A madman's rantings

Video A bit of the same story, I wanted a shorter post but I've decided to include some elements from other historic issues I've seen within the OW community to provide some context and irony/hypocrisy.  I'm looking to outline the new priority pass system and my thoughts on that but more importantly I'm going to tie in how the community is reacting, how this relates to private profiles, and how assbackwards this is from a couple years ago. Final Edit: While I consider this blog done I'm not happy with its results but it's still a good discussion.  The video will go over it in better detail. Let's start off with something objective.  Priority Pass is a system that allows players to queue up competitively in a new flex queue.  This queue will put you into the role that's needed most.  If you queue up this way you'll get 2   passes on a loss and 6 passes on a win. You can save up to 40 of these passes and can spend one at a time to by-pass the long time

A single tweet is all it took for me to be reminded that most of the community, or at least the vocal ones don't know some of the inherent flaws in OW.  I posted my thoughts on  this blog before, highlighting the issues with niche heroes and the concept of counters.  I went over this blogpost in a video you can reach here.  Video Discussion The long and short of it is that if a hero is too strong in their niche it will feel overpowered and broken.  This was how OW was thought of at first.  You're required to go a specific answer(counter) to deal with a specific strength.  This type of gameplay feels unfair because it wasn't execution that defeated you, it was someone making a choice.  The root of this issue is that when a hero has an advantage over another it is inherently skilless. You did nothing to earn that advantage outside of selecting a hero.  It is easier to play Winston into the Genji, Phara into the Junkrat or McCree into Tracer.  This is how Overwatch and role b

Video           I want to open this up by giving credit to Blizzard.  When Jeff mentioned balance a while back he said he thought Overwatch was in a good spot everyone thought he was crazy, but it's the truth.  There's a single fact that constantly reminds me of this, with enough skill you can get to top 500 with any hero, at times top 100.  Some heroes are easier to climb with (this isn't a shot at low skill floors, it's a shot at meta) but that doesn't change the fact that it's still possible. The way I think of it is that after a 7 year development cycle the only issue is that a heroes numbers of off by 10%, that's pretty damn good.  At the top 1% of games you can still run most heroes. The community needs to face it, Blizzard hit their scope and now its about fine tuning.  Overall we complain too much in this community, some of it is constructive but that's rare.  In either case it does give feedback to the developers on how the current game makes us

This will be(was suppose to be) just a quick post as I'm often asked what I think of Valorant.  Nothing in depth, just my thoughts. No, I don't see it as an Overwatch killer.  It was launched at an interesting time in Overwatch's timeline.  It was when people were sick of abilities being king and where mechanical skill wasn't needed as much.  Funny enough, that's the entire point of OW (see my first post).  The community was wanting more skill and this is why I think so many players jumped on the "Its an OW Killer" bandwagon.  It seemed to be the perfect answer for everyone's frustrations in OW.  With one big problem... The pace and TTK of Valorant's design make it a completely different game.  Once everyone realized that Valorant wasn't close to the same they came crawling back as usual.  I can't count the number of streamers and players that quit OW only to come back a month or two later.  Maybe a break is needed, OW can get on yo

Video here More complaints from the community! Welcome to Overwatch.  This time it's about the match maker and it's ability to pull in players that are sometimes 500SR (or hidden MMR) apart.  At the surface level this doesn't seem correct nor good for the community but it actually is!  While you may not agree I hope that by the end of this post you'll at least understand the benefits to this behavior. To start this off I'd like to give some background on myself because this subject sucker punched me.  I thought this way of learning was normal, to the point that I didn't understand the counter argument.  I've been a martial artist for a long time, across multiple disciplines, and while the style and quality of teaching has varied it had one common trait, you learned from everyone. In a typical class you'll listen to the teacher explain a bit and then you'll start training/drilling with your fellow martial brothers and sisters (Traditionally spea

More of a wish list of what I'm hoping will happen in Overwatch 2. Sure, we all know PvE is the biggest feature.  It's going to expand the lore and story of all the heroes we know and love.  While that's nice what i'm really looking forward to are some fundamental changes to the backend of Overwatch.   I'm heavily basing what I'm looking for based on that we know OW2 does not use a new game engine, but a heavily upgraded on. First and foremost, new workshop features.  With the upgraded engine comes new code but this time Blizzard understands that the workshop exists.  Any system that is being changed should be created with options to modify it through the workshop.  This means that the new system they talk about that handles eyes,skin, and other features could have been created with options in-mind for the workshop.  Currently in the workshop you're unable to use assets such as models nor can you change these assets at all.  Outside of models and oth

The video discussing this post can be found here This one has been a long time coming.  For decades before Overwatch I've always half-joked about skill, noobs, pros and generally have held a bit of an elitist view on video games.  As I've gotten older and study game design more I've refined it into an understanding of skill, when something requires too much and when something requires too little.  Please stick around because this is going to be a longer post that covers some parts of game design and some of balance, I promise it all comes together, eventually. I want to start off with a statistic from Jaffe Alex's discussion "Cursed Problems". "Players are said to believe a game is fair if they win 70% of the time " Keep this in mind when we talk about balance and how the community perceives it, whenever someone talks about "balance" 70% win rate is what they probably wanting.  Right now the big complaint in OW is Genji, who is s