone else to go shut down Mercy, but nobody ever did that, so instead they complain to Blizzard and ask them to remove the only ability in the game that counters overcommitting. Blizzard does. People continue to play 2CP wrong, now that there is no counter to the strategy of a dry push and a clean wipe. They mess it up every time, the defenders stall for 5 minutes (which is a beauty of orchestration and coordination when done correctly), and they complain to Blizzard and ask them to remove 2CP.

Something I like about computers is that you can't negotiate your way out of being bad. But Blizzard listens to the community, and that has actually become an option! Instead of playing the game they're given, they play the game they think they personally can win, and then convince Blizzard to change it to that. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you get to listen to some streamer have a meltdown about how tough it is to play computer games for a living. Metagaming at it's finest, and a great strategy in real life. But at some point, I think players should try to play the game as implemented and see how it goes. There's probably a strategy you haven't considered yet -- go try it! It might be good.

> The game is incredibly stale

This is what I would describe as the state of Overwatch. After sinking thousands of hours in this game, I stopped playing my favorite game because Blizzard didn't care.

1. They pretty much gave up on any new content for OW2 development. 2. Competitive was broken from the beginning. Good behavior was rarely rewarded and bad behavior was rarely punished. Most of my games were grind really hard to win and get 100SR, only to have two consecutive games where people would leave early and then lose 4v6 or 3v6 and have that SR disappear. 3. Elo hell was real. I was in Bronze because that's where I started from when I began the game, but eventually when I got better, I could never jump out of the ELO hell. I ultimately had to create a new account, and lo and behold I was immediately placed in Diamond. 4. SR awards were bs. I was a Moira main who'd get 40 kills and pretty much own the game, but just because Moira is rewarded on healing and there was a Lucio on the team, you barely get any SR for carrying your team, meanwhile Lucio reaps all the SR. 5. The event based content was so bad, recycled game modes from 3 years ago, recycled skins, recycled pretty much everything. 6. PvE modes were garbage. 7. Lootboxes were so frustrating, I at one point spent $50 to buy a fuck ton on lootboxes for a special event that had a ton of legendary skins, I managed to get just 1. Had a ton of repeats, that have minimal payoff. 8. Constant meta changes were brutal towards the end. Everything that came after Brig was just ridiculous. 9. 2-2-2 was BS. 3-3 was worse. 10. Everything, EVERYTHING was more catered to OWL than the player base.

At some point these MBA types who don't game, decided what's best for making more money and went ahead on executing in that direction. Player base was forgotten. And that has been pretty much the state of OW and all the Blizzard IP.

you have a warped view of how the MMR/SR systems function

essentially all that matters is your win-rate, if you can win more than 50% of your games over a reasonable stretch of time your MMR will increase and your SR will follow it

performance based SR is only a very small bonus (up-to diamond)

initial placement is essentially a guess: over 25 or so games your MMR will converge to where you're supposed to be

(4200 support main)

I don’t think I have a warped view of SR. Yes the idea that you win more than 50%, you’ll eventually get there is flawed. Especially in lower ranks where there’s an overcrowding of salty folks who leave, throw, smurf, pick heroes not based on need and just straight up don’t play the objective. I agree that the logic works at higher ranks, but it simply doesn’t at lower ranks. Performance based SR is important for lower ranks and that’s something that straight up gets ignored. It’s especially brutal because there’s no way to reset your SR (it carries over from season to season) except creating a new account and losing all the progress from thousands of hours of playing.

I find the competitive in OW especially bad considering other games like Apex really do it well. There is simply no excuse to ignore all of these problems. I’ve literally had games where 5 of my teammates quit, and I sit through it because I’ll lose SR to only find that I lost more SR by sticking around. It’s inexcusable.

Even in lower ELOs each team should have, on average, the same amount of trolls, leavers, etc. Actually, if you can guarantee that you aren't one of those people, then there are X slots on the enemy team that might be a joker and X-1 slots on your team, so the odds should favor you.

I'm unsure of the intricacies of Overwatch's rating system, but the problem I've noticed in most rating systems is that players don't play enough games for the rankings to stabilize. You end up with a situation where a very large amount of players end up close in ratings, where only a few wins or losses can propel them way higher or way lower.

This might not be a big deal, but the game isn't static. It changes, which means that the skills someone picks up might not be as useful in the next patch anymore. This keeps the rankings somewhat unstable.

Team games inherently require more games to stabilize a rating too. You can get lucky or unlucky with your teammates. On top of that, a game where you can end up with a character you're not strong with probably increases the number of games to stabilize a rating even further.

On average it might work out, but are enough games played to actually reach that? My guess is that for most players the answer is 'no'.

This is anecdotal, but when I host my buddy at my place (he is high diamond on all roles) sometimes he'll hop on my account (low silver on all roles) and steamroll. I'd say 3-5 wins per loss, and he tends to stay off his mains. Yes bad games happen, but he consistently will leave my account at a higher SR than when he arrived (please don't ban me Blizzard). I am pretty confident a diamond level player could boost a bronze account in any role without much trouble.

I recall ster making a new account, sandbagging all of his placement matches to land in mid Bronze, and then reaching Diamond in 6 hours. [1] I think it took him another week to make it back to Grandmaster. Granted, this was in Season 2 and I quit around Season 4, so I have no clue if they made any changes that would affect rank gain much.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaORwv8dkt0

there used to be different mechanics like a win streak modifier, which are gone now

but if you have a high win rate you climb more or less immediately (once you've unstuck the MMR confidence value)

I get that, but I played maybe 200-300 hours of OW as dva and for some reason couldn't get out of silver. Nothing I did worked.

Ended up creating a new account, ended up in high plat and quickly became diamond, never to drop lower again.

Why/how did this happen? I'm not sure, but ELO hell was real for me.

(Dva main)

different elos require different playstyles

as a 4k support main I found qp games with silver friends extremely frustrating due to the extreme chaos and lack of structure (normally devolving to team deathmatch)

the tanks don't know what they're doing (e.g. rein charging on cooldown, sniper dva feeding, etc)

the DPS don't know what they're doing (mccree going for cheeky flanks and dying most of the time/getting a single pick)

the other support doesn't know what they're doing (wandering off alone to duel people)

adjusting your playstyle works, so as a support you become super aggressive, the enemy makes near constant mistakes and you pounce on them immediately

vs. a GM game where everyone knows what their role is and the game plays much more "normally", and I can't get away with that sort of behaviour

you also have a warped understanding of SR and climbing. >50% winrate doesn't guarantee climbing, because SR change is not constant and depends in your chance to win in every particular match. The better you play the lower SR reward (because your chance to win is higher). That's exactly why elo hell exists and that's exactly why purchasing a new account allows you to climb instantly. And the last fact is the reason why nobody will change this flawed system.

I understand the system perfectly

true: SR change isn't constant, delta SR after a game is based on the difference between your MMR and SR

SR is essentially irrelevant, MMR is the only number that matters

your SR oscillates around your MMR, essentially at random

MMR also has a confidence value, "elo hell" is where you can't win enough to unstick the confidence value

if you win more than 50% consistently the confidence value will drop, your MMR will increase, then your SR will follow it

a new account has a zero value for the confidence, which is why the MMR (and SR that follows it) is more volatile, at least to begin with

"then your SR will follow it" is a wrong assumption. SR will only increase if you win. And while MMR increases, you receive fewer and fewer SR points per win.

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

Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...

Chess was actually most recently updated around 1860, when en passant was standardized: https://www.chess.com/news/view/breaking-official-rules-of-c... .

(I don't think that's the link you thought it was!)

Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike. Both really old both almost unchanged for years and both have big active communities.

OW is more complex (outside of high ranks). In many cases the changes are meant to balance characters so more combinations are equally viable. when i played TFC way back when, pyro was a worthless character, effectively unused for years. they eventually balanced him; so probably just the far higher number of characters and abilities and desire to make more things viable. OW is gets stale at high elo but at lower ranks it’s whatever people are best at that tend to work within reason. (i quit just before 2/2/2. played silver to diamond)

The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun.

Forcing two tanks, two healers, two DPS characters leads to eight minute DPS queues. But if you don't force this kind of team composition, the game becomes incredibly unfun for the team that has five DPS characters and no tank.

You'd figure that this would drive DPS players to switch to the other roles, to reduce the time they spend in queue - but no, the queues today are as long as they ever were. It's probably because a lot of people don't find the support roles fun to play.

Contrast it to something like League of Legends, where queues for each role are much closer in length - probably because a large portion of the player-base finds supporting roles fun in that game.

>The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun.

This has been a criticism of Overwatch since day one. If the core problem was the actual core formula it wouldn't have grown so large to begin with. Millions of people wouldn't have billions of hours into the game in the first place if the core formula wasn't fun. I think you have a valid point, but I don't think it's why Overwatch hemorrhages players. None of the issues your brought up are any different than they were for the past 5 years (except role queue).

Also, you can't point to queue times, then mention League has a better system. It wasn't rare at one point (I don't play League anymore) to have 30 minute queues even in diamond. DPS queues in OW currently are 10 minutes max even in GrandMaster.

For the first year of overwatch, me and my friends played for hours. Every night. Every day.

Then they started restricting your team choices. You could no longer have two of the same hero.

You then had to be forced into meta-roles ONLY.

You then had to queue specific roles and were not allowed to pick anything else at all.

All lack of balance and content aside, what the hell?

But they did address that a bit by re-adding open queue, also flex queue helps a little bit if say one day you wouldn't mind playing tank and then another day you just wanna go strictly dps. But I guess it should be fairly straightforward to expect people playing first person shooters to want to play mostly damage characters, and there's probably no easy queue-based fix for that.

Yeah, but by the time they addressed it, it has already given everyone many, many repeated large reasons to move on from the game.

The worst part is/was (unsure if this has changed) that you are hard locked into specific hero categories even if you are queued as a full premade. Even when you are with a full team that is OK with swapping, you can't swap roles as needed. Incidentally, I played dps junkrat back when it was categorised as a defence hero. And the categories were decided and changed by Blizzard - Junkrat might have been the only defense hero I'd be willing to play, and now the only offense hero since they recategorised him - I would rather heal than play mccree, but there you have it

Open queue is plagued with stacks of people queueing as tank/support to get easy wins. So one side rolls over the other in the majority of games.

Yeah, they originally had it all open and found out that it was a mess. Having very distinct and static characters is a neat idea but the problem is that there is usually one set of them that everyone wants to play. I've started just playing tanks to get short queues, but it gets boring quick since there are so few of them and not much difference in play style.

The other issue is that if you play casually and get a terrible healer, then you will almost certainly lose. Being a fantastic player only gets you so far.

Other people mentioned Valorant, and it appears it has a very different style with exchangeable weapons that apply to all classes, but just different abilities and more strategic games. It seems like a really good player can make a bigger difference and play solo. I'm going to look into that now.

It's about power spiking. Blizzard committed to designing without power spikes and gamers prefers power spikes.

Maintenance requires switchups to these dynamics, but when you have created a system that's devoid of these events, your game is going to be stale no matter what you do. New maps, new characters, etc.

What are power spikes?

Power spikes are moments in the design of the game where one player/character is really powerful relative to another player / character. Sometimes in League of Legends heroes are designed to be kind of weak at the start or strong at the end. Sometimes a character is just really strong relative to others for a period of time because you unlock a power before the counters are unlocked, or you purchase a powerful item.

Power spikes can be fun because it can be fun to have a feeling of power, or see the balance change in your favor in a game. They can be frustrating because you can be faced with a power spiked player and feel helpless. It is a design choice with pros and cons.

Surely that's exactly what overwatch ultimates are?

They aren't optional power spikes, so the strategy/engagements are predictable from the moment the team composition is revealed.

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

In terms of WoW, I'm sure a lot of it is focusing on the top raiding guilds and leaving the casual player with few rewarding activities.

Further, one of their most cherished metrics is how much time people spend doing a certain activity. Instead of making those activities more fun and rewarding, they made them take longer to complete and with fewer rewards.

To top it all off, they are nearly completely deaf to their player's concerns, and instead focus on metrics instead of gameplay or fun activities.

People at Blizzard certainly have forgotten that games are supposed to be fun.

They try to cloak their declining userbase by saying they have the highest number of logins ever, but they quit reporting individual subscribers a long time ago. One of them is a completely worthless metric and the other keeps the lights on.

The last of the original WoW dev team quit Blizzard last year, and they are running with a crew that don't have the chops to make engaging games.

This is why "you can't improve what you don't measure" bothers me. It's rare that you can condense all useful information into a number and it encourages people to remove critical thinking from the equation. People come to rely on the number instead of thinking deeply about what they're doing.

This is basically Goodhart's law (quote from Marilyn Strathern's generalization). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

I don't align with the top tier player opinion about WoW. I feel that this is who they have driven away from the game. I personally spent a large amount of time in that top-20 guild environment and have only progressively seen them care less about the edge case of boundary-pushers and more about the day to day player.

The latest systems encourage time sinking less than they did in Legion, where there were infinite diminishing returns for playing, now there is just a full-stop end to your week. Legion was the most abusive expansion with regards to a player's time. The latest expansion fixed a lot of that for me and others, but it isn't enough to keep me sustained.

WoW Classic actually kept me enthused and is extremely enjoyable, however if you were on a streamer server, there were artificial queues for ages and it was exhausting living around a queue when trying to be competitive at that top tier of play.

If TBC fixes that (doesn't have the queues at release), I will be a lot happier with it.

> now there is just a full-stop end to your week.

Note that I don't think this stuff is casual friendly. As a casual, my problem with the way Blizzard does these systems is you want to do something every day/week/etc.

Quite frankly, it turns the game into a chore. It tells me that not only how much time I spend, but also when I spend that time significantly impacts my rate of advancement.

Disclaimer: I haven't played Shadowlands at all.

Yeah, this sounds very mobile-gamey. Systems like this tend to start feeling like a job you have to do when you're not in the mood to play them. My preferred casual style of binge-rest-binge would not not be well-served.

Definitely agree and a lot of the popular WoW content creators (Bellular, T&E, etc.) seem to agree. They don't always mention casuals, but lack of progression is a major issue, particularly in Shadowlands. As a person spending too much time playing, you are basically forced to do non-LFR raiding, rated PvP, or mythic+ dungeons to actually progress your gear at all.

Not to mention they seem to hate flying yet keep creating terrible zones unless you can fly. There aren't clear routes between common locations like roads in Skyrim. That can be ok, but in that case they really need to have a flatter level design like in Oblivion.

> Not to mention they seem to hate flying yet keep creating terrible zones unless you can fly.

Yes, this is just an ongoing disaster. My sense from their communications over the years is that, when players fly through zones, that hurts the feelings of the artists, which Blizzard doesn't like.

> There aren't clear routes between common locations like roads in Skyrim.

I actually really liked how roads were handled in original WoW. They twist and turn, and yet somehow they're always faster than going offroad. And they were reliably safe -- until in Duskwood there's a wolf right on the middle of the road, which added to the atmosphere for me.

For the latest expansion, my main complaint is that they provide a bunch of cosmetic features, which they know are a draw -- but you can't use the cosmetics on your other characters. All shadowlands cosmetics are restricted to characters who belong to the particular faction. (Which is, overwhelmingly, just the specific character who unlocked it.) I characterized this once in guild chat as "welcome to Shadowlands! To enjoy this expansion's new content, please wait for the next expansion to release", and got many pained agreements.

You can't use your mail-wearing toon to unlock plate cosmetics, either. You need to go through the entire rep grind, again, if you want two sets of cosmetics from the same vendor.

>Yes, this is just an ongoing disaster. My sense from their communications over the years is that, when players fly through zones, that hurts the feelings of the artists, which Blizzard doesn't like.

Flying should never have been allowed in WoW, period.

Beyond the whole issue of players skipping content in zones artists spend months building, the mechanism severely distorts gameplay. A player being able to hover, descend to the ground, pick up an item, then immediately remount and rise back up—avoiding monsters—is ridiculous.

If flying had to be introduced, it should at least have been done with some sort of meaningful takeoff/landing process.

A well balanced stamina mechanic would be a great way to implement flying. (Something along the lines of Valheim and Breath of the Wild's stamina mechanics)

With some tuning not only would it prevent complete flyovers, it could actually be really fun and add another option for progression. Like a basic mechanic where climbing altitude quickly consumes stamina, while gliding consumes it slowly. Add thermal drafts to strategic locations and let the player improve their flying stamina over time.

Now you can limit how much a player can fly and when, and create fun game moments with crash landings in hostile areas when you misjudge your stamina.

>A well balanced stamina mechanic would be a great way to implement flying.

I like the suggestion. I suspect, however, that making flying harder could only have happened before flying first appeared in the game, and that Blizzard has calculated that any such move now would cost too many players to be worthwhile.

Hi, yeah that would be me, the guy who "skipping content in zones artists spend months building" and you know why?

I do not give a rat's ass about the "artists spend months building" anything, I just need to be there, pick something up or kill something and I am out.

With all respect for those who enjoy the "zones artists spend months building", I am here (WoW) just to beat stuff up in a repetitive & predictable way. Until today, I have NO idea in what zone what dungeon is, or what the background of the story is of that particular monster that lives there. I have never seen a cinematic in full, turn off the sounds and run graphics at to the lowest level possible so I see stuff that is relevant (fire) and am not bothered with cosmetics (grass). And I have been p[l] aying this game (on and off) since over 10 years.

It is just a nice time waster which allows for easy & cheap boosting so I can show up with the same gear as the addicts.

> you are basically forced to do non-LFR raiding, rated PvP, or mythic+ dungeons to actually progress your gear at all.

Those things are the game though and pretty much always have been. Raids, dungeons, or PvP. If you don't want to do any of them why would you have ever picked up WoW.

Because LFR Raiding and non-mythic dungeons exist? It's worked in the past, why is the only way to move forward to remove the casual nature of things? I play FFXIV and I like playing with random dungeons, raids, and trials, and it's to advance without having to have a dedicated group or a super intense focus.

They do an incredibly poor job expanding the content. The only thing expansions provide, aside from occasionally requiring the relatively trivial act of learning slightly different class mechanics, is progression content.

That is, content that provides new/better gear, more challenging fights, etc. That is: content that heavily rewards a hardcore from day one play style.

They consequently are in something of a race against time: the current game is hostile to casual players, who quickly give up and leave when it takes hours to find groups for leveling, and stale to hardcores that “beat” it quickly.

So one can intend to play casually or hardcore and be poorly served in both cases.

The thing is, those aren't "Raids", "Dungeons" or "PvP" - they're specific forms of them. You could run dungeons every day, do a fair amount of raids, and a lot of PvP and be left behind because you aren't doing rated PvP or Mythic+ Dungeons.

There's not even a "You'll have to put in a lot more time." It's just a lockout.

I think after Mists of Pandaria I stopped playing wow as an MMO and just focused on doing single player stuff for the past many years. To me there is a significant difference in something requiring to farm an instance 50-100 over when you have time vs. doing it over 50-100 days because of daily lockouts. That is just not fun and and disrespectful to me as a player. I don't always have the same free time every day and when I do get a couple of hours I can't farm due to lockouts.

Their WOW playerbase are getting older and if you don't treat them will respect even more will be lost. There are so many games out there right now, sure not of this genre, but they provide options for someone who wants to pick up gaming and not necessarily invest in WoW.

I hate how many different grinds there are in this expansion for legendary weapons and such. Mythics are okay. WoW is just like my home away from home I go to explore lore and goof off for an hour or two a week. The lore and world is very rich. It’s fun to level and do stuff on occasion. It’s fun to collect specific armor and mounts at times. I just don’t enjoy all the grinds and kind of refuse to do them.

I find it equally demoralising but simply let some expert do these things for a couple of hours a week and find my characters all geared up and ready to go when I feel like playing.

May I ask why you don't just simply let these brain dead grinds be done by someone else?

That is just a different type of game at that point. It is all relative and I don't play competitively. Virtually all of the content is accessible at some lower difficulty level, so it doesn't really matter what the stats are on my gear if I can do the content I want.

> Further, one of their most cherished metrics is how much time people spend doing a certain activity. Instead of making those activities more fun and rewarding, they made them take longer to complete and with fewer rewards.

This is basically Goodhart's Law.

This is sort of what lost me - and I've been playing WoW for a long time. It was clear if I wasn't running Mythics, Raiding or doing Competitive PvP, I'd be both hopelessly outclassed and not have much to do. I sort of idly tinker with the stories when I feel like it, but I'm drifting away.

I went from hardcore-raider-lite to casual and then they gated my characters progress behind raid level dungeons I just lost interest.

> I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but:

"The Blizzard Way" doesn't work anymore.

Fortnite releases content monthly/quarterly. Massive updates with huge out-of-game tie-ins, changing worlds, in-game events, etc. Other games have changed to match/compete. CoD and Valorant both implement similar season-pass style systems.

Blizzard, on the other hand, insists on delaying/cancelling games, releasing "only when ready", continuing to lose touch with their playerbase, etc. They made it public that there would be no more Overwatch updates until Overwatch 2 (and also made it public that Overwatch 2 is actually a PvE expansion). There is no release date for OW2, so Overwatch players will be sitting with no new content for over a year.

It is very obvious why Blizzard is losing players and not really competing in 2021.

I basically agree with this kind of answer. I’m an old Blizzard alum circa 2000. Blizzard was a personal company filled with a medium sized collective of people doing ambitious work. It was about me getting patti melts with a mythical figure named Chris Metzen at lunch. And then inspired to spend the next 14 hours in the office on my level design application submission. No matter what we did it was either worth it and/or scrapped. This may be why blizzard had lost touch. It is very difficult to recapture the early magic. It’s been copied and even newness does not bring the original energy back because it lost touch.

It still works. The problem is that when they used to delay titles, they came out as blockbusters. The death knell of Blizzard as a premier game maker was WoW. WoW became so amazingly profitable that Blizzard became "the WoW company." I remember being excited for Diablo 3 until I heard that they took away 8 player games so that D3 wouldn't compete with WoW. I never bought D3 and was completely unsurprised to find out no one liked it. No other game can survive in that company long term.

Diablo 3 was a disappointment at release due to the always online requirement (which was rare back then), the ultra boring campaign, real-money auction house, and no end game.

Diablo 3's expansion though fixed all of those mistakes set a solid foundation. It was very good for several years. But then they stopped developing it, presumably (hopefully) because they started to pour all their resources into Diablo 4... which I have high hopes for, but with Path of Exile 2 on the horizon, I'm not going to be too disappointed if it flops.

Fully agree. Bought D3 at launch, played a bit. Meh.

Came back after the real-money AH was gone, then played the expansion - have sunk many hours into it since then, coming back again and again for a week of play in a fresh season. It's a good game now. And I like it a lot more than D2, that always felt too grindy and I hated that there were no talent resets. (AFAIK they added them at some point, but not when it was current.)

The auction house was just a terrible, awful idea. It became pretty obvious that they broke the entire premise of the game loop: do farming runs, try to get good gear that aligns with your targeted build, get real excited when that thing you were chasing suddenly falls into your lap, update build and go for more loot to realize it further. Instead you would just grind hoping for general "good" things, flip them on the AH for gold, then use that money to buy the exact thing you wanted from said AH for your build. Completely killed the little human spark from the loot roulette that basically underpins why people play it.

This analysis is probably correct, but it's also depressing as hell because Fortnite is a shallow, money-hungry game. Nothing like Blizzard's best work from the past (Diablo 2, Starcraft) that could be played for years with no "season passes" or other MTX.

I don't think there will ever be another successful game without "season passes" or other MTX. Overwatch may be used as a singular reason in the industry why the old model doesn't work.

Fortnite can afford to keep artists and programmers on staff to develop a huge amount of content because they have consistent money coming in. This isn't the case for OW and I hypothesize this is why they struggled to crank out new content.

I must be getting old. I don't get why everyone's so obsessed with new content or the lack thereof. Overwatch is already huge compared to older FPSes, adding more characters actively makes the game even harder to balance. New maps are incredibly hard to get right (Paris, HLC, Havana...).

Quake3 is still one of my fav games. I could literally play the same map all day even.

I think it may be more that the content is getting stale too quickly. Like place once and done.

Maps get stale when they lack depth and an evolving meta. Map size, assets, etc are almost completely irrelevant.

Over watch gameplay and especially movement is largely the issue here.

The meta is almost completely dependent on the hero balance at the time IME though, outside of Havana always having snipers at the top levels.

StarCraft I meta evolved for decades even though blizzard stopped updating the game. It’s hard to get that kind of depth from a FPS game, but CSGO’s Dust II is iconic in part due to it’s constant refinement but also near perfect balance adds strategic depth when players explore subtle interactions.

I think you could revert Overwatch to the launch day build, and people would play it a lot differently now than they did back then. The community learning to play the game will happen no matter what balance changes show up on the backend; balance changes just force people out of their local maximum towards a new higher local maximum. But, you could do that without balance changes. Just try something new. There is probably a better strategy out there.

Not really. Blizzard's balance team is shockingly bad. Metas usually exist for huge periods of time (GOATS lasted over a year, as did moth, as did dive). It is repetitive to play the same maps, with the same heroes, for a year.

I hear that a lot. Why keep playing? Why play the meta? The onetricks seem to do well no matter what the meta is.

A lot of players feel forced to play the meta. Then a few don't, and the meta changes.

> I hear that a lot. Why keep playing? Why play the meta? The onetricks seem to do well no matter what the meta is.

To compete at anything means making the decisions that put a contestant in the best position to win. A "meta" is the most optimal team composition for a given map. To play off meta is uncompetitive.

> Then a few don't, and the meta changes.

This is not how metas change.

So why did the Orisa buff result in a Rein/Zarya meta? She wasn't in the meta before, she was changed, she wasn't in the meta afterwards -- but the meta changed. What's going on there exactly?

Sorry, if you can expand on which Orisa change you're describing I'd be happy to explain what happened in that meta. Nonmeta heroes get changed all the time and do not change the meta (unless they get changed enough to become meta heroes).

The no-crits-while-in-fortify change. Probably just a couple patches ago at this point.

Ah yeah. The Orisa change was actually mostly irrelevant to the meta at the time. The change that actually had an impact was the 2nd of 2 big Hammond nerfs.

At the time, teams were running Hammond/Sigma/Tracer/Echo mostly. Depending on the map, Rush (Rein/Dva/Mei/McCree/Lucio) was also viable. After the change in the patch you referenced, Hammond was no longer optimal so Sigma/Ball stopped being played in favor of almost fulltime Rush.

More recently Double Bubble has become popular (Zarya/Winston), but Rush is still played a ton and the dominant meta.

The patch notes for that patch can be found here: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/overwatch-reta...

Eh I mean. It's the biggest game in the world for a reason. It's shallow and money hungry to you, but a huge % of its players love it.

> Nothing like Blizzard's best work from the past (Diablo 2, Starcraft) that could be played for years with no "season passes" or other MTX.

The people responsible for that iteration of Blizzard no longer work there, is the problem.

> Fortnite is a shallow

Hate to take offense to this, but as someone who plays Fortnite competitively, it is absolutely not shallow. It's so much more than just another FPS.

I think Errant Signal has a great video [1] dissecting the appeal and breadth of content in Fortnite. It's not my cup of tea, but I certainly don't think you can call it "shallow". On the other side, Folding Ideas has a great video [2] (that the Errant Signal video references) dissecting the monetization systems in Fortnite and their negative aspects.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNukmNDq60Q [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0

Absolutely, I won't argue the dark patterns to get kids to spend their parents' money. It's kinda gross that it's simply the industry standard now.

I just know it's by far the most interesting competitive real time game I've played in years.

Can you expand on what about it is so interesting to you? My only experience with Fortnite is watching my 13 year old brother practice crazy fast building, and every time I can't help but wonder why they'd rather play that than Apex Legends. I sincerely don't understand.

Grinding fast builds helps you when you're fighting. :) Boxing someone and then editing a hole to shoot them is sort of "top tier" gameplay.

In general, not only do you have to shoot people as in a typical FPS, but you have additional defenses you can put up (builds), you can use those builds for mobility and gaining height quickly, Epic constantly rotates the weapon set, they add/remove mobility items all the time which forces you to change how you move across the map, and the map changes.

And then when I just want to chill there are all sorts of non-fight challenges and (relatively shallow) lore to chase down.

It's never not interesting, and if you like grinding and seeing your own skills and reaction times improve, it's all there

edit: I should link some videos.

1. One of the best players in the game right now getting 25+ kills in ranked play (ignore the rich kid chatter, he's 16 and already made nearly a million in comps which makes him insufferable sometimes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhTCEEeLvdk

2. One of the best teams placing 2nd in the last FNCS, what typical "endgames" look like in tournaments (lots of yelling): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLFCmOFAf_w

Monetization systems aside, the game development work on Fortnite is pretty innovative.

While Fortnite is one of the bigger games doing it, I don't think it's unique to Fortnite. Many games have seasons and constantly updating content. That's the bigger takeaway, not that Fortnite is successful with it.

Players will no longer stick around a year or more for new content. Back in the days when there was a dozen different games, maybe, but nowadays there's so much other content out there, why would someone play Overwatch for 4 years straight?

"The Blizzard Way" works just fine. The problem is there isn't any Blizzard left in Blizzard, as near as we can tell. Put more directly the people that made the method work, don't work for Blizzard anymore.

Overwatch had that April Fools card last month, and it was a ton of fun. They should do something like that every month -- shake up the core of the game for no good reason whatsoever. There's no way to monetize that, though, so I guess it's not a priority. That's the downside, for users, of the "buy once" model.

Unlike most people here, I have fun pretty much every time I open the game. It's exactly my style. Nearly 100% uptime where you're gaming. Lots of dumb voice lines and silly characters. Always something to do or see or be amused by. I didn't play computer games at all before Overwatch, I bought it on a whim, and it became my thing. There is always some way to play better, a new hero to explore, new custom games, new friends to meet, etc. I'm still getting a lot of value for that initial $40, probably more value than I've ever gotten out of anything.

At least for me, Blizzard made something I didn't even know I wanted. That is really impressive for a Fortune 500 company.

The Blizzard Way absolutely works. The problem is Activision is your run-of-the-mill quarterly-targets-chasing company. Vivendi was very hands-off with Blizzard and allowed them to thrive and become the legendary name in gaming they once were.

It's interesting that Hearthstone is the exception. They're regularly releasing new content. I still play daily after 5 years.

> Blizzard, on the other hand, insists on delaying/cancelling games, releasing "only when ready"

Starcraft Ghost :(

Seriously, I’m so bummed this never was released. Still remember the gameinformer cover piece on it :,(

I wouldn’t say that about fortnight, in the past 3 years fortnight revenue dropped from 5 billion to 3 billion, a similar %40 drop.

The problem is that "The Blizzard Way" is not what Activision Blizzard has actually been doing for the past many years.

Diablo 3 was a rocky launch, and the always online requirement was indicative of poor choices by management. Recall, that they wanted a healthy real money auction house (presumably to take their percentage off the top), and always online is typically utilized to block piracy. Of course, anyone with a brain and not currently trying to get a promotion knows, that piracy is a distribution problem. D3 came back into popularity with the Reaper of Souls expansion, a lot of the early problems in the game were fixed, and it still today is incredibly fun to play. In addition, the tone deafness of "do you guys not have phones?" tells you everything you need to know. Some dude at the top saw that mobile is a big trend (good job!), then drew from a hat a name of a Blizzard game, then blessed that title with his brilliance.

Heroes of the Storm, they tried to push as an esport, and invested heavily into... everything except the game itself. What happened to build it and they will come? The truth is, it is a very fun MOBA, it fixes a lot of the problems of the entire genre. In doing so, it rewards team play so much more than being a lone hero. You would think it helps the competitive scene, but in the case of the MOBA playerbase that's often the most toxic and egocentric, it doesn't mesh well. They could have easily enjoyed having the most player friendly, low toxicity MOBA experience that tons of people crave. But no, if there wasn't a world championship scene on par with League of Legends, it wasn't worth Blizzard's time.

Hearthstone had some problems catering to China but I do think with the recent battle pass system and the increased in game economy, there are some great steps in the right direction. Good turnarounds in the monetization area for sure.

Overwatch you would be surprised to know has some very impressive player numbers even now, for a game that gets no updates. Now that Jeff Kaplan is gone, I'm afraid the last of the best of original Blizzard are gone. I really, really, really hope Overwatch 2 is good. I will give it a few solid chances and I will revisit it. I fear the worst though, I don't think Jeff would leave his baby like that.

Warcraft 3 Remastered was a disgrace by management. Truly. You could have literally, and I mean literally, took Warcraft 3 source code, and dropped in touched up models, sounds, and textures. It would have sold like crazy. That's it, no excuse. Why did they have to reinvent the wheel, with a team comprised mostly of interns and fresh college graduates, rush it, with no communication with the delays, oh and did I mention that the main menu is an unoptimized web app running on chromium?

The story of Activision Blizzard is monetization for the sake of monetization alone, and management decisions formed solely on the basis that they sound good to other managers. Overwatch had the pleasure of being shielded by Jeff Kaplan, so it suffered less than it had to. The other large projects usually launch like crap, but after management has had their way with the game for the first year or two, the devs slowly but surely bring it back and make it fun at the very least. Do they have the financial resources on their side? No. But be damn sure they will improve and polish the core gameplay loops.

I have watched this slow death since around 2014 at least, but it's hard to know where along the way the roots became so badly damaged that Blizzard became destined to be EA-like.

> The problem is that "The Blizzard Way" is not what Activision Blizzard has actually been doing for the past many years.

This isn't true though. Delaying (and not announcing) Diablo 4 is typical "Blizzard Way" nonsense. Same with the Overwatch content drought.

> Overwatch you would be surprised to know has some very impressive player numbers even now, for a game that gets no updates. Now that Jeff Kaplan is gone, I'm afraid the last of the best of original Blizzard are gone. I really, really, really hope Overwatch 2 is good. I will give it a few solid chances and I will revisit it. I fear the worst though, I don't think Jeff would leave his baby like that.

I wouldn't be surprised about anything related to Overwatch as I have played competitively/semi competitively since the beta. Overwatch is kind of an excellent example of a good idea implemented so poorly it's really sad to watch. I don't think Jeff Kaplan was a great game director.

> The story of Activision Blizzard is monetization for the sake of monetization alone, and management decisions formed solely on the basis that they sound good to other managers. Overwatch had the pleasure of being shielded by Jeff Kaplan

You've convinced yourself of a very flowery narrative about Overwatch and Jeff Kaplan that I just don't think is based in reality. It's pretty bad from a content standpoint, terrible from a balance standpoint, doing horribly as an esport, about to pump out a "sequel" that is actually just fluff content. I think it's about as mismanaged as I can imagine.

I don't think Jeff had much involvement in the esports aspect. He seems like he wanted to make a game for casual gamers just having fun with friends, but Activision wanted the sponsorship revenue from an esports league. Despite all odds, they did make something that the best professionals in the world can play, while still being fun for people that have no idea what's going on.

I tried to get into Overwatch League, but found it hard to watch. All the rich colors and scenery of the game drowned out by the ugly monochrome of team colors. All the rich sound effects of the game drowned out by the world's most annoying casters. (Seriously, who hired these people!? Are real sports like this?) All the while not fixing obvious UI bugs (you will be watching first person through someone's camera and it will say "STOP THE PAYLOAD" at the top, but that person is actually pushing the payload). If they tried to make it bad, they did a great job. I don't think Jeff was at the controls pushing to erase his artists' choice of colors and sound. I think he did the minimum required to not get fired, and it shows there.

Jeff's a good dude, and I do worry about the future of the game without him. I can easily see a world where they don't even let normal people play the game, and they just make you subscribe to watching vetted pros play the game.

My post wasn't really about esports, but I'm happy to chat about it.

Overwatch was built intentionally to be a game that fostered an esports community. Jeff had a big part in the esports aspect of Overwatch in that the game was meant to be their gateway into LoL-esque esports. They wouldn't have made Overwatch at all had they not been interested in getting involved in esports seriously.

> I tried to get into Overwatch League, but found it hard to watch. All the rich colors and scenery of the game drowned out by the ugly monochrome of team colors. All the rich sound effects of the game drowned out by the world's most annoying casters. (Seriously, who hired these people!? Are real sports like this?)

It sounds like you just don't really like sports/esports. The casters are a big part of the experience. The game would be awful/unwatchable without them.

The viewing experience for Overwatch is terrible. There's too much going on, and if you're not actively involved (playing), it's just awful. Colors and lights everywhere, weird sounds, orbs flying all around etc. I think Overwatch is kind of a failure in that regard as well.

> Jeff's a good dude, and I do worry about the future of the game without him

I suspect there will be massive improvements relatively quickly.

Agree wholeheartedly on the viewing experience. I'm curious as to how the largely unenjoyable viewing experience for an average gamer has to do with OW's dying popularity. I know Twitch isn't the best canary in a coal mine for the popularity of a game but it definitely is one of many signs. OW has had lower viewership than like Rainbow Six and Dead by Daylight and other games who haven't put a billion $$ in funding behind their pro scenes for better part of a year now. Getting absolutely blown out of the water by Fortnite/Valorant/COD/Apex Legends and other games you would consider in their competitive space.

I consider myself to be a pretty heavy gamer, played OW casually in the past but mainly Apex now. I used to go to Blizzard Studios in Burbank to watch OWL with my wife as she was a huge fan (funk pops and all that) and holy shit, even being a causal player of OW, trying to understand what is going on at all times and trying to glean any semblance of "exciting plays" or "clutch moments" from the pro gameplay is virtually impossible. The gameplay is essentially an unintelligible explosion of colors, sounds, and strategies that brings you to the brink of a seizure before ending for indiscernible reasons because it's impossible for the camera to view the important elements of the match at once.

This is in comparison to the popular competitors currently beating them in Twitch viewership above. I watched competitive Apex before playing it and it just made sense. Teams of 3, battle royale, they have different powers, now go survive. Done, easy. Same with COD, Valorant falls inline more with CS:GO which is equally understandable. All of which are proving to have more staying power than OW.

Yep. It doesn't help that Overwatch at the pro level looks nothing like ladder play, so even casual players won't see something they understand when watching an OWL match.

I think esports are best suited for games that are slower paced (LoL, DOTA, CS:GO) or easier to understand (CoD, Rocket League). Overwatch is a game that is very fast paced (Dive fights took like, 2 seconds from start to finish), and doesn't really have analogues in real life, so it's harder to connect with or intuit.

> It sounds like you just don't really like sports/esports.

It's not that exactly. There is much that can be learned from the world's best players training together and performing together against an opponent that does the same. It's just the format is unwatchable. I do find watching sports on TV similarly impossible, whereas watching them in person is much more enjoyable.

I mostly watch streams. I don't think solo queue is as interesting a game as full teams playing multiple games together, but you do get to hear one player's thought process, which is always enjoyable. That is probably incompatible with true competition, but is entertaining.

I think someone decided what esports should be, and everyone else just copied that, but we haven't actually hit the global maximum for the format quite yet. What's strange is that we often take steps backwards. There was one season when you got the ability to select your own camera angles and chat in a members-only chat, and that was the season that I enjoyed the most. Chatted with the regulars in there, got to watch whatever player I personally felt was most interesting to watch (usually Jjonak fragging people as Zen), etc. Then they removed that, as well as the ability to pay them extra for the privilege. Strange decision!

> The viewing experience for Overwatch is terrible. There's too much going on, and if you're not actively involved (playing), it's just awful. Colors and lights everywhere, weird sounds, orbs flying all around etc. I think Overwatch is kind of a failure in that regard as well.

I hear that a lot, but don't really have a problem with it myself. The thing that gets me whether I'm playing or not is when people use an ultimate at some range outside your current camera position, and it's totally silent and you have no way of knowing that they used it. There was a time when ults were map global sounds, and that got patched out for no apparent reason, and it's never really been discussed as a problem. But I think it's weird to play around a Zarya with grav when she just used it to kill some Wrecking Ball over in Narnia. Why punish players that are tracking ults? Never made sense to me.

> there would be no more Overwatch updates until Overwatch 2

I honestly don't get wth they were thinking with OW2... In what world is it the right decision to fracture your game community in two?

> Starcraft 2 is basically dead. WC3 remastered flopped

Paradoxically, I've noticed an uptick of new creative Starcraft 2 content on Youtube (similar to those "can you beat the game by doing [insert crazy premise here]" types of videos you see in the Mario community).

I think the two company direction things that were noticeable for me were that they decided to try to embrace two major cop-outs: milking cash shop (skins, voice packs) and trying to pull Disney-like re-runs of classics (SC and WC remastered). Many in the community are lamenting that e.g. the dev team behind Starcraft is essentially disbanded. It's like they fundamentally gave up being a game company, and decided to be a collectibles company instead.

The competitive Starcraft 2 scene has definitely seen a new surge of excitement within the past two or so years. (This is just my subjective impression; no idea of the actual numbers. And I'm not sure what the non-professional scene is currently like.)

I think a large part of it is that after around 10 years of dominating Starcraft 2 and 20 years of dominating Starcraft 1, there are now some European players who are repeatedly beating Korean players (and everyone else) in the big tournaments.

(Including in-person tournaments, so you can't chalk it up to latency differences. Though of course there haven't been any of those in the past year, so we'll see if that'll be sustained.)

The two main usurpers, Serral (Finland) and Reynor (Italy) also have a really entertaining rivalry. I'd go so far as to say that those two may have single-handedly kept professional Starcraft 2 interesting and alive.

I think the notable thing about the Starcraft 2 pro scene is the age of some of the new up-and-coming players. Reynor is 18, and Clem is 17. They're clearly not coming to the game for the nostalgia.

I think the uptick in challenge youtube videos is also no coincidence. These are games where there's depth in terms of acquirable skills, and there's definitely interest in the community for displays of mastery in these types of games.

Yeah, definitely. A lot/most of the top pros and commentators have been playing since the start of SC2 and often since early SC1, so all these new, young players are a huge breath of fresh air. They're growing up on a metagame that's been forming for a decade and putting their own creative spin on things, in addition to probably having a bit of a speed and reflex advantage. Reynor's keyboard cam is often pretty insane to watch.

(SC1 was actually the first computer game I ever played, back in 2000 or so, which I think is why it still holds a special place in my heart. Funny to think "computer game" is kind of an antiquated term now.)

SC1 and AOE2, have more streamers and events than 3-5 years ago from my Twitch browsing. Both games that are more than two decades old. Really shows the staying power of the RTS genre IMO, sure it's some nostalgia, but there have been remakes and an upcoming AOE4 sequel too.

AOE2 is not the old AOE2 game though, it's a remaster (the second even) with consistent new content, patches, balance and so on. Yes, mechanics and graphics are mostly the same, but there's a resurgence because the game is maintained/developed, not just because the original was good.

I'm personally loving SC2 scene at the moment. Lowko is a great caster, Harstem too. Serral, Reynor, Has, Clem, Stats, Maru, Special, Scarlett...Florencio. I love it all.

Also to a lesser extent, there is the rise of Clem (France). What makes that interesting is he is Terran, which is a race that rarely sees high level foreign (non-korean) players.

Yeah, I should've mentioned him as well. I was following it most closely in 2019, where Serral and Reynor were the main stars and Clem was mostly just a super young and kind of inconsistent up-and-comer. We'll see if Serral (23) can keep up with the teenagers.

It’s looking likely that the GSL is going away after Blizzard stops funding it the year after, though.

ASL looking strong in Korea.

> It's like they fundamentally gave up being a game company, and decided to be a collectibles company instead.

If there's one business lesson to take from the history of the video game industry, it's that being a video game company is extremely unreliable. Being a collectibles company is much more reliable.

As the company leaders look for ways to make their business endure, it's natural for them to turn to more reliable business models.

Nobody likes layoffs.

I dunno. I think riding on nostalgia can only get you so far. Disney's new Mulan and WC3 remastered getting flak were due to happen at some point, and the criticisms are well deserved IMHO.

On the other hand, Mario keeps reinventing the adventure genre with creative mechanics, even though storyline/CGI of each new game is basically non-existent compared to Blizzard's capabilities. WoW obviously did very well in spinning the Warcraft lore into new directions, and Starcraft Ghost was also highly anticipated before the vaporware lost its steam. I think the main difference between Nintendo and Blizzard - and why Nintendo still commands such strong brands - is Nintendo plays the long term game, never getting drunk on a single unicorn success.

I'm unsure if the RTS genre is in a waning phase. AoE2 is still a top-20 game every day on Steam. Granted, it's a 20-year-old game. Maybe that shows new entrants can't make it; or maybe it shows there aren't enough good new entrants. StarCraft 2 is not as popular as it was, but would still be in the top 20 games if it were on Steam. We'll see if AoE4 gives the genre a kick. Initial reactions are somewhat lukewarm because of the art style, but the game play looks good.

I recently started playing AoE2 again with my brothers after basically a 15 year gap, and it's a lot of fun. I was surprised to see such an active community. I've heard AoE4 will be more like AoE2 than AoE3 was, so I'm totally considering picking it up at some point if my brothers do. The game has aged really well with its design. We are all casual gamers, and it's nice to have something to play with people who aren't into the FPS twitch skills.

The game has seen a resurgence because of

1) the release of the HD and Definitive Editions of the game, with graphics and gameplay that still hold up

2) availability on popular game stores like Steam (though it's a Microsoft game)

3) continuous balance patches, content updates, and occasional DLC

4) talented Twitch streamers and YouTubers casting games, commentary, and analysis (See T90Official and Spirit of the Law)

5) an active, mature, and welcoming player base on Reddit, Twitch, Discord, etc

6) frequent and varied tournaments with increasing prize pools (the recent Hidden Cup had the highest prize pool for an AoE2 tournament in 20 years)

I feel like RTS would have a second awakening if they could de-emphasize the all-important actions-per-second somehow. It’s not appealing to new audiences because most people cannot execute multiple threads in their brains well. I think Factorio has some of this, where there is strong pressure to automate things that would otherwise demand your constant attention.

Wouldn't that get you turn-based strategy?

I suppose they mean in the commercial sense, new RTS games certainly don't drive industry leading sales for instance.

Certainly in the context of talking about a publisher like Blizzard nothing but raw profit is of any concern. Arty ambitions is the something for the game studios that appear and die off, not for the publisher that seeks to endure.

To me it just looks like they aren't trying very hard.

SC2 did something very smart with its last expansion with the coop mode, and it became very popular despite being only sort of fleshed out. I could easily see that kind of game mode making for a hit RTS if it was the central focus, and had the standard MMO-lite stuff like loot and missions and raids and story and customizable units/armies and support for other group sizes.

Immortal is being built with competitive 2v2 and 3v3 play specifically in mind in addition to 1v1 duels. It should be interesting to see how a pro-scene around that would play out. More combos, more team play, more personality clashes might all make for better eSports engagement. I'm sure PvE modes will be available too.

Yeah should be cool, I backed it for the alpha.

As GP mentioned, AOE4 will be a good litmus test of the "commercial sense". Microsoft arguably squandered one of their most iconic franchises for the better part of 2 decades, and yet here we are (in large part thanks to strong sustained grassroots support from the community).

Nothing wrong with being a solid niche imo. Classical music will never sell as big as pop, but there will always be musicians and concerts keeping it alive on a smaller scale. No reason the same can't happen with RTS.

But the industry wants all the money, and right now.

They are focusing on games that can monetize user-base actively via micro-transactions and subscriptions RTS games are not really capable of this.

Last example i can think of is CoH 2, which was disappointing and the 'pay to win' commanders drove me away from it quickly. Plus i think original CoH is much superior game in terms of balance and fun.

Fighting Games have a smaller, but devoted niche that does well enough. The games are more expensive and they do seasonal or annual content pack releases that are also quite expensive, but the player base is devoted enough that they will pay. They make up for lack of volume with higher margins that their fans will support. I see no reason RTS can't go the same way.

Blizzard kinda killed the RTS genre with Starcraft 1. It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2.

There are still niches for specialized audiences, like historical battles with a more strategic bent, but for mass market RTS nothing has been able to beat a 23 year old game.

I love BW but it's still far from perfect. Even if things like single build select and max 12 unit select were okay at the time and worked decently within the game's design, they're still incredibly clunky choices. Honestly, even playing it in its heydey, I already disliked the 12 unit select.

> It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2.

SC2 had a bunch of design choices that seemed to reflect a shallow understanding of what made BW actually super good. Like, how incredibly tightly units clumped together should've been picked out as an obvious flaw immediately, but instead they never fixed the underlying issue and just patched up some of the negative impacts via econ changes.

> Like, how incredibly tightly units clumped together should've been picked out as an obvious flaw immediately

Pretty much everyone who used air-units in SC1 abused the "tight" formations of Muta-stacks (or other SC:BW air units). In most fights: tight formations are incredibly superior to loose formations. (Obviously Corsairs / Valkyries changed that, but typical hit-and-run tactics are better when stacked)

Automatically having tight stacks in SC2 meant the skill-curve of tight formations was brought down: so that beginners can benefit from the strategy with less practice. Advanced players can still use their superior APM to loosen the formations (if they go up against anti-death ball units, like Siege Tanks or Banelings).

Are there no widely used flak/AoE weapons that heavily punish tight formations?

There are plenty. The problem is that it's created a game dynamic where battles turn in an instant. You either dodge the splash and your army melts theirs or you eat the splash and your army evaporates in a flash. The game feels really swingy and punishing when whoever gets the right angle auto-wins.

In contrast to Brood War, where battles tend to unfold as an aggregate of smaller engagements happening simultaneously all around the map, Starcraft 2 hinges a lot on positional play with two giant armies dancing around and probing each other trying to engage at an advantageous position. And then once they get drawn into an engagement it's just BOOM! ZAP! POW! and it's over. If you blink you could miss it.

In Starcraft: Broodwar... Muta-harass isn't about winning, its about forcing your opponent to make more clicks than you.

In the ZvT metagame, Zerg can deploy Mutalisks many minutes before the Terrain have access to Valkyries (AoE anti-air). Terrain's only response at that stage in the game is Marines.

Marines (who shoot one-vs-one) need to group up tightly to have a chance vs Mutalisks. However, a Marine only has 40 HP, and can be KO'd by a group of 11 Mutalisks taking one shot simultaneously.

This forces the enemy Terrain player to group up their Marines before approaching Mutalisks: the Mutalisks are flying however, so they just run away when they see the opponent grouping up. By forcing the opponent to group up, respond, and deploy, you win the "APM / Clicks" war. You're just trying to force the opponent to "waste their clicks" and eat up their mental capacity.

If the opponent fails to respond, you just run into their economy and destroy their workers. If you break the opponent's economy, you pretty much instantly win. Because you have flying units, you always have access to the opponent's backline / economy. (IE: most Terrain players "wall off" their economy so that ground units must destroy a 500HP defensive structure before reaching the backline. But you can get around those walls by using flying units, like Mutalisks)

Otherwise, you take advantage of map features: high-ground makes your creatures invisible (even air creatures are invisible on the high ground in Starcraft: Brood War). So you swing in from the cliffs / retreat into the cliffs repeatedly.

A missile turret has 200 HP, and is a bit harder to deal with. However, a Muta-stack with of 11 can KO the missile turret before it even takes a 2nd shot. It takes much practice: you need to learn the timing of the Mutalisk, carefully watch their animation and positioning (they only take a "instant shot" if they're flying in the same direction that the shot will take place), and Mutalisks can instantly turn-around (you need to move-click 180-degrees offset from the direction of their current movement).

With accurate timing, you can move-click, attack the missile turret, move-click away (causing an instant turnaround, leaving the missile turret range, preventing the 2nd shot), then move-click attack the missile turret a 2nd time and KO the defensive structure. This is the "muscle memory" practice that made Starcraft: Brood War famous. Only those who dedicate many hours of practice to memorizing this strict timing will even reach the barebone basics of the game.

-------

Eventually, Terrain can go Valkyries and with a large enough group, can AoE kill the entire Mutalisk stack. However, that's later in the game. By that point, the Zerg player has moved onto their main strategy (probably mass ground-forces, like Hydralisks). Valkyries are useless against that, and its well known that Mutalisks are otherwise an inefficient unit in combat. So its unlikely for the Zerg player to heavily invest into Mutalisks.

Stacked cannons anyone? :P

Whether intentional or not, I think 12 unit select was one of the design choices that enabled the pros and experts to really separate themselves from the average folks.

For a "perfect" game, Dragoon / Goliath pathing is sure awful.

Starcraft 2 units really do "what you want" most of the time: automatically balling up into groups or "dancing" together. From one perspective, elite Starcraft1 players who memorized "The Magic Box" and other engine-level pathfinding behaviors saw this as an abomination: other players can gain the same skills now without practice.

On the other hand... lets be frank. Dragoon / Goliath pathfinding was bullshit from Starcraft1. The extraordinary measures you'd have to take to become a competitive player who uses those (ie: Magic box memorization. Dragoon Dance practice. Etc. etc.) was fundamentally unfun.

This is coming from me: someone who did put in the effort to properly dragoon dance / Muta stack / etc. etc. We all do things to seek a competitive edge against our opponents.

-------------

The work / reward ratio needs to be there in some extent. But it can't be so large to turn beginners away. I'm not sure if anyone's found the proper balance yet, but Starcraft2 definitely was better from that perspective.

EDIT: I'm also a big fan of fighting games. Hyper-fighters, like Blazblue or Guilty Gear, have a nice auto-balance called combo proration. Combos are clearly the best way to play, but each combo makes the rest of the combo exponentially do less damage (!!!). This means that a 50 hit combo in BlazBlue will probably only do 10% more than a 20 hit combo, despite the huge difficulty curve in executing. The bulk of the damage is from the attacks before proration kicks in. This allows for the expert-community to practice for those 50-hit combos, while not necessarily granting huge 250% bonuses over beginners. A casual player may only decide to learn the 20-hit combo and still be 90% of the way to playing like an expert (compared to experts who have to work far, far harder to get the last 10% of damage).

I've always held that their patch/balance style is what ultimately killed SC2's scene compared to SC1. Just look at how many balance patches were required from SC2 vs. what they applied in SC1.

While neither game is perfect IMO, letting the game mature without micromanaging it was a very important aspect of SCBW's success. Instead of mucking with units on a monthly basis they let things simmer and ultimately let balance be achieved through proper map design used in the competitive scene.

In my personal opinion one of the biggest faults with SC2 was their unit design philosophy. The idea that every unit was viable or had some special unlock created a balance nightmare. Its been years since I played either game competitively (played iCCup in BW / Collegiate StarLeague for SC2:WoL) but I remember always feeling like the game had too much "gotcha" in it that SCBW never had. Didn't scout proxy reapers? gg. Didn't scout fast void? gg. Didn't scout x? gg. It was too much rock-paper-scissors where missing one piece of intel was death while SCBW wasn't entirely the same. Taking the Terran/Protoss matchup for example you'd typically expect the early game to be vulture+tank vs. zealot+goon where if the terran player just a-moved into the protoss it was guaranteed loss, but microing the vulture and tanks gave you the chance and arguably the upperhand where the skill of the either player determined the outcome. SC2 didn't have that to the same extent.

That sounds more like a symptom as opposed to the underlying problem. A large number of patches isn't necessarily a bad thing, but an unstable meta is definitely bad.

So SC2 starts off with SCV-auto split, no more manual splitting at the start of the game (all players now can play the first 5-seconds of every game like a pro: no practice needed anymore) But then muscle-memory people wanted an edge, so they added MULEs / Spawn Larva / Chronoboost, giving players a muscle-memory / simple timer countdown to play with. Etc. etc.

Just back-and-forth changes like that was the real problem. The general balance patches had no idea for the final metagame they were actually going for. Did Blizzard want a game that rewarded manual effort (Juggle MULEs?)? Or did they want a game where manual-effort was minimized (Auto-Worker Split?)

In the end: Blizzard wanted both, even if the two designs contradicted each other. You really can't please both groups of players, but by switching back and forth between the two designs, they only really pissed off both camps over the long term.

I'm not sure I agree, the balance for pro level has almost no bearing on lower leagues who suck. I think the reason people stopped playing is that it's really really hard (tiring) and it's not a team based game and can get quite lonely.

Even in Starcraft:Brood War days, it was common to learn from stronger players by playing 2v2 (where Strong+Weak player goes up against Strong+Weak player).

Starcraft 2 added "Archon Mode", where you can 2vs1 (Weak+Weak player vs Strong player), controlling the same team. There were far more opportunities to play teams in Starcraft2 than Brood War.

And the 2v2 was always an option in Starcraft 2 anyway.

It's still a lonely experience. Social and player discovery was badly done. 2v2 play was lonely too, it doesn't feel like a team game when you're getting rushed 2v1 at 8:00 clock time and your teammate is far away building their early econ. Compare that feeling to DoTA or counter strike which really feel like team games and not like two 1v1s that happen to be on the same map

Speak for yourself; I can't stand SC1 after all the quality-of-life features they added to 2.

There's nothing dumber and more immersion-breaking than watching 15 dragoons get stuck in a small opening because the game's pathfinding is the very best the mid-90s has to offer. Or watching a reaver's scarab just ... get stuck, on the way to a target. They solved all of this crap (and a whole lot more) in SC2, and I can't go back.

Dragoon pathing is actually a bug where the dragoons think they're smaller than they are IIRC. They just never patched it because it ended up becoming a part of the accepted balance.

I think its because their model changed their hitbox as they moved. So while their pathing was calculated at one point of the animation they could no longer fit and would re-path or something to that extent.

> They just never patched it because it ended up becoming a part of the accepted balance.

I wish people would do this today. Release your game and let the rules be the rules.

Last year, Magic: the Gathering announced "by all our metrics, we consider the metagame healthy. So we're doing something we've never done before: we're banning a bunch of cards purely for the sake of change."

> Blizzard kinda killed the RTS genre with Starcraft 1. It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2.

The overall market killed the RTS genre because everybody has a pretty clear idea of exactly how much money you're going to make selling an RTS and it's not that high. RTS games don't port well to consoles or mobile, and that's the majority of people and revenue.

Blizzard killed the RTS genre by completely optimizing for e-sports click-fests at the expense of everything else. A pox on their house.

I much preferred Supreme Commander, but then again, I'm not the eSports clicks-per-second type of gamer.

I remember enjoying SupCom back in the day. I find it interesting that it still seems to have a small but loyal following thanks to ongoing, fan-driven development like Forged Alliance Forever. I can't imagine it's making anyone much money any more, but the game was good enough to build an enduring bubble around it.

I watch probably 10 hours a week between SC1 and SC2. I have to agree, BW is a much better spectator sport imo. Battles take longer, there are things happening on more on the map ect. But SC2 is still a lot of fun to watch.

I watch both too and I disagree. After a while I have to stop watching SC1 games, I can continue watching SC2 for much much longer. SC1 just gets way too boring. It really is like watching chess, slow and methodical (assuming the perfect control only the top players can achieve in this game, I could not stand watching any less skilled players, other than with SC2). I appreciate the much faster games in SC2. I think SC2 game play is more significantly more varied too.

Both are great :). I especially like TvT in Sc2. I find it is more interesting than the the SC1 counterpart.

AoE2 is another 20+ year old game that has experienced a renaissance due to new updates.

I still play SC1:BW Remastered almost every day.

It's PERFECT!

.

Neither is an RTS. They're MOBAs.

True. But these Mobas are descendants og these RTSs. WarCraft 3 gave birth to Dota 1. StarCraft 1 had the Aeon of Strife map.

Sure but mobas are much closer to action RPGs than RTS games in the actual game experience. The origin story as a mod for a RTS is interesting but doesn’t lock in the genre

I guess it wasn't clear but he is talking about RTS games of which your examples are MOBA games and would not apply.

DOTA and LoL are not RTS games; they’re MOBAs.

Those are MOBAs, not RTS.

Yikes. I'm a very keen RTS player and I couldn't disagree with this any more strongly. Starcraft is a very milquetoast RTS that follows a basic formula and takes no risks. It's the Marvel movie of RTS games.

Overwatch is just feeling stale because OW2 has been in development so long. I'm sure they'll get a huge boost when it launches. But yeah, all their current titles are pretty much just rolling along with nothing new, people are going to go elsewhere in the meantime.

The FPS crowd is extremely cyclical, mostly owing to Call of Duty and Battlefield's annual release cycles. Gamers buy the latest FPS, play it for a few months until the next one comes out. A game like Overwatch just... feels old now, even though it's a high-quality well-balanced game.

Or maybe Overwatch does not have staying power. It is quite interesting how CS still has million daily players... And they don't do that much either in terms of new content.

Overwatch queue times are still pretty good outside of Masters+ competitive play (remember most players are quick play or Diamond and below). I'm fairly certain overwatch 2 and beyond will be just fine barring some massive screw-up. The main problem with OW was how much money they blew on the Overwatch League and E-sports partnerships - hundreds of millions of dollars invested and the top talent keeps leaving because they are miserable.

>and the top talent keeps leaving because they are miserable

Can you expand on this please? Why are things so bad?

Three main factors:

* Work/life balance is fundamentally broken for most E-sports players (in all games). Bad habits like playing/streaming 6+ hours after 7+ hours of practice/scrimmages, terrible diets like 100% uber eats + pounding energy drinks, and finally the stress and anxiety of performing what the internet community breathing down your neck. Many E-sports players have never lived on their own prior to moving out to team houses, and some of these individuals can barely take care of themselves - and it shows. Most players burn out within a year or two.

* Meaningful incomes are almost never provided via your salary or tournament winnings - the real money comes in through sponsorships and streaming revenues. Even though OWL has a generous minimum wage and provides housing allowances, top talent has consistently spurned six figure salaries for seven figure streaming salaries. Sinatra, XqC, Seagull, Harbleu, are some examples of top talent who chose not to sustain their professional e-sports careers.

* There's very few roster spots available and tier-2 teams that on paper are supposed to provide a career path into the league are openly considered a joke for most games.

Has making 17-year-olds move to a foreign country and work 12 hours a day 7 days a week ever worked well? That's what Overwatch League is.

The field is in its infancy, and some day the esports pros will negotiate like other professionals -- work/life balance, a big 401(k) contribution, and compensation commensurate with the fact that they'll be replaced by an 18-year-old when they're 22.

It's pretty amazing how evergreen the CS formula has been considering how simple it is.

In games simplicity isn't a bad thing. Think of Chess or even more think of Go. A thousands of years old game, with two pieces/colours and very simple rules.

The last content added to Overwatch that wasn’t new character skins or balance patches was in April of 2020 when they added the last new character to the game. The last new non-death match map added to Overwatch was in 2019.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I think CS:GO has had like two big updates since like Q4 2020 alone.

If it launches, one of the major faces of that project has left. There's not a lot of trust @ Blizzard releasing good updates to games anymore.

I'll miss Jeff, but he's not the end all of why Overwatch is a fantastic game. Bear in mind "faces" are often just that... the "face" of a large group, who generally is comfortable being in front of the crowds and talking with everyone.

Hearthstone just wasn't the same without Ben Brode.

I wonder if the reason Jeff left was that he was asked to leave for taking so long with the game...? I would rather he not leave as he has been the face of OW for a long time and beloved by the fan base. But, this is a public company and deadlines and dollars matter...

I highly doubt it. Very visible employees that are community-loved are incredibly stupid to let go of. Jeff's community fame is worth dozens of other employees' worth to the company.

My guess is that Jeff wanted to move on, either due to issues internally, or for something different.

My money is on Jeff Kaplin joining mike morhaime's Dreamhaven. That studio seems to be stealing lots of top executive talent from Blizzard.

> Starcraft 2 is basically dead. WC3 remastered flopped. The RTS genre writ large is definitely in a waning phase.

I wouldn’t call SC2 “dead.” You can still queue up for a game within a couple of minutes if you want to play, which is all that matters. This is even true of Brood War.

I think the dominance of Starcraft 2 on the RTS esports scene basically smothered any contenders in the crib. The oldheads who still like it seem to prefer playing Brood War with all its incomprehensible esoterica (to uninitiated audiences) to anything new. Now that Blizzard has put the game in maintenance mode I expect there will be more sunlight to nourish new seedlings as its canopy withers. All the influential Blizzard RTS developers seem to have decamped for Frost Giant games to create a new RTS, and it looks like they have the industry clout to make a splash when their title finally lands (maybe in 3-5 years ha).

Meanwhile Sunspear Games, which made the innovative “Vanguard” mod tor SC2, just got done with a (purely hype-focused) kickstarted launch for Immortal: Gates of Pyre (slated for late 2022). And then Relic is putting out a new Age of Empires as well.

I am WAY more optimistic about the future of the RTS genre now than I’ve been at any point since Heart of the Swarm came out and half of SC2’s active player base decided it wasn’t worth it to continue playing.

> They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends.

Which to me isn't surprising as HotS' way to stand out from the rest is also why it's not fun long-term. At first it seems cool that every map in the game has a unique objective that the teams compete around. But the game is balanced in a way that you either win that objective 2-3 times or you lose the game, with rare exceptions. So now suddenly you do have a couple different objectives, but those never change and set the pace and timing for every single round, always in the same way.

In comparison, LoL and DotA always have the exact same map and objectives on it, but the teams are free to do what they want. Stay in lane for 20 minutes? Sure, why not, if none of the teams force the next phase. Focus on teamfights and kills or try to get the next dragon? Whatever you want.

I played HotS for 2 weeks and then I just needed to see the next map's loading screen to know where I'd need to stand exactly 2 minutes into the round. It becomes a game of kill-and-fetch quests where you also have to rely on 4 other people to do the right thing. Not fun.

I strongly disagree. The maps add tons of variety and the objectives force you to have team battles instead of just one vs one landing to last hit minions all game. Shared XP is another part of making it less about winning your one lane

The issue is they were late to MOBAs and made the game entirely free so there was no reason to really support the game. Eventually the finance people notice

> The maps add tons of variety

The maps remove variety because they shrink the possible space of what you can do to a finite number of gameplay objectives. The game tells you that some objective starts in exactly 1:27 from now and if you're not there at that time your team is disadvantaged and probably about to lose. That's not variety, that gets old quick, as a player as well as an audience for a professional league that you'd need to even start competing with any other Moba.

If that was true, we would still be using myspace and friendster.

> Stay in lane for 20 minutes? Sure, why not

You mean you are pretty much stuck doing just that for half the game. Hope you like lasthitting all day, GLHF.

I just started playing Dota 2 less than a month ago. The game is enormously complex and a pleasure, HoTS feels like Fischer Price MOBA by comparison.

Laning involves pushing, farming, last hitting, denying, harassing, taking down towers, jungling, runeing, and ganking. It isn't stale at all. But maybe I just haven't gotten tired of the game yet. I am having more fun with Dota than any other multiplayer game (save for WoW circa 2010.)

If you think laning is just about last-hitting I can see that you don't like it.

> don’t you have phones?

Blizzard isn’t the same company it once was. It used to be known for deep gameplay and creative stories but now it’s focused entirely on the free to play skinners boxes of card games, a mmo, and loot boxes to monetize the other games. Almost the entire early-days staff has moved on to other companies. Blizzard doesn’t exist any more, just a big corporation with the same name

Ain't this the truth. Most of the OG Blizzard team members have left; it is nowhere near the company that made Warcraft, Diablo, Blackthorne, Starcraft et al.

The writing was on the wall with Diablo 3's item market. D3 itself is just... Forgettable?

WoW also just got boring for me a long time ago. Sure, they keep adding new things, but it's still riding in very deep treads they dug long ago. It's still fundamentally the same game, and in my eyes showing its age.

I'd love to play a new MMO that explores new ideas. WoW explores WoW.

I've tried a bunch of MMOs since WoW... and despite newer engines and some neat features, they often end up just being... mostly WoW once the sheen wears off. I occasionally revisit WoW because if you're going to play a WoW clone, you might as well just play WoW.

You should try playing some older MMOs: EVE, Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, Runescape. All stuff fundamentally untouched by the WoW design - and they are much better for it IMO. When I've played these games, even 20 years on, I am completely stunned. Makes me realize how psychologically kneecapped we are by WoW.

No love for EverQuest? Any MMO I've played since hasn't held a candle to the world design and enduring sense of mystery and wonder EverQuest was able to spark in my fragile little boyhood heart.

I went back to play in a "static" group on the old school Project 1994 servers a couple years ago. Buncha strangers agreeing to meet online a couple times a week to play, drink some fancy beers and shoot the shit. No wonder lost. That thing is still a place of glory.

WoW was the beginning of the end for the genre, in my opinion. Everything about it was smoothed over in all the wrong places. The art design and worldbuilding were just not good, especially when you consider the lore was a hobbled together mess of inheritance. The Colosseum legionnaires of the Iksar in their jungle and swamped wilds or the truly monstrous trolls selling dwarf bits that could have been pulled straight from some Nordic fairytales: that's some love of the grim imagination.

> the old school Project 1994 servers

You mean Project 1999: https://www.project1999.com/

(LFG, by the way)

Oh jeez, that's what I get for not proofreading! Thanks for the correction.

What side of the world are you on?

I've spent a lot of time involved in the EVE space, I was on the DUST 514 version of the CSM, and I've participated in a couple of wars, even though I am very bad at Internet spaceships. Sometimes I wish EVE was just a tiny bit more like WoW... I wish the environment felt more varied than it does today. It really solely differentiates the game over time and area by player politics. Which is definitely fun, but almost in spite of the game, rather than because of it. ;)

(Other games I spent time on, which yes, are newer than WoW: I really enjoyed the moment to moment feel of playing WildStar and Black Desert Online (largely because they replaced casting/cooldowns/calculated damage values with movement and combos), but of course, RIP the first one, and the second one is macrotransactioned to heck, my wallet couldn't take it. SWTOR's early storyline content is insanely well-done, but unfortunately, once you graduate out of it, it literally is exactly the same game as WoW.)

eve online's formula is... controversial. the significant IRL time grind (doesn't necessarily need to be actively played, your skills train even when offline like an idle simulator...) was always a controversial game design point since it meant newer players were permanently less skilled than older players, they could never catch up... but CCP made it so you could just pay to get higher skill points, which isn't great either.

dust failed and it seems like CCP pivoted towards trying to monetize EVE Online harder. And it was already a fairly heavily monetized game (real-money trading was sanctioned even 15 years ago, the game basically required multiple accounts for high-level play, etc)

Doing the FPS + MMO integration was a risky step, but they get points for trying because that was pretty creative back in its time.

Like walking-in-stations, (now in Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous) they seem to be pioneers back in the day but didn't get much credit for it because the execution was so important.

I'm fine with EVE having pay-for-skill points now because you were always able to buy accounts and that was actually scam-free. You'd need to buy a lot of PLEX back then to pay for one with real money though.

I feel like CCP's vision is always ten times that of its capability. Walking in Stations would've been achievable for a larger, more funded studio. But CCP has never been able to put out something on that scope. (EVE itself is simple, in comparison to WiS, from a game development standpoint, and that took over a decade to get where it is.)

I logged into Ultima Online recently and played a bit. Still fun, though the community is a lot smaller now. It is a shame that Origin took so long to try to fix the nonconsensual PvP and other issues (then split the worlds instead of just doing consensual flags), which resulted in lots of people leaving. They really did a very impressive thing with UO, and the original graphics still beat the cartoonish 3D stuff they added later. Again, goes to show that a solid foundation can endure for a long time. Lots of good memories, friends, and immersive play.

If you've played a lot of WoW, you also spot glaring flaws in other games very quickly.

Usually the 'feel' of combat/animation/movement just isn't up to Blizzard standards, and UIs are often very inflexible compared to WoW's moddable interface (without that, nobody would play healers for long!). Sometimes the travel timesinks are just unbearable (SWTOR), or the global cooldown feels glacial (FFXIV)

And WoW keeps getting more and more polished. Just a shame that it all feels as if it's being run like an F2P mobile project now, probably driven by analytics/monetisation people rather than passionate MMO players.

I would say WoW is getting less and less polished, at least for existing, active players (the new player experience has just received a massive boost).

The WoW community has become accustomed to systems getting launched in a poor state, expecting future patches to fix glaring flaws in core gameplay, with the developers all but admitting this in interviews (if you're really into the details, Torghast would be the latest example of this pattern).

The FFXIV global cooldown is a bit weird in that it feels super slow until about lv50, where suddenly it doesn't feel slow enough. It's not the same for every class but using non-GCD abilities in between the cooldown becomes the primary rotation and it's _super_ challenging. I've been playing a lot of the Samurai class lately and the rotation is way more fun than I originally expected.

FFXIV is the one that finally hooked me. It improves on WoW in a lot of areas. The learning curve is a bit steep and the hell that is mogstation are points against it, but I've been very much enjoying it.

Mogstation is truly incredible, it's like the digial equivalent of those "this is not a place of honor" signs, it feels designed to actively repel use.

That said, FF14 is a ton of fun! And IIRC these days you can play the free trial up through the end of the first expansion, which is a LOT of gameplay.

given the graphics horsepower of many modern computers, I've been hoping for a "world of diablo" that focuses more on the gothic horror imagery and the backdrop of the much more exciting world that diablo is set in. Make it dark, atmospheric, and pack it with random dungeons, sorcery, and doom-style jump scares. Maybe as a bonus, put it in VR and innovate controls for attacking and spell casting.

I can dream, right?

Honestly BloodBorne might scratch that itch if you're willing to work through SoulsBorne difficulty.

I’ve been taking some time away from work recently. I played WoW (classic version) for about three months for the first time ever. I made it to level 47 as a night elf hunter.

The environment is beautiful. The fighting is well designed. Dungeons can be a nice social experience. It can be a very fun and relaxing game. But it gets super repetitive after a while. The quests are all minor variations of a few simple formats.

I just started playing Minecraft two weeks ago and I’m loving it. I’ve never played it before either. It has the exploration and beautiful scenery aspects and feels like a much more creative game. I’m guessing it will be less stale after 3 months than WoW was. But we will see :)

You are in the no mans land of wow leveling in the mid 40's. As a hunter you should be able to blow through to 60 in a few days from 47, it is one of the better classes for solo leveling.

The real fun of wow classic is running dungoens and instances with a guild. A clean run of a 40 man Molten Core run is a hoot. I would say join a guild and run instances with them and see if that sparks some of the fun back into it.

> The real fun of wow classic is running dungeons and instances with a guild.

This does nothing to solve the parent's problem:

>> But it gets super repetitive after a while. The quests are all minor variations of a few simple formats.

Instead, your proposed solution makes this much worse.

> A clean run of a 40 man Molten Core run is a hoot.

And this is an... unusual perspective. I raided Molten Core in WoW Classic (the recent release, not the original). It's a huge slog in which the only challenge is mustering the willpower to stay in there for the hours it takes to clear. Once my power cut out during raid, and it came as a big relief.

Riot is developing a MMO based on Runeterra. It will be interesting to see how that pans out.

These days I'd be weary of running anything Riot puts out since they got that new kernel anti-cheat.

What's the flipside, you want to play with cheaters?

Yes. Very much. The idea that you should be playing games online with strangers you'll never see again has done terrible things to computer games. The solution to cheaters is to tell them "hey, knock it off", because you know them socially. Or to use the same cheats (call them "mods") while playing with them. Or to be so much better that you win anyway. Any of those is better than what we have now.

Yah, that's just not fun to me. I have seen entire games become not playable due to cheats. I would opt in to a kernel module anytime

It will 100% be like Genshin Impact. Sure you can treat that as an MMO too but don't expect anything like WoW at all

So there's going to be a gacha system trying to extract hundreds of dollars from you?

Well, they have it LoL, so that's to be expected. (the hextech chest stuff)

Ive recently revisited GW2, and its been fantastic.

I’d love to play World of Warcraft with Diablo/Starcraft fixed-POV and gameplay controls. It could be such an interesting story if it weren’t for the camera controls that make me wish I had a flight simulator joystick.

What is missing from the title is that revenue is up. They are wringing more cash out of fewer players. This could be aggressive monetisation driving people away, either directly due to how it feels or indirectly due to dev resources pushed into fancy hats instead of core content.

The article does say that Shadowlands and WoW Classic carried the torch for revenue. One is old-Blizzard quality I guess, the other pretty much as expected for a new WoW expansion. People are going to buy it. Whether or not they stick around is another story. It does note that they did not confirm if subscription numbers are rising or not in WoW (modern).

The monetization in WoW is pretty invisible. Many games have a core of players who love playing no matter what and don't mind buying whatever new thing pops up on the store.

Everquest 2 is such a game. It is basically dead in terms of attracting new players, but people who love playing it have been keeping the parent company afloat for a while. IIRC, WoW and EQ2 came out at the same time. I can easily see Blizzard having the same fate in the not too distant future.

Well the monthly sub is quite clear, as well as paid expansions. Which I'm a fan of (I play FFXIV a bit). Otherwise, there's no clear price signal.

In f2p or bolted on cash shops like FFXIV I'm always wondering, should I buy some mtx? I don't really want to encourage them too much. I don't know what is reasonable to spend to keep the game afloat, I don't want to feel like a leech, but I really have no interest in cosmetics. I don't know if buying or not buying sends a stronger signal to them to spend more effort on mtx rather than the game - sometimes it just seems like all roads lead that way.

FFXI is in a similar state to EQ2 I'd guess, it only has the monthly sub but a really hardcore base who's still there (or dips their toes back in like I did for a bit) after all these years. It still gets minor monthly updates and probably has a nice ROI for the effort.

Diablo 3 gets a new season with some changes. It's not a lot, but there's still some attention being paid to the game.

Diablo 3 was pretty bad imo, clearly targeting consoles. Path of Exile is a much more faithful sequel to Diablo 2 and has a very active player base. It’s almost like if Valve gave it the same treatment they gave dota2.

I don't know if this is true or not, but it seems doubtful since it didn't come to consoles for over a year after release.

According to Wikipedia:

> It was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X in May 2012, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in September 2013

If you played the game it’s a given that they were planning to do that release a long time before it was announced. The gameplay was heavily dumbdowned in D3 exactly for that purpose.

POE is dangerously close to "2nd job" territory and is struggling to be fun as it heads into curiously complex gameplay and meta game.

So i struggle to see how different it is from other blizzard games

yeah d3 was lacking meta and PoE overdo's it for the average "hardcore" audience. d2 was mostly fine and the reason why it was so beloved. the problem is that replicating what d2 did with something new is challening or impossible without rebuilding it (thus being a clone)

I prefer Grim Dawn, myself.

I didn't know about Valorant before. Thank you! I'm going to go look into that. Every time I play Overwatch the matchups seem so off and if you get a bad healer or tank you are toast, I end up thinking "Why do I still play this game". Valorant seems to have a better way of dealing with differences in the classes and mix-and-match with the weapons, which seems like a good player can play solo casual and make a bigger difference without having their team just completely fold.

> Starcraft 2 is basically dead.

Do you have source for this claim, because population in StarCraft is fairly stable, at least based on ranking statistics.

I used to be a daily Hearthstone player and I dropped completely given how they handled the situation with the Hong Kong protests

Same but with sc2.

RTS genre is waning, but Age of Empires 2 is still holding on.

Plus Overwatch development has stagnated for the last year or so as their team has been focusing on Overwatch 2, which probably won’t even come out this year.

> Starcraft 2 is basically dead

I just started playing. Awesome game.

All of this started with the Activision buyout. They wanted to milk the cow as much as possible, outsourcing ALL. It is not working.

>I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses

It's because the current culture at Blizzard is dominated by theorycrafting eggheads who believe that the poor, misguided players aren't playing the game "properly" and need to be told what to do.

I just don’t understand what they’re doing. I played every Blizzard game since Warcraft 1 but after them killing HotS and me growing bored of Hearthstone and WoW years/decade ago there hasn’t been anything for me to buy from them in years.

I stopped playing their games and being particularly excited about what's coming when they got taken over by a large publisher. That's always a deathknell for fun, and without fun there's no point to video games.

WC3 remaster flopped so badly it killed the original WC3, and the ridiculous clusterfuck of that has ensured that I'll never buy another Blizzard game. You truly have to try to screw things up that badly.

How about hearthstone? They release new content regularly and have significantly extended the game with new modes of play over the years.

I think it has its own set of problems but they seem different from the ones you mention.

> The RTS genre writ large is definitely in a waning phase.

I've been longing for a good RTS for a long time. Give me something like Lords of the realm 2, C&C Generals, Future Cop: LAPD (ps1) plz.

add to that their foray into Mobile gaming (ignoring their main player base), as well as the controversy around Hong Kong.

> WC3 remastered flopped

Was really looking forward to playing Helm's Deep on Bnet like good ol times but alas

Overwatch development has basically stopped; everything is on hold waiting for Overwatch 2. Because they announced Overwatch 2 in 2019, with a strong implication it was already well along the track, and because they announced they were stopping all new content for Overwatch in 2020, a lot of people expected Overwatch 2 to drop sometime in late 2020. Well, it didn't happen. And in fact, communication about Overwatch had dried up, and the lead designer (the much loved Jeff Kaplan) has left. At this point, people are guessing Overwatch 2 may be landing in 2022 - which means ~2 years of Overwatch being abandoned.

In context, there's no surprise Overwatch is haemorrhaging players. They've as much as told people "go away, Overwatch is dead, check back in 2022 for the sequel".

Meanwhile on the World of Warcraft side, the Warlords of Draenor expansion (released 2014) was badly bungled; many headline features were scrapped, and the pipeline of content that keeps subscriber numbers up between expansions wasn't there. They (very obviously) panicked, and threw EVERYTHING at the next expansion, Legion (released 2016). It was quite well received, and it was clear player numbers had recovered. The problem is that the following expansions (Battle for Azeroth, released 2018, and Shadowlands, released 2020) have been pretty underwhelming. But with a two year expansion release cycle, and two underwhelming expansions in a row, that lines up with a sharp drop in active players over the last three years.

Also don't forget the announcement of the Diablo mobile game; some PR missteps made the fans think it was a Diablo 4 announcement; when it turned out to be a mobile game it was, basically, worse than nothing.

There's also the misteps relating to WoW Classic. It had been a perennial fan request, but Blizzard had always refused, at one point infamously telling fans that "you think you want it, but you don't". Well, they finally released WoW Classic, and it turned out the fans really DID want it. Without that the collapse in WoW subscription numbers during BfA would have been much worse. But when you think about a team that struggles to make compelling new content, then argues with fans about whether there's any appetite to revisit old beloved content, then finally discovers they were wrong and there is...well. It raises some serious questions about whether the current team understands what the player base even wants. Because on some level, you can look at the last few years as Blizzard saying "you guys are wrong, you don't want Vanilla back, you guys want BfA!" But no, the player base wanted Vanilla, and did not want BfA.

Finally, there's been a long, long series of horrible esport misteps, from the re-written EULA that ensured the Warcraft 3 remaster couldn't possibly become an esports staple, to their successful efforts to ensure that if they couldn't run a SC2 esports scene nobody else could either, to some very puzzling choices around Overwatch team and tournament structures, to the killing of of HoTS, to their repeated awkward attempts at creating an esports scene in WoW, despite the game being unsuited to it and the player base having no interest. (Seriously, between Startcraft 1 and DoTa, Blizzard had the modern esports scene handed to them on a plate, and threw it away in an attempt to gain control.)

29% decline? You don't say...

How do you lose revenue as a gaming biz during a pandemic? Kotick needs to lean in and build out WOW.

Revenue is up, up, up, but MAU is down.