It’s not really FOMO, it’s more Not-Enough-MO. I highly doubt I’ll play more than 20 hours of Overwatch.
Thanks. That’s what I thought. In a meta based game, it’s not FOMO then. It makes sense to widen your pool of champions where possible.
Mind you, in the context of League of Legends, which is a different beast, I also know people who do very well as one trick players. But you better like that one trick champion you play all the time.
Overwatch went too hard into esports, that’s my opinion. The obligatory division in role types, now the matches being 5vs5… all is focusing in esports. Instead of making it fun for casual players. Where it’s those games where people could be 4 Winstons if they wanted…
Yes, to a certain point. There’s definitely some rock-paper-scissors, if the other team has a Hog/DVa tank setup then I’m almost always going to switch to Mei and ruin them, because Mei is awesome fun and her CC is brutal for those two characters. (Nerfed in OW2, thanks Blizzard.)
Other hand, some characters are just so good they’re always viable (Rein, Mercy, Soldier, Moira) so they can break through many counters if the player is good enough. A really good genji is super annoying because he’s nothing but mobility and escapes, unless you have really specific counters or a magic DPS he’s untouchable, relatively.
If I was king of the world, I’d leave OW alone, add modes and maps, remove Lucio, Widow, Hanzo, Pharah, Ana, Sombra (all the fucking annoying characters) and Doom (or nerf him down) and have fun. As it is, they’ve taken away a lot of the offbeat fun character abilities.
Tl;Dr, they nerfed Mei, fuck 'em.
The thing that adds to the creepy vibe for me is that I already have a Blizzard authentication fob. It’s tied to my account. I bought it from them a long, long time ago and they even mailed it to me. So, why do they need my mobile number? What is a legitimate, non-creepy reason for it?
I know the world doesn’t care. We are a long ways from “you can’t play our game unless you agree to these terms that give us everything and you nothing” to, “you can’t play our game unless you give us a working not pre-paid cell number and let us record your microphone.”
Two factor + unique email more than killed Blizzard games to me. It’s not as if I was playing them 24/7, so when I’d return after a year or two I discovered one or more failure points and was unable to login. Eventually it became so cumbersome to disentangle all the login crap I just gave up and surrendered and gave up trying to use that account and all the games attached to it. But it did teach me that I don’t care enough about a $60 game to retain a complicated password / login system for over a decade to keep using it. When I finally played stuff like Overwatch, I just made a new account. In fact it’s still such a pain in the ass (to me) that I tend to make separate accounts for cross platform games still.
But I just will not use two-factor almost ever again if I can avoid it. Amazon almost forced me into two-factor by default and it’s probably cut down my use of Amazon by 90% or so (it’s constantly bugging me to login to it in different browsers and receive texts that don’t come in, ect).
This phone thing is probably going to keep me from playing OW2. Good going Blizzard!
To make it harder for people to register multiple accounts and register new accounts when they are banned. I don’t think it is the right solution, but that is the general reason.
Good grief. I think they’re just going to harvest cell phone numbers. Reddit comments say you can use an autheticator app instead of SMS, but Blizzard won’t let you set that up without registering a cell phone first.
Then there’s this:
So I sign in and push the button
My address is not in the account details. I was actually working in CA (where the CCPA law applies) when Warcraft 3 came out and I made the account. But, my more recent purchases were elsewhere.
Please file complaints with Blizzard (even if you did before).
the short answer is, cheaters love free games. they get banned they just start a new account. requiring legit phone numbers makes there more of a risk for the cheaters. It is a strong deterrent and probably worth the negative optics on non-cheaters.
they can tell your state by IP also unless you are VPN’ing.
I think that’s partially true, but it was also just an easy out for balance problems they didn’t want to solve. For example, the original reason they stopped duplicate characters was because players were cheesing the Overtime meter by swapping to 6 copies of Tracer. But eventually players became good at doing so with a team of unique characters and they had to fix the meter and respawn mechanics correctly anyway.
Same deal with the 2-2-2 team composition and their inability to balance tanks. (Admittedly that’s not an easy problem)
The obsession of having perfect balance over fun is also a symptom of chasing the esportness, imo. Although fixing super cheesy/almost exploity tactics is ok.
I get what you and @Lantz are saying. However, I have Blizzard’s own physical authentication fob already registered to my account. Why then do I (as in me with their registered fob and not the generic player starting an untethered FTP account) need to give up my mobile also? It feels like the reasoning is not about creating multiple free accounts, but that a mobile number has useful data as a secondary (primary??) prize over an authentication fob.
Or is there some market for people buying multiple Blizzard fobs to register and then ditch when banned? Is there a Blizzard burner fob underground or something?
In the plus column for Overwatch 2, there is supposed to be cross progression. As someone that is not a hardcore competition player, I like being able to play both on PC (M/Kb) and console to progress unlocks or keep what I bought on my primary platform. This was one of my favorite features of Paragon before it died. Sometimes I just don’t want to be at a PC anymore during the day and I can follow heal as a Mercy just as well on a controller. Plus some friends are console only players.
Also the live challenges are not looking as bad. They seem fairly generic. There are ones like X number of headshots (sorry healers) or play a hero that is not in your top 3 X number of times. While it could mean, “try something new”, I translate it as “play a hero you don’t enjoy playing X times to progress your paid pass.” But most of them are fairly generic.
There are DC issues, but it’s day one of a live service.
In queue: 30000 players ahead of you.
Yeah, maybe I’ll try next week.
I’m watching some streams and it looks like the DC, then hit a giant queue wall to get back in, then repeat cycle is fairly real. As the NA world gets home from work it will be nuts. I expect Diablo 3 style meme videos will follow, and then get forgotten when it works fine later.
The pacing does look much more lethal without that second tank around. I’m not sure how my old man reality feels about that. Overall the game looks fairly slick and very high production value. The PvE elements could really make this the full package over time.
Personally, I am still struggling with my (maybe) get off my lawn type issues over Blizzard/Activision’s Hong Kong failure, work culture, etc. along with their personal information stance on OW2. But after many years, my Blizzard disuse feels about as meaningful as not using Facebook as everyone I know rolls their eyes at my concerns over social media.
How is Blizzard still so bad at handling server load issues?
I feel like every single time they release a game, day one is a shitshow of epic proportions, due to the servers crumbling.
Generates lots of press, though.
They’re plucky indie devs, cut them some slack.