ESports leagues only work when they come from the community. No amount of money will make people care about a random assortment of franchised teams
Good. It ruined the game.
It was always weird for me, because they seemed to be playing an entirely different game.
A bit sad, but not surprising. It was always something that felt forced and only propped up by companies trying to create a new market in order to monopolize it.
If the NFL didn’t exist, then suddenly just sprung on the public as it exists now, I think it would have also suffered a similar fate.
On the player and even team level, I’m sure it felt different, but as a spectator, it was hard to ignore the top down, corporate, ad filled, “fellow kids” feel of the thing.
From the comments here, apparently I was the only one who really enjoyed watching OWL.
Yeah, it wasn’t perfect, yeah it always had a meta, but it was fun to watch.
Miss you Jeff Kaplan
I mean I like Jeff but the OW1 eras of pretty bad gameplay and pretty long time waiting fixes happened on his watch. He designed a crazy fun game, but I think his stewardship in making it stay balanced and various and fun once you get good at it was a bit more lacking.
The PvE pipe dream was also a result of Kaplan’s direction.
Yup. And Overwatch PVE has never been good… I know a lot of players were pumped for it, but we’ve never seen any evidence they had a good plan for how to make it fun. They had lots of zany ideas for powers and RPG elements and whatnot, but all the PVE content for Overwatch released so far has been mediocre-to-bad.
Imho telling the story through PVE has never been a good idea for OW. It’s not a PVE game. Finding some way to tell the story in PVP, even with massive ludonarrative disconnect, would have been better.
Oh no!..
Anyway…
Sad about this. I know it’s fun to hate on overwatch, but the idea of an esports league being city based was really novel at the time. Ive always enjoyed overwatch, and despite overwatch 2s monetization being absolutely atrocious, the gameplay changes I have enjoyed for the most part
Good, really don’t care about everything surrounding eSports. Gamers are cringe.
