ESports leagues only work when they come from the community. No amount of money will make people care about a random assortment of franchised teams
Reminds me of when Wargaming tried to push a World of Tanks e-sports league.
Turns out, if your players aren’t making competitive tournaments for your game on their own, it’s probably not suitable for e-sports.
Yep just give the community a good base and let them self organize. Maybe throw in a sponsorship here or there. But don’t make that shit yourself.
The problem with self-organizing is you get things like the Smash community, where the worst people imaginable take over the competitive level and then you’ve got a huge reputational problem on your hands. It’s a delicate balance between supporting what the community develops on its own and going top-down and forcing it.
I’m not mad, e-sports ruin games for casuals imo.
and evolving competitive Overwatch in a new direction
Aye, rankings are based on who has the costliest skin equipped, of course!
finally, a ranking we can all actually care about
From the comments here, apparently I was the only one who really enjoyed watching OWL.
Yeah, it wasn’t perfect, yeah it always had a meta, but it was fun to watch.
I watched them live at gamescom once. Was a lot of fun!
Miss you Jeff Kaplan
I mean I like Jeff but the OW1 eras of pretty bad gameplay and pretty long time waiting fixes happened on his watch. He designed a crazy fun game, but I think his stewardship in making it stay balanced and various and fun once you get good at it was a bit more lacking.
Noo, I love watching mirrored matches of 12 heroes for the entirety of the tournament duration, it was so much fun waiting for someone to press Q and the commentators getting hyped about it.
Jokes aside, they needed more heroes from the beginning, and instead of churning out heroes every season like OW2 does, they slowed down, ironically, because of OWL.
they needed more heroes from the beginning
Imho, the problem is the reverse. The game had enough heroes, it’s just that too many existing heroes were boring, underpowered, or (if they got sufficient power) game-breaking, and so they were too hesitent to say “this power doesn’t work with our format, we should get rid of it”. Instead it was tweaking numbers. There’s a place for tweaking numbers, but when stuff fundamentally breaks your chosen format (eg. ana antiheal) you have to take a firmer hand. But they let game-breaking powers like Mercy rez ult or just too damned many barriers sit instead of saying “okay, this isn’t working, let’s throw this bad idea out completely”. But of course, gamers scream if their best girl gets touched, so they’re really hesitent to make big moves.
Plus, too many of those heroes were damage heroes considering the team can only have 2 of those.
Overwatch was such a good game to watch. I watched some matches with my girlfriend back in season 3 or so. She had never seen overwatch and had no idea what it really was. But she was super into it. I really started to dislike when Ana was released, she was the “you need that hero to win” pick. She hardly ever suffered from any nerfs, and people lose their shit when you even suggest it. When heros like roadhog get too powerful and gets any pickrate at all, he got berfed to the ground. But fine, go on. GOATS killed it for me, it’s like you said, 25 hero’s, but you would only ever see 6 or 7. And it was just so boring.
This was too artificial and expensive, there wasn’t a grassroots movement to make it happen
Looking back, they literally never had a good clean season. Season 1 was Mercy meta, and only branched out near the end. Season 2 was all goats until the finals where the meta did a 180. Season 3 was COVID, and after COVID they penny pinched on everything and nothing was impressive again. It was the source of so many bad decisions that only affected the actual game negatively. That’s all I remember it for being now.
I always thought that competitive gaming is amazing, but competitive gaming like this will never be sustainable. For one, it relies on endless influx of people willing to spend money, and regularly watch the content. Given how little new stuff Blizzard actually made, it’s impossible to remain interested.
But let’s just take something else as an example. The League of Legends championships have been out there for like 15 years now. For the latter half of that, it’s looked a lot like insider trading and money laundering, because it’s not a competition for who wins the game. It’s a competition for whose gaming brand stays in business
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I was deep into overwatch and just stopped before 2 launched. I played a bit of 2, but not that much, uninstalled and never really looked back. Just the other day i saw that they have a new tank and a new dps is following soon (?). I actually thought the very same thing. For whom do they make those heroes? Oh right, people apparently still play.
25M over 30D. Far more popular than lemmy 😉
Considering actually trusted statistics it’s more like 20.5k people
🙄👌 🤦♀️
Great comeback
A bit sad, but not surprising. It was always something that felt forced and only propped up by companies trying to create a new market in order to monopolize it.
If the NFL didn’t exist, then suddenly just sprung on the public as it exists now, I think it would have also suffered a similar fate.
On the player and even team level, I’m sure it felt different, but as a spectator, it was hard to ignore the top down, corporate, ad filled, “fellow kids” feel of the thing.
OWL dying is a shame, I was excited for it, and right when they were about to do the games in the proper cities COVID stopped that, then whoever was asleep at the wheel let the GOATS meta run an entire season when it should have been stopped by a rule change after one match, destroying any desire to watch further.
Good, really don’t care about everything surrounding eSports. Gamers are cringe.
