> A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into.
I like the overtime mechanic. It feels fair -- you're about to win, but you ran out of time. But there's overtime, so you don't just insta-lose. I agree that it brings out the worst in players. The calm and methodical team always wins here. (I haven't heard the term "Route 66 effect" for a while, but it's a thing. Players panic, forget everything they know about the game, and lose 2 checkpoints while they stagger in. Don't do that.)
> They spend tons of effort on things like trying to make healers and tanks fun. Instead, they forced people to play them.
Role queue was to force people to play DPS. The problem OWL and the high ranks were suffering from was that 3 tanks and 3 supports won every game against any team that had a DPS character on it. They nerfed the tanks into the ground and buffed the DPS to nightmare levels, and they still couldn't fix it. (They made the mistake of creating the most oppressive meta ever on the same day they introduced role queue. Sigma/Orisa. That was not great, even as someone with Sigma and Orsia at the top of their favorite character list.)
> Once they think the meta is balanced in a game, they get conservative and don't want to tweak things too much. They don't realize that the meta is an equilibrium state found by the players. Change the game, a new meta will be found.
Some of this is the community's fault. They get locked into thinking they have to do certain things, and the result is that they make the game stale for themselves. Blizzard changes something, and it has a totally random effect. Most recently, Orisa got that buff where she can't take critical hits during Fortify, and the meta became Rein/Zarya again. What? It always amuses me.
(Speaking of shaking up the meta, did you play that April Fools experimental card at all? Even though it was an unbalanced shitfest, I found it incredibly fun. I love those kinds of experiments.)
I think a lot of people think they've figured out Overwatch, but they don't play like they have. There's still a lot to unlock there, with or without Blizzard's help.
I also think that Blizzard is often too hasty to adjust things that players complain about. 2CP and Mercy have long been points of contention. The way the attackers win 2CP is to walk onto the second point and use 0 ults (even when it looks good!) to bait out defender ults. You all die horrible deaths, and then walk in and use all 6 ults to get a clean wipe. You win. The counter for this kind of overcommitting was Mercy's team rez. She sneaks away in the heat of battle, people kill everyone they can see, and she then flies in to resurrect everyone. By the time the attackers realize, it's too late. All 6 enemy players alive and well, and 33% of the point not captured. All those ults wasted, and then you just spend the rest of the game losing the ult economy and eventually lose the match. Someone should have noticed that they only killed 5 people and sent someone else to go shut down Mercy, but nobody ever did that, so instead they complain to Blizzard and ask them to remove the only ability in the game that counters overcommitting. Blizzard does. People continue to play 2CP wrong, now that there is no counter to the strategy of a dry push and a clean wipe. They mess it up every time, the defenders stall for 5 minutes (which is a beauty of orchestration and coordination when done correctly), and they complain to Blizzard and ask them to remove 2CP.
Something I like about computers is that you can't negotiate your way out of being bad. But Blizzard listens to the community, and that has actually become an option! Instead of playing the game they're given, they play the game they think they personally can win, and then convince Blizzard to change it to that. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you get to listen to some streamer have a meltdown about how tough it is to play computer games for a living. Metagaming at it's finest, and a great strategy in real life. But at some point, I think players should try to play the game as implemented and see how it goes. There's probably a strategy you haven't considered yet -- go try it! It might be good.