Overwatch 2. Something that never needed to happen. I liked the idea of them rebranding in order to draw in a new player base. I liked the idea of making it free to make it more available to everyone. I even liked the idea that they added in a battle pass! Even though a battle pass is normally not a great sign. But, what I can not stand, Is the greed. It's now so much harder to grind out currency, any new players have to grind to be able to use most of the characters, the new new characters even the original players have to grind out the battle pass to unlock them(which I'm not totally against, there should be some grinding), and a good chunk of everything they add is going onto the paid battle pass. I'm totally down to grind to level 80 on a battle pass, but what's the point when I can't get the majority of the items due to my unwillingness to pay blizzard any more money. I absolutely loved the first Overwatch, it was pretty much perfect. Of course there's no such thing as "Perfect", but it was a game that a whole community loved and devoted countless hours to, It was good enough. Then, they went money hungry. Made the game free to draw in as many people as possible, hyped it up as a way to make it more "accessible", and when the moment finally came and everyone was ready for a new era of Overwatch, they stomped on our hopes as they through accessibility out the window. I wont even touch anymore more on the phone number incident than this, because enough has been said about that and I'm sure they'd like everyone to forget. To summarize, Overwatch was a titan of a game, with a following that thought it was timeless, but just as we've seen with many other games in the past years, greed is the true evil, and it will be the end to any company that strays to close to the sun, hoping for a little more profit.
Game companies should absolutely be making money, of course. But if their margins start to slip, they should explain this and make choices that benefit both them AND their player base. It sounds impossible but honestly if original Overwatch displayed a message when it launched saying something like "We love Overwatch and the community that makes it possible, but with tough times and sales drooping we need a better form of income to keep the game running, which is why we've added a cosmetic only battle pass for those players who want to support their favorite game and show it off with style." that would have been great! Instead of putting up a façade saying they have the community's best interests in mind then turning around and defecating on dedicated and new fans alike.
Oh and what's with the sudden spike in players losing their accounts? Lifelong players suddenly need to merge their accounts, then when they comply they lose all their years of progress, just for the support system to tell them sorry to hear that we'll let someone know, then mark them as a solved "Issue". It hasn't happened to me personally, thank goodness, but I have a handful of friends experiencing the issue along with countless posts online with seemingly minimal response or care from Blizzard.
