Yep, I think they made tons of bad design decisions trying to force it to be an esport. I think they went too restrictive too fast. One of each hero per team and having some sort of power-up system would’ve been the way to go. OW2 is just blatantly exacerbating the problems and they keep making it worse.

Immediately doing role restrictions was actually a bad community suggestion that removed some of the crazier counterplay opportunities. I just don’t think they could balance it in any reasonable way.

Yup. I got the launch edition for 40 bucks special and once paid 20 bucks for points for their first Halloween costume. Hated the grind, don’t ever intend to pay for any type of loot box/ pay to win shenanigans. Got Diablo 4 for free, couldn’t play first weeks, got two hours in, next time I log on they patched a season, fucked my build, instead of playing i uninstalled. Blizzard is dead. Died with frozen throne

Overwatch 2 killed Overwatch. You cannot play the original game

Overwatch 2 is 5 vs 5, the first one was 6 vs 6.
Some heroes from the first game were not in the sequel
Some changes of roles and mechanics
blah, blah, blah

With this I want to say If you liked the first game Blizzard made sure you could not continue playing it, that made people angry

The game felt more like an update instead like a full fledged sequel

The game is way more predatory with its microtransactions and battle passes than the first one, that also made people angry and the fact that they made the first game unplayable added salt to the injury

Blizzard made a lot of promises about single player content… that was later cancelled, that also made people who were into Overwatch 2 angry

They made a lot of people angry…

I cannot give a super accurate account as I actually haven’t played OW2 at all, but that may also be for the same reasons it’s on the bottom.

OW1, when purchased at release, promised to be a “10 year game” or something like that. I played that game a lot and loved it for a long time. I played it so much that at one point I was just under being a top 500 player in NA servers. I never bought more than the original game though. I never bought a gun or character skin because the default skins seemed fine, but I did collect a lot from just the lootbox system. The game had some balance problems, but it was overall good game design.

So, why did I, specifically me not others stop playing?

They entirely nuked team composition in the game. It may not have been a great idea to be a squad with 6 dps, but you could do it if you wanted to, and on a rare occasion it may have even been a good idea. Then they forced set roles, so a team could only have two tanks, two dps, and two healers or something like that. Suddenly the variety of diverse compositions and strategy got restricted to only a handful, and games became much more… I dunno how to put it. Mechanical? Boring? Identical? Gameplay took a turn for the worse.

Then there was the Hong Kong thing which was a huge thing for me. A pro player made a pro-hong kong statement during the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard fuckin took all the guys prize money and banned him from pro-play Then, when the community loudly demanded to amend this, they sent out a letter to the community boot-licking to China and telling the players to fuck off. I think the last time I seriously played was the day the letter came out. Maybe one or two games over the following years total.

Then there was the sexual harassment and workers rights violations from blizzard right after that.

Then they announced that OW2 was going to come out at like year 5 or 6 of the OW1 lifespan, cutting the lifespan of the game in half.

Then they announced the PVE game mode, which was the entire reason they were making OW2 in the first place wasn’t going to be out in OW2, and would never be made.

Then they announced OW2 was going to replace OW1 entirely. They said all the skins and stuff would transfer over, but then a bunch of people couldn’t get their skins transferred over, even if they had paid for them.

Then they changed the lootbox system so that if you did not pay for skins your chances of getting pretty much anything you wanted was gone. You either bought it or you didn’t get it. Probably a slap in the face to the people who already bought it in OW1, had it taken away and then had to either complain to customer service for days or weeks or just buy it again. I still remember forum posts of people losing hundreds of dollars worth of purchases shortly after release, never found out if this was ever resolved.

Then OW2 came out and it was pretty much just OW1 with a couple new characters. They also completely destroyed niche characters for reasons I do not understand. Biggest one I can recall was a tank called Hammond whose whole shtick was being a high mobility-low damage disruption based tank. They turned it into a mobility restricted low damage bullet sponge. They completely fucked characters that were outside “the meta” which made the already stagnant gameplay become even more rigid.

I didn’t even play the game and all this shit pretty much had me swear off buying or playing any other blizzard games. Even if OW2 is playable right now, which I have doubts about, you can pretty much guarantee the company is going to cannibalize the remaining lifespan of the game more and more until they just entirely shut down the servers.

Ignoring anything you might say about the game itself (i.e. it’s not a good game at all), the biggest reason people are shitting on it is because Overwatch 1 was a $60 game that they abruptly canceled and re-released as Overwatch 2 “free to play” without any changes to the it, locked the characters behind a paywall, and leaned as heavily into micro-transactions as any game ever. It was a massive bait-and-switch. They also promised that a complex story mode pve experience was the reason they had to make it OW2 rather than an expansion or whatever to OW1, but they ended up canceling that… so literally all they did was take a game they had charged people $60 to play and made it an f2p micro-transaction game. They royally fucked over the loyal player base, and cheapened the game by making it free. I’ve never seen a more blatant “fuck you” from a developer to its fans ever.