The Round Stable

I got a PotG by sheer luck:



I'm amazed I didn't get gunned down as I was running back to cover.

I'm down to play some Junkenstien this week. Feel free to invite me if you see me online.

Kill everyone with magic

So how sad were my teammates?



Yeah, this was with a full six-player team. Two of them had single-digit levels. What can ya do?

I found out Orisa has a Book Horse color scheme.



Naturally I had to get it.

She also has a Rarity one Truly a quality robot horse.

It's funny to look at this thread and look at overwatch now with how it's basically forgotten.

Anyway, I regret ever playing it because in hindsight the game did nothing but make me tilted.

There's like so many things I could say about how this game plays and how frustrating it is.

Competitive shooters require a certain mindset. Back when I was a TF2 fiend, I could stay in that mindset reliably, but these days I think I'm better off sticking to cooperative games. It's better for my mental health.

I feel like TF2 did a good job of keeping things feeling low-stakes so people didn't take it too seriously, but maybe I just lucked out with the servers I ended up on.

I played a lot of TF2 with regulars from TRS and the atmosphere was always chill because no one really cared that much about winning.

Overwatch does have a bias towards the competitive side.

DaikatunaRevengeance wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 17, 2021 12:29 pm

It's funny to look at this thread and look at overwatch now with how it's basically forgotten.

I remember how hot Overwatch was in 2016, both on the old forums and the rest of the Internet. It's honestly stunning how it fell so far in just a few short years.

Pocket wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 19, 2021 4:51 pm

I feel like TF2 did a good job of keeping things feeling low-stakes so people didn't take it too seriously, but maybe I just lucked out with the servers I ended up on.

Having dedicated servers is one of the biggest factors in this, I feel. In a lot of ways, TF2 feels like one of the last of its kind, in that it supported LAN play and community servers with a server browser and all (COD Modern Warfare 2 was the end of that, basically). That allowed communities to set up a space for themselves and play the game how they wanted, instead of forcing everyone into the same matchmaking pool so that the whales who whaled extra hard for cosmetics can have a big audience to show off in front of.

TF2 was also built for 12v12 play, so having literally twice as many players as an Overwatch match and having a slower pace for each game gave people plenty of time to hang out with each other. Like, in TF2 you could spend somewhere around 45-60 minutes on one map (looking at you, Dustbowl) to give each team a chance to attack and defend, whereas the same in Overwatch is somewhere closer to a third of that at most. Overwatch felt like it landed right in the middle of trying to get players to take it seriously while also making matches just long enough to matter, and therefore hurt. (For a shorter-end comparison on this spectrum, look at Splatoon, which is 4v4 and its ranked matches take five minutes at most if neither team achieves the objective.)

Dropping in and out of matches is less of an issue when losing one player doesn't hurt your team as much. Not to mention the server would keep running if everyone leaves and joins two hours later. So if you're not feeling it today, you don't have to stay, someone will probably join to fill you in and if not, the worst that would happen is the server is empty for a few hours.

Overwatch's monetization is based more around selling copies of the game than other shooters, so they're more incentivized to make Overwatch 2 than to keep pumping out free upgrades. Thus, they've done basically nothing with the game for at least two years.

It was a fine time for this thread to be bumped, because just yesterday the state of California filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard after two years of investigating their utterly abhorrent workplace culture. The suit explains shocking amounts of discrimination against women and black people who worked for the company, systemic excuses of behavior by shitty higher-up white men, and even one case of a woman who had been sexually harassed by coworkers and committed suicide while on a company trip with her boss, a man.

I played Overwatch in October last year when the Switch version had a weeklong free trial. I remember thinking, it's good enough, but probably something I'll only pick up if I see a used copy for cheap. After this news came out, that opinion's plummeted to never buying a game from Activision Blizzard again, barring some actual serious change on their part. Sadly, I expect that at best we'll get a lukewarm mea culpa followed by an attempt to distract with news of the Diablo 2 remaster. And at worst, the company will double down on the whining about "unaccountable State bureaucrats [...] driving many of the State's best businesses out of California," and swing hard right in their policies.