The Overwatch League ruled esports. Then everything went wrong

I feel like fixation on e-sports is what ruined the entire OW experience for the rest of us. I can't even play OW1 anymore and I paid full price for it.

In my estimation, this is also what ruined whatever soul existed in League of Legends, et. al. I still recall the crazy, emergent gameplay that would occur by stacking item effects - and everything else incompatible with high-brow competitive play.

The effect of esports on the gaming community itself has also been extremely catastrophic in my estimation. There is now a ubiquitous notion that you could be banned from a game for playing "off-meta" wherein "meta" is defined loosely as "not the way I'd personally do it because of this one clip I saw on tiktok".

We need to go back to a more raw form of gaming where it is what you make of it. Trying to force these artificial constructs around fun is completely ruining the whole thing. Games like TF2 are still a good example of what you achieve by getting out of the way of the community and letting them do whatever they want. If the community decides they want a billion dollar e-sports ecosystem around them (they won't), allow them to construct it organically.