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Gravitas Shortfall posted:SVB just did an interview with Jared Neuss, the Executive Producer of Overwatch. The whole thing is so loving pathetic.
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Dec 19, 2023 17:48
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Jack Trades posted:The whole thing is so loving pathetic. All of his excuses are "we are so loving stupid, just.. just complete loving morons" Like sure my dude, you didn't think Mythic skins having less and less customisation options would be a problem. Your entire team has brains as smooth as marble. That's definitely it.
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Dec 19, 2023 18:21
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:All of his excuses are "we are so loving stupid, just.. just complete loving morons" You see this same kinda thing with League where instead of the honest answer with corporate wanting more money they would just rather treat themselves and you like utter idiots
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Dec 20, 2023 01:27
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It's not like Mythic Genji was a particularly high bar to begin with. Mythic customization options (or the lack thereof) have been a consistent disappointment for me and the ones with voice modulation all sound loving terrible with no option to disable them. On top of that I think SVB is a whiny oval office so I'm extra salty about this interview
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Dec 20, 2023 03:07
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novaSphere posted:It's not like Mythic Genji was a particularly high bar to begin with. Mythic customization options (or the lack thereof) have been a consistent disappointment for me and the ones with voice modulation all sound loving terrible with no option to disable them. Personally I like the modulated Ana voice and think it's stupid that other players don't hear much of it, because it causes situations where you hear "Humans are a BLIGHT on this world" but just said in a normal grandma voice. also my tier list for the Mythics would go: Great: Cyber Demon (Genji), Amaterasu (Kiriko), Galactic Emperor (Sigma) Good: A-7000 Wargod (Ana), Adventurer (Tracer), Weak: Onryō (Hanzo), Mythic Grand Beast (Orisa), Zeus (Junker Queen) that list is pretty much just based the idea that Mythics should have extremely high amounts of customisation that each radically change the character and not just be Legendaries that you can auto palette swap.
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Dec 20, 2023 08:15
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I wouldn't mind *some* modulation but the current effects are overdone on Ana and especially Genji. I wish they were a little more subdued like JQ or even Poseidon Ramattra, who has a slightly different effect during Nemesis form than his other skins. Then there's the Hanzo skin where some voice lines have effects that can be heard by other players, but then his ult line is said in his regular tone. It's all just wildly inconsistent. I mean the real reason why the recent Mythics and releases have been feeling cheaper is because the dev team was hemorrhaging staff faster than they could replace them after PvE progression got scrapped
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Dec 20, 2023 08:31
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OW2’s skin game is pretty weak to be honest. It seems like they are just cranking them out as fast as possible, same with the recolors. OW1 had such a high standard for good skins too.
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Dec 20, 2023 16:12
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Lord Packinham posted:OW2’s skin game is pretty weak to be honest. It seems like they are just cranking them out as fast as possible, same with the recolors. That's true for literally every part of the game.
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Dec 20, 2023 16:13
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tbh I think they're still putting out a bunch of good skins, it's just that they're lost in a sea of mediocre ones also all the ones from the current battlepass are mid at best
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Dec 20, 2023 16:26
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The gap between the good Winter Wonderland skins (Rein/Illari) and the bad ones (everything else) is pretty wide. Also - can I just buy any skin at any time now? I thought you could only get classic Winter skins during the events, but I guess that's not true? Also I have like 12,000 of those white coins and have no idea where they came from.
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Dec 20, 2023 18:08
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Coins you had left over from OW1 got converted into those credits. Battle Passes give out credits, and you also got 3000 or something for free as a login reward last season I think. You also now get an extra 150 from a newer weekly challenge. It all adds up quick now, but the credits can only be used on older skins or most of the default cosmetic options like victory poses, default skin recolors, voice lines, etc. This season they finally added a display on the main menu that shows your coin purse so people can actually see what they have at a glance. Before you had to navigate to the Hero menu and mouse over a little "ⓘ" in the top-right to ever see your credits. novaSphere fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Dec 20, 2023 |
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Dec 20, 2023 18:43
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Fun fact! Junker Queen has absolutely no good skins purchasable with legacy credits!
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Dec 20, 2023 19:05
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Mauga for me is best when he's keeping the other team's healers busy with tic damage and just generally being a pain in the rear end distraction to give your teammates the backs of your enemies. I mean, he mentions guerilla tactics in his voice lines for pete's sake.
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Dec 21, 2023 06:02
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So are the 1/2/3 week tickets only that week? Or can I collect week 1 tickets on week 3?
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Dec 21, 2023 22:00
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Good Will Hrunting posted:So are the 1/2/3 week tickets only that week? Or can I collect week 1 tickets on week 3? I think we will be able to catch up in subsequent weeks. If they re-lock a previous week before the end of the event, that's an especially lovely use of time gating. People have to travel and shop and cook etc. and might be able to play more games during week 2 or 3. If the early tickets they missed are forever out of reach, why bother?
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Dec 21, 2023 23:24
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You can pay $5 and end up not being able to get all the tickets if you don't get to play, and even if you do get all the tickets after paying, you still can't get all the items available. It's garbage
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Dec 22, 2023 01:19
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novaSphere posted:You can pay $5 and end up not being able to get all the tickets if you don't get to play, and even if you do get all the tickets after paying, you still can't get all the items available. It's garbage The devs hear you, and they want you to know that they don't understand why you're so upset.
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Dec 22, 2023 01:43
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Father Wendigo posted:The devs hear you, and they want you to know that they don't understand why you're so upset. It would've been less rude to just spit in my face instead of pushing this corpospeak drivel.
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Dec 22, 2023 09:07
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Dec 30, 2023 09:16
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Coming in to talk about this dead game for a minute. It's still pretty active to all appearances but that's the maggots writhing in the corpse. (Of which I guess I'm one since I've been playing quite a bit recently.) It's possible that the Season 9 changes may Frankenstein this poo poo back into viability. I hope so. We'll see. However! My primary use case for this game is as an entertainment pursuit where I get to engage brain a little bit. I really don't want to chase rank and to be honest, I don't think doing so in Australia is actually viable. Anecdotal, but I've played a bit with a guy who was in GM and dabbled in and out of low Top 500 a bit in the US - on console, granted, but he was still pretty drat good. He has commented repeatedly that he's finding Australia to be genuine Elo Hell and he can't break out of Diamond over here. Not enough players at each rank, too much variability, too many throwers having a disproportionate impact. Interesting. So I mostly confine myself to messing around in Quick Play, and mostly solo. It's very hard to gauge what my actual MMR equivalent rank would be. I would guess probably mid-high plat. I don't think I'm exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. But I've noticed that the matchmaker really seems prone to swinging into win streaks and loss streaks. Very, very appreciably. Whatever it's doing seems geared to create this pattern and it's broken only by individual matches where one or more individuals on either team behave in a way that wasn't anticipated and throw the game, either by playing something they don't know how to play, by intentionally memeing instead of playing ("it's just quick play, it doesn't matter!") or by being in an altered state of consciousness. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't just making up this swinginess and perceiving a pattern that wasn't there. So I've been recording notes on the games I've played over the Xmas break. And, well: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kN5UcdRjj-38v313pBy3mhpCPZTxisejAWSml-6dNkM/edit?usp=sharing I realise that this is probably deeply uninteresting because the people who care about this stuff probably only care in the context of Comp. But it speaks to the game overall, I think. So for what it's worth, there it is. I'm going to keep updating it while I'm still playing the game. e: I deliberately haven't commented on any thoughts I have about these results as I don't want to bias anyone's view on it. I think there are a couple of things to say though. SadisTech fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 11:46
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soooo is there any chance at all more style play like standard 2 tanks is ever coming back?
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Dec 30, 2023 14:14
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Cowslips Warren posted:soooo is there any chance at all more style play like standard 2 tanks is ever coming back? Overwatch 3
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Dec 30, 2023 14:31
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Cowslips Warren posted:soooo is there any chance at all more style play like standard 2 tanks is ever coming back? Just play Mei as one of your DPS and focus on using your wall to create space.
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Dec 30, 2023 19:49
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SadisTech posted:Coming in to talk about this dead game for a minute. It's still pretty active to all appearances but that's the maggots writhing in the corpse. (Of which I guess I'm one since I've been playing quite a bit recently.) It's all in your head!!!
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Dec 31, 2023 22:42
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SadisTech posted:Coming in to talk about this dead game for a minute. It's still pretty active to all appearances but that's the maggots writhing in the corpse. (Of which I guess I'm one since I've been playing quite a bit recently.) Why?
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Dec 31, 2023 23:44
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Because ranked is bad, especially for Australians. Long queues and no better quality of game. So Quick Play is the way this entertainment product needs to be consumed. So it's interesting to build some data around what Quick Play matchmaking looks like (the answer is "it may as well be coin flips") so that the player knows exactly what basis to approach it on (do whatever, it doesn't matter even slightly, just have dumb fun).
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Jan 1, 2024 04:32
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im actually curious what will happen to aus matchmaking if the skill brackets are widened signifigantly for ranked. it already feels like ranked game skill gaps are even bigger than in qp
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Jan 1, 2024 05:34
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Yep! It could be one of those scrolling gifs. Ranked is Bad so No-one Plays Ranked so Ranked is Bad so No-one Plays Ranked so... Low population = long queues and wide games.
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Jan 1, 2024 05:56
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elo hell doesnt exist a top 500 pc player trivially skyrockets out of diamond people are supposed to meme and do the stupidest poo poo in qp hth
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Jan 1, 2024 13:13
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if one of the ways you want to have fun in a game is to try to get better at it, one of the most important principles is self-criticism and not focusing on the mistakes of your team which are going to happen constantly at every rank in every game once you settle around your mmr, success for the matchmaker is every game being a coin flip since that is the definition of giving you fair games. unless you are one of the best or worst players in the world, you are going to converge to 50% win rate. keep in mind that overwatch has multiple mechanics that conspire to snowball games into a landslide even if they were a true 50% game.
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Jan 1, 2024 13:18
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comedyblissoption posted:if one of the ways you want to have fun in a game is to try to get better at it, one of the most important principles is self-criticism and not focusing on the mistakes of your team which are going to happen constantly at every rank in every game This theory is completely reliant on the idea that the matchmaker actually successfully programmed with the goal of creating balanced matches, and not, let's say, with the goal of lowering the wait time for certain groups of players as much as possible, or alternatively simply being non-functional because of lack of budget or manpower to do otherwise. Jack Trades fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 13:32
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elo-based systems are the best systems game devs know of to deliver fair games and this is what overwatch uses skill bands necessarily need to be widened if queue times are too long or player population at that moment too low there is zero evidence that overwatch devs are crafting the matchmaker to try to deliver anything but fair games
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Jan 1, 2024 13:51
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comedyblissoption posted:skill bands necessarily need to be widened if queue times are too long or player population at that moment too low comedyblissoption posted:there is zero evidence that overwatch devs are crafting the matchmaker to try to deliver anything but fair games These are contradictory statements, the first is literally making the matchmaker less fair to decrease queue times.
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Jan 1, 2024 13:55
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comedyblissoption posted:there is zero evidence that overwatch devs are crafting the matchmaker to try to deliver anything but fair games I'm sure that them removing or actively hiding every piece of information that would allow one to check the accuracy of the matchmaker, is a big oopsie woopsie. Especially considering how every other OW2 change, is specifically there to either improve DPS queues, or sell more poo poo, at the cost of actual game experience. You're also completely ignoring the part that OW team's QA department has been completely gutted in favor for Diablo 4 and OW2's updates were constantly breaking everything left and right in a way that OW1 never did. So even if they are actually trying to make the matchmaker work probably, it's highly likely that it's also broken in a way that everything else is. I almost never noticed matches in OW1 being poorly balanced, with the exception of a very occasional smurf. OW2's matches have been consistently awful right from launch.
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Jan 1, 2024 14:02
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:These are contradictory statements, the first is literally making the matchmaker less fair to decrease queue times. wide skill bands do reduce the quality of games in the sense that players in them will have wide skill gaps which are often not fun for either party except the sickos that like to smurf. Jack Trades posted:I almost never noticed matches in OW1 being poorly balanced, with the exception of a very occasional smurf. OW2's matches have been consistently awful right from launch.
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Jan 1, 2024 14:10
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you'd think having consistently bad games due to excessive skill gaps would lead to people not playing, even more so than sitting in queue for an extra twenty seconds but hey, that's next quarter's problem, and at least this way we can make the queue time metrics look good for this quarter's performance review...
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Jan 1, 2024 14:48
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comedyblissoption posted:elo hell doesnt exist I'm glad to see that you're still repeating exactly the same counter-arguments that you were over a year ago. Tell me, where do most top 500 players play? Have you read or heard any Australian top 500s talking about what they need to do to have a chance to get into top 500? Also, have you seen the bit where the Overwatch 2 devs have stated that their intent is for Quick Play games to be sweaty and have pretty close matchmaking? Does that accord with your experience of Quick Play games? Do you think that repeating the exact same counter-arguments really addresses any of these points? Are you just happy to keep trundling them out?
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Jan 1, 2024 14:48
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maybe overwatch needs to do the fortnite thing where if you're on a losing streak they queue you into a comp stomp lobby with bots that are pretending to be real players
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Jan 1, 2024 14:50
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the gm australia console player pool may be less skilled than the gm australia pc pool switching inputs from roller to mouse will take a lot of hours to adapt for aim intensive roles
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Jan 1, 2024 15:10
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comedyblissoption posted:the gm australia console player pool may be less skilled than the gm australia pc pool He still plays on console. The only thing that has changed is the player pool that he is now part of. I have played with him due to console/pc cross play in Quick Play. Incidentally, an interesting thing that I have found out by doing this is that console players get to see who in the lobby is playing on PC and who is on console. PC players do not get visibility of this information. I could only speculate as to why this is the case. I would like to be very clear as to the arguments that I am presenting. If you would like to engage with them I would enjoy seeing responses actually addressing these rather than reiterated disparagement. 1) The state of Ranked play at the moment is fairly bad in general. This is an opinion, but it is a very widely shared one at all levels of play. 2) The state of Ranked play in Australia, specifically, means that queue times are long and match quality is not particularly better than that found in Unranked. It might be said that it is worse, in fact, since losing a match to factors outside one's control is more frustrating when there is a sense of a stake in the outcome, i.e. a visible ranking decrease. These are, again, opinions. I do not think that people outside the Australian matchmaking pool are in a position to make judgement calls on them. It is factually the case that high skilled Australian players will employ VPNs to get into other regional matchmaking pools and simply deal with the connection latency thereby incurred, since it is still the better option for them. 3) The above factors mean that Ranked play is not the optimal way to experience Overwatch as a relatively casual Australian gamer. This means that most people will choose to play unranked Quick Play matches. 4) It is factually the case that the developers have recently stated that their intent is for players to take Quick Play matches seriously and that their matchmaking is designed to be fairly sweaty. This aligns with the experiences that most Quick Play players seem to have, particularly at the higher end of skill, where match outcomes are still highly meta pick dependent and make them work extremely hard. 5) However, the Quick Play algorithm does not appear to build matches consistently. This may be down to a large number of individual factors that impact specific games. It may be the case that one team is a stack or partial stack who can coordinate to at least some extent. It may be that the average MMR is simply not consistent across matched roles. It may be that individual players are under the influence, are learning a character or felt like playing something specific and do not care about the match outcome. However, if match outcome was heavily influenced by factors outside the actual MMR based lobby built by the algorithm, high levels of randomness should be apparent in game results over time. This does not appear to be entirely the case. While there is obviously a level of random outcomes, players at many skill levels - particularly in the mid ranks - anecdotally report very high levels of streakiness where a sequence of wins is followed by a sequence of losses. 6) My own observations loosely indicate that this is indeed the case. While a sufficiently large number of randomly matchmade games approximating correct MMR should trend towards 50% win and loss, it appears that there is a fairly strong corrective effect in the algorithm which creates frequent near-certain wins and near-certain losses a high proportion of the time. I hesitate to use the term "forced 50/50" as I do not subscribe to this particular conspiracy theory, at least the way it has customarily been framed. I nevertheless think that these steamroll games are not just contingent on factors down to performance in a given match but are inherent to the way that the matchmaker is designed. I do not think it is likely that it has been built this way with any particular malicious intent. It is, however, true that a very large amount of information which would be useful in allowing players to interpret match outcomes has been deliberately obscured from them with the stated goal of reducing toxicity. 7) What all the above implies is the following: - i) For matches which approximate how the game could and should be played optimally, it is probably necessary to engage with the Ranked system - despite the developers' stated intent, Quick Play is neither designed for nor perceived by players as a way to play the game seriously. - ii) For those choosing to play Quick Play matches in preference to Ranked, it is necessary to accept that any given match is going to be hugely and probably primarily influenced by factors outside of individual player skill, and simply play to have moment to moment fun. - iii) For those choosing to play Ranked and try to engage with the game seriously, it is necessary to accept that this may not be consistently possible, particularly for those in regions with a limited player pool, and that while it is likely still true that skill will tell over a sufficiently large number of games, this relies on both individual skill being high enough to move the outcome significantly in any given match, and/or sufficient time to invest to play a very very large number of games. The first of these is obviously an extremely limited subset of players, and the second is not practical for many people with other calls on their time. It thus seems fairly fair to state that Overwatch is no longer a game for semi-casual play. It is stratified into requirements to take it very seriously indeed or very superficially. It remains to be seen whether changes to the Ranked system and other changes that may be implemented now that corporate regimes have changed might alter this in any way. One can hope.
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Jan 1, 2024 16:34
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