got_quiet

The Snowflake Challenge is happening again this year, and I liked doing it last year, so I'm going to try again.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of snow-covered mushrooms and green moss. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

I did challenge one, which I think is pretty much always to spruce up your profile, but the only sprucing up I did was removing interests... kinda sad times tbh.

On that same vein challenge two is to write a little fandom manifesto, and I am just so utterly devoid of fannish feeling, and have been for nearly a year, that I'm struggling to come up with something. I'll keep thinking.

Challenge 3, however...

In your own space, Scream Into the Void. Get it all out.

I literally just got back from trying the new event in Overwatch and I do in fact have some complaining to do.

There is of course the obvious elements of Blizzard that is just straight up complete trash, namely the corporate culture that fucked over anyone who wasn't a white bro with a frat mentality. Something a lot of people forget because Team 4 was a big improvement on this front is that Bliz was also a conservative company for a long time. Industry insiders knew it and it was reflected in their straight homophobia in game and out, their weird attitude towards skin tone in WoW, etc. And their terrible handling of player speech in support of Hong Kong as the CCP was fucking them is the terrible cherry on top. I decided a long time ago that I wouldn't spend any money on the company ever again and I've held to that. But I stopped short of dropping the game and the league completely because a lot of the employees at team 4 have been outspoken about these issues, have said that the OW dev team did not have the same sort of internal issues as that of WoW etc., and the talent in the OWL have been generally cool about things and used their limited platforms in more positive ways. I can't say that I am super satisfied about it all, but I hadn't gotten to the point where I felt it necessary to walk away entirely.

I am, however, increasingly disappointed in the way the development of OW2 has gone. I wasn't optimistic to begin with. We knew going into it that the free-to-play model meant that there would be a lot of pressures to monetize the game, and that the promises of more content was dangerous, because the speed at which things had been going in OW1 was a consequence of the difficulty of the problem of balancing such a unique game, not one of laziness. So as predicted, the content is not really coming out much faster than it did in OW1, the communication is not better, and the monitization model has gotten insanely stupid immediately. The battle pass is an utter joke, chock full of trash that no one in their right mind would spend a cent on outside of the maybe the final reward in a large grind that spending money on doesn't free you from anyway. Locking new heroes on the pass is fucking awful, making the game feel like a chore rather than something you might play because, you know, you enjoy playing it. The endless list of dailies, weeklies, and other challenges means that instead of me just jumping into the game that I want to play I'm checking to see what Blizzard wants me to play, and without hitting some of these the chance that any casual player is going to actually get the season hero is low. Because the cast is still relatively small and metas can revolve around a single hero serving as a linchpin, not having access to the full roster is a big competitive disadvantage. The devs have tried to excuse this by saying that their design philosophy is now about utility overlap and not having a certain hero shouldn't be a big deal, but the game is not at that point yet, and as a tank player not being able to play one of a small handful of viable tanks in anything but Mystery sucks ass.

And speaking of mystery, the balance for all of the arcade modes is completely out of whack. They've always been messy, but surprise surprise if you make a group of heroes tuned so that they are actually worth two people, and then you let people have as many of those that you want, they're the only things anyone who wants a quick win will play. Shit sucks. Arcade was where you could go if you wanted to just fuck around on DPS and doing that is now sort of a throw. On top of that they moved Mystery Heroes, which was my primary stomping ground, out of the arcade, likely so they would have space to fit more modes, but that means Mystery doesn't count for certain weeklies, which means I'm disincentivized to play it.

This doesn't even start to address the clusterfuck in ranked, where people are getting unbalanced lobbies, have had the feedback of rank up and down removed for some unknown reason, have to contend with a scoreboard that has done nothing the decrease the toxicity, and the top players are finding they're all getting tied for first and they have nothing to grind for anymore.

It's like every single change OW 2 has made was designed to make people frustrated. The monetization is greedy as fuck. There's almost no good skins on the BP and you have to spend 20 dollars on top of that to get a decent looking skin in the shop (lol no thank you even if I was willing to spend money on Blizzard).

And today they released a new event, which is a FFA with some modified skill sets on a small group of heroes. I like the idea and I used to like FFA, but... the challenges are a stupid grind, the rewards are nothing, and in fact the top reward is an old skin that anyone who played a lot of OW1, including me, already has. To top it off this is the one place I can choose to play Rammatra because there's no way I'm grinding enough to unlock him until the end of the season, and he's underpowered as fuck compared to literally everyone else, who has burst. So trying to grind on him is extra trash and after five games I decided actually my time is worth more than this and I quit. It's not like I was getting anything out of it anyway since the reward is literally a hand-me-down.

It's such a pain in my ass because OW was my favorite game from between 2017 or so to around now. That's almost 6 years it was my go-to. And now I'm so close to done with it. I want to go back to playing OW1 but that game has literally been wiped of the face of the planet for this travesty. Even the OWL is going to be less and less interesting the further removed I am from the game itself.

I suppose I should be eager to have my free time back. Eugh.