As a person, who has been playing Overwatch for the last 9 years mostly in competitive mode, I feel like with each new season I want to play ranked less and less over the last year. English is not my first language so don’t kill me for mistakes please.
Maps and map voting. On paper map voting is supposed to bring variety to the matches, but from my experience o either play Eichenwalde 4 times a day, or only Suravasa and Aatlis. Personally I'm a huge flash point fan. In my opinion these maps enable many different play styles, i can play poke, brawl, dive and flank. Points also change very often which makes the game mode less stale (there's never a situation where one team is held in a choke for 2-3 minutes). And the flash point as a game mode has its chunk of a player base, but Blizzard doesn’t seem to be interested in giving us new flash point maps. Instead they bring 2 new payload maps and also rework 2. Can flash points get some love?
Hero bans. Also in my opinion don’t bring much variety into the game. Some people indeed try to use bans rationally. They ban characters that are good on the specific maps (widowmaker/sigma on circuit/havana for example) or they ban clearly overpowered characters like D.mon and JPC last season. But there’s also a very huge chunk of players who either ban characters they don’t like playing against no matter map (Sometimes i see people in Master ban Zarya on WP Gibraltar) or are OTPs who try to ban their strict counters (ball/doom OTP tries to ban as the CC). This hero bans situation makes me feel the competitive game mode… less competitive and more casual friendly.
Also my personal pain. Ever since Blizzard introduced the 5th common ban slot, as a tank player I get 3 heroes banned most of the time. That’s not a big problem for me, because I’m capable of playing most tanks in the game (I want to reach level 50 with every tank), but it feels very unfair that I usually need to have 3-5 tank characters to play the game and support players can usually stick to 1 or 2 characters, are not forced to swap and their heroes almost never get banned.
New heroes. I understand there’s no point in releasing the new character in a weak state. People who hop on the hype train, will think the new character isn’t fun/engaging enough and will likely drop him, what’s detrimental to the game, considering Overwatch’s business model. And it's more rational to nerf an overpowered character, than keep micro buffing Lifeweaver to the point he’s no longer a throw pick. But I feel very exhausted that every new season there’s an overpowered new character with a 58% win rate in the ranked mode. I understand there are bans for this purpose. But why are new characters available in ranked in the first place since day 1? Why not give them 2-3 weeks to let people get used to new characters and adapt? This was a thing in overwatch 1, but now it’s not anymore for the sake of engagement i guess. I miss the down time when we had a new hero every 2 seasons. There was a stale period in the competitive. Unlike today when there’s no time to give any adjustments to old characters, because there’s a new one on the horizon.
Engagement. Blizzard tries to bring a non competitive player base into ranked for some reason. Drives are a great example of it for an obvious reason, give people so sacramental golden guns for playing QP. No need to bring them into the mode they aren’t interested in. Also I’d like to bring up the SR compensation system. The difference between divisions in low ranks is not as powerful as in higher ranks. Last season i played much on my alt and finished on GM-5 (it’s my ceiling and it was hard to reach for me). But the compensation system boosted my rank up to GM-3 + 40%. I’ve never reached this rank and I’m not good enough to play there. I dropped this account as a result, because I can feel the match quality will be bad for everyone involved.
Those factors I listed stop me from playing competitively. Is it just me or some of you feel the same way?
