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> That said, I'd consider paying a $10/m premium subscription fee if they brought back OW1 in the exact form it existed in circa 2019

I would, too, I'd even go beyond that. I'm used to OW2, and I don't care about an apology, but I would -love- to get back old OW.

The downside of these online games really is the ability for developers to shut them down / change them drastically without you having a way to stick with an older version. There are multiplayer games from the 90s that I still play today, and they're just as enjoyable now as they were then.

When Overwatch first came out it was so easy to find both normal and ranked games, we're talking 30 seconds or less, I had a great time even when teams weren't optimally balanced.

But then they started forcing classes, implemented the different queues and today that's become a big issue.

If I continually play healer I can find games relatively easily (in say a minute or two), but on the other hand if I want to play dps I'm going to be in a queue for 20 minutes. Tanks are usually in the middle, so a big portion of the game just feels non-accessible to me.

Playing from Norway I have never seen dps queues longer than 6 minutes in OW2. A few months ago all the queues were <2 min, now dps is usually 3-5min.

I've been playing OW2 a lot since its launch, I think it's great. Queue times are incredible, often times I can queue as DPS and have a game in 1-3 minutes. For a long time that was standard, now it's getting a bit longer usually but it's still good and tank/support queues are nearly instant. In the old OW you would easily wait 15 minutes for a dps queue.

I also think the whining about hero unlocks is total bullshit. It's trivial to unlock everything completely for free if you play semi frequently. I think it took me about 30 hours of playtime to unlock the flower boy. I have never and will never purchase a battle pass.

The only complaint I have is that I miss free loot boxes. The battle passes don't give any cool skins for the free tier. But I don't really care much about skins so it's alright, the game is still fun. It's not like I can see my own skins in-game anyway.

What are the key differences between 2019 OW1 and current OW2? From an outside view, they look very similar.

6v6 and no role queue (depending on what part of 2019 they mean...). OW2 is a 5v5 game, there is a role queue and you choose to play tank, DPS or healer before finding a match and you're locked into that choice over the course of the match and the number of each role is fixed at 2 DPS, 2 support and 1 tank. In old OW1 you'd just queue and could pick any role at any time so your time could be 6 DPS or 3 DPS, two tanks and a support. And at launch of the game you could even have multiple of the same hero on a team in a match.

> and no role queue

Yes exactly this.

A completely open-ended team comp that players dynamically rotate through during a game was the original intention. It was incredibly sophisticated gameplay and theory.

I guess it turned out that the average gamer was too much of a dumbass to learn this system, so it had to be watered down into a gameplay style you could copy from mobafire.com

Or every gamer wants to be the "killer" and not the healer nor tank.

It's fun to get points/kills in PvP games. Especially in a casual mode.

>Especially in a casual mode.

Agreed. The game isn't balanced around casual. If you want to play the game play ranked. Otherwise you cede the right to complain about balance or the behavior of your team.

It turned into everyone picking Winston or another character. There weren't plays and counter plays. It was rush and who could click on heads better.

The part of the game that suffered the hardest was competitive multiplayer.

OW1 mid-high tier competitive gameplay felt a constant explosion and your brain was engaged nearly 100% of the time. In OW2, the urgency level feels more like a game of counterstrike or League of Legends. Everything is muted and grey in terms of fast-paced arena shooter experience. More waiting, less fighting, more weird complex bullshit, fewer things happening per unit time, etc. Subtracting a player from each team certainly is a big part of this.

The community itself is crappier too. The "energy" left the room 3 years ago. The first year of OW1 competitive felt like a digital drug to me.

The way the game is played with a single tank is a pretty big shift in dynamics, the game becomes much more rock/paper/scissors based for the tank role and some of the tanks feel out of place since they were originally designed as off-tanks, not main tanks. While a single player has always been able to have a big negative impact on the match, a skill gap between the tanks on each team is very obvious now (I know they changed the match making to help fix this by balancing teams based on role instead of just the overall team average, which probably helped).

The most annoying thing for me though is that when new heroes are released you cannot play them right away. I don’t play that often anymore, so when a new hero comes out it sucks that I can’t play them unless I grind and grind or shell out money. If I miss several hero releases, I have to do challenges (play 30 matches as support, do 12000 damage, etc) and they are pretty annoying because I have to remember to activate them and I can’t do more than one at a time. It’s time consuming and obviously designed to make me want to spent money to skip them. I’m no stranger to games locking new heroes on release, in apex legends you have to unlock them with coins, but at least in that game you can accumulate the coins passively and have a bunch saved up for new release—this is not the case in OW2.

This is one reason why I don't play these games - I don't want to grind just to play / unlock aspects of the game. Give me a subscription plan!

> Give me a subscription plan!

They design these games to be a chore with an appealing but costly way to skip the chore, and rather than demanding they design a game that's actually fun, you ask them for a more convenient way to take money from you?

Is this sarcasm? Help me understand this POV.

A good subscription plan is often capped at 10-15/month, with full access to the game. This is cheap entertainment if you are already playing even 3-5 hours a month, and a good way to fund on-going development.

Contrast that to unlocking a hero/character (the 'fast' way) alone will cost that much, and you still don't have access to everything.

The reason why F2P with that kind of incentive is popular among developers is that it's a good way to artificially inflate your playerbase with tons of people playing the game for 'free' while you manipulate the 'whales' (the addicts) into paying an insane amount to offset costs.

>This is cheap entertainment if you are already playing even 3-5 hours a month

That's 5€-3€ a month, I wouldn't call that cheap

Compared to a 20 hour single player game for 70 USD? Let's break it down.

a subscription to an MMORPG for example ; 15 bucks a month, 5 hours a month = 3 bucks per hour. this is basically uncapped. if you only play 5 hours, then you're paying 3/hr - if you do more (say 10 hours a week = 40 hours a month) then the value goes up and cost goes down.

a single player game; 70 bucks, 20 hours = 3.5 bucks per hour. Plus an extra 5-10 hour for another 40-70 bucks DLC to extend the experience

i don't have time to grind out an overwatch2 hero in 30 hours, nor am i going to pay for one. i'd rather pay for a 15 bucks subscription for 1 month, then if i want to, then cancel.

I have 1200 hours in OW1 (thanks to the pandemic). That's $0.05 per hour. You'd have to watch 8 hours of Netflix every single day to match that.

The relevant point of comparison for me is Overwatch 1, which cost around $40 and provided me with hundreds of hours of entertainment for years after release, as well as indie titles that typically cost $15-30 and equally provide me with least dozens, if not hundreds of hours of entertainment. A $10/mo subscription is an increase of at least 1000%.

Personally I skip games that gate primary content behind microtransactions (with some exceptions like MS Flight Simulator where additional content is highly individual and takes a lot of effort to create)

The "chore" you describe is literally just playing the game and the "reward" for the "chore" is also just playing the game.

I don't understand why you people make this sound so terrible. If you don't like OW2 then don't play it, that's fine. If you do like it, playing it is not a chore and you quickly unlock new heroes without paying anything.

I unlocked the flower boy in about 30 hours, that's completely doable in 2-4 weeks if you're playing regularly. If you play less than that you have plenty of work to do learning the other heroes anyway.

You don't have to grind, you literally just play the game. You can play a whole bunch of heroes and eventually you'll be able to play all of them. It's not a problem at all.

>Reducing the normal team size from 6->5 was probably also intended, in part, to help with establishing matches more quickly. For me, this kicked off a catastrophic series of design changes that pushed me away from the game completely.

Agreed. OW1 wasn't perfect but getting rid of the 2nd tank wasn't the solution. Making tank more fun is the solution. People play Hanzo genji doomfist because they are fun. People don't play Orisa because she is boring.

Overwatch is an objectively better game now than it was in 2019, and it's not even close. You are wrong, and I find it hilarious that you want a "deep, thoughtful apology".

Role lock and 5v5 have dramatically improved the health of the game. They've made matches more even, lessened toxicity, improved queue times, improved player experience, improved game balance, and made the game more dynamic. There are definitely drawbacks: tank synergies like Reinhardt/Zarya or Winston/Dva were fun, and having the option to play triple damage or GOATS or whatever was cool. But the tradeoff is so overwhelmingly positive that it kind of blows my mind that people want to go back to 2019 Overwatch.

I agree that 2019 was a wrong point to pick in time, and that there have been some good changed in hero design (especially reworks for Orisa). But I don't think games are "more even" now, it feels way more reliant on the relative tank gap, whereas for OW1 even with one outmatched tank the rest of the team could cover up. Tanks have such a fundamentally important role to the game that even a minor disadvantage becomes magnified when there's just one of them. With role lock, 6v6 mostly avoided the issues with GOATS, and towards the end OW1 tank pools were pretty diverse, and mostly fun to play against or with unless someone went double shield.

It is so positive that they had to basically super nerf widow and hanzo from the game(I mained widowmaker, so I quit), and queue times are 10+ minutes. I would go back to 2019 OW in an instant, but they deleted it. So its not really OW2 but OW 1.5. Very dishonest and par for the course for Activision Blizzard.

It’s also easy to say how much better the game is when there is no OW1 to compare side by side. I will say I had much more fun in the beginning than now. I think Birgitte being released was the beginning of the end for me, and Tracer had hard nerfs as well making her almost useless except in pro hands.

Get good. Seriously. At no point in OW2 have Widow, Tracer, or Hanzo been bad. People win with those heroes in every ELO from bronze to Top 500. Small nerfs don't matter, if you hit your shots you'll win