Ultimately players will still find themselves in the rank they belong in eventually. This doesn’t make climbing easier or harder in the long run, it’s just a psychological trick. We’ll have to see how the playerbase responds to it throughout the first season, but my gut says most people are like me and would prefer transparency, no matter how marsh that reality might

On the other side of things, playing against one tank is even more of a chore because both healers are now focused on the same tank, rather than dividing their heals between two. Take Orissa. She can buff herself and deflect damage, all while Mercy and Moira both keep her health full, meaning that it’s much harder to take her down. If you lose track of other players and focus too much on that singular tank, the enemy DPS can easily swoop in and pick you off. It’s all much harder to play for both sides, but the solution is sitting in the first game - adding a second tank. Overwatch was designed for two of each role and it shows; pulling one away has completely disrupted the way it fl

The system secretly tracks losses as you work your way towards 20, but it never tells you how many losses you’ve stacked up. The only way to know if you hit the loss threshold is if you get a rank adjustment before reaching seven wins. You could play up to 26 games (19 loses and 7 wins) before finding out what your new rank is, and you’ll have no way to know - other than keeping track of your wins and loses on your own - whether your rank is going up, down, or staying the s

Challenges also incentivize deviant play, which creates a negative game experience. In team games, this means pursuing goals that are different from the rest of your team. The stated objective of the game - get the most kills, score the most goals, capture the most objectives, ect. - may not align with the goals of each individual player. We’ve all seen (and been) the player ignoring the objective while trying to sniper headshots because we had a challenge for it. Both teams suffer when players are asked to do something different than the game’s objective, but the person messing up the game for everyone else is getting rewarded for

With so many flocking to the game now it’s free, the cracks are starting to show. I don’t know if we’ll see 6v6 return - at least, not in quick play and competitive - but whittling down the team size by gutting a tank has made Overwatch 2 inherently imbalanced, and no amount of hero tweaks will patch up the h

Live-service games tweak heroes all the time, of course. Hanzo, for example, is likely to get a nerf soon. But this doesn’t feel like a typical tweak to the meta, and instead like Blizzard has changed Mei just because. It’s not only her gameplay that has changed either - it’s her look too, and that’s another major letd

Free-to-play games have changed so much since Overwatch launched in 2016 that the sequel not only has to adapt to going free but also has to navigate the modern world to find its place if it hopes to earn back its cultural cachet. A big part of gaming that’s changed in the last six years is in how developers approach cosmetics - it’s all about crossovers, baby. Fortnite’s got Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Uncharted, and is even rumoured to be roping in Doctor Who , while PUBG has joined in on the fun with Spider-Man and NieR. The biggest free-to-play games are all about IP - just look at MultiVersus - but Overwatch 2 updates 2024|https://overwatch2tactics.com/ never needed that and still doesn’t, and earning back its presence doesn’t mean copying the new kids on the bl

I am not an expert in Overwatch . Though I have a sneaking suspicion that some data was lost when my accounts merged, the word ‘minutes’ appears on my Most Played Heroes list more than the word ‘hours’ does. I am not an Overwatch die-hard who can tell you the best counters, the new meta, or the perfect strategy. I just pick the characters I like and who seem fun. Occasionally there is a disconnect here - Sombra is cool but I can’t play as her - but mostly, I stick with favourites and hope for the best. Unfortunately, Overwatch 2 has delivered a double body blow to my love of

Does anyone actually enjoy doing daily challenges in games? I for one resent logging in to play and finding a list of chores to do. Even trivial challenges - something I would accomplish through normal play - rub me the wrong way. I don’t know what I’m more upset about: that someone invented such an anti-player progression system, or that every developer in the world took one look at it and said "Yep, that’s good enough for

It seems like Blizzard wants to protect players from their own feelings with this new system. Obsessing over decreases to your SR after every loss can really put you on tilt, especially if you were close to the next rank up, so Blizzard found a way to keep your SR hidden. Now you can grind away without worrying about your number, in theory, at le