This mega company is running out of opportunities. I think owl could have been way bigger. You don't kill off your competitive scene. It is a breeding ground for skill and intrest. Just like korea was a breeding ground for skill given the sheer number of competitive players in close proximity.

Also screw sportsball models. The whole point of video games, programming, and computer systems is that you remove many limits of reality. If they developed a world cup viewer style client with options for announcers and with ads (tastefully) that would have helped.

Right now activision is losing. Literally their best product is classic wow in terms of actual quality gameplay mechanics. In terms of money well the pay to win bill might crush them. Cod is dying even though the last iteration was fun it was killed trying to ride the battle royale train and adding monitization. There are a ton of other examples of games that are in trouble. Overwatch actually touched greatness but when it was time to step up and hit the next level of gaming that everyone wants it just foundered. It's clear that the gameplay experience was falling behind with a poor system of balancing (using new characters). Combine that with owl killing off many interesting and exciting competitive scenes and the competitive ladder itself being somewhat stressful. Players have less excitement near the top end and they could have had it for free if blizzard just let 3rd parties have an existence.

Someone pointed out in one of my games that everyone's ping time was higher. Mine was about 30ms higher than usual. Anyone else know anything about this? Is it a bug or intentional?

sry guys dont mean to bother you but I can't seem to find how to use the nifty overwatch league viewer that they demoed for the OWWC. I'm sure it must be a glitch because that viewer was the most amazing thing to happen to esports ever. I mean all they needed was an announcer volume slider and it was a wrap. Surely it is lurking around here somewhere on the standalone or launcher. First person to tell me how to use the spectator on OWL gets 1 MILLION usd irl. No jokes.

I return

Less games in season from a league that suffocates the rest of the pro scene and slaps players on the wrist for infractions that signify a major problem in the overwatch ranking system. Meanwhile activision / blizzard share holders are breathing down the neck of developers who badly need to fix a game broken by the mentality of balance through counters.

dallas needs management / ownership that is not retarded

yeah i think rockets not headshotting is a good idea. we will have to see how it plays out in game though

of course you dont cause u are stupid

https://youtu.be/f0lGo-HVVbE

Enjoy ur dying game

Gonna play fortnight

yawn I cant watch the best players in the world play goats for one more match.

lol so many downvotes for the correct prediction

seeing goats or goats like comps every match is getting pretty borring. turns out overwatch needs less hard counters.

ok it has turned from an uphill battle into the great wall of china

damn man china feeling really strong. Canada hoping for some key fights to turn out in their favor but just seems like they are fighting an uphill battle.

my brain hurts

jake is actually a really good game caster

I think they get a bit egocentric and usa built their ego being in the finals with south korea last year. It's easy to forget that you have to prove yourself in the games and each game is a new opportunity. Let your ego give you confidence and it may detract from your actual gameplay.

I agree. Not sure what his shatters were doing. Maybe he read that his team was losing the goats war and he needed to make a play but shattering into fusions shield multiple times when he could have saved it.

Also in general it seemed like usa gave the uk alot more opportunities to melt an isolated tank. UK for sure had discipline backing out and giving ground when they needed to and coming back in 6 strong at the right time.

And that time uks winston was zoning the usa widow. Winston had low hp and was completely seperated from his team and any mega healthpacks. And widow healthpacked up to full. Still usa let it be a 1v1 and he won it while the rest of uk also won the other fight. Clearly UK played very well.

Yeah the world cup viewer is awesome. Everything I wanted from an overwatch viewing experience. Would be nice if they allowed the camera smoothing to be toggled off and for commentary to be toggled on. But yeah its awesome. I hope they keep using it for owl.

well played uk

no world cup viewer. damnit

5-0 hearthstone

!tmobilemvp xqc

Thats what jeff kaplan said in the developer update. Also you have the ability to use this mode to replay matches.

Currently all 240hz monitors are using panels that were not intended for 240hz.

0.5 ms may sound insignificant but to those who use them including the pg258q that owl used, they know they do have a bit more motion blur than many expected. 1.0 ms rating is actually a best case transition and average transition times for 240hz monitors are around 3.5ms or higher which are a significant portion of the 4.16 ms frame time.
Look for new monitors advertising 0.5 ms in 2019.

No pressure, Paris. Nooooooooo presure.

he was one of them

The game changes the meta changes. Even the psychology changes. But its hard to be successful when you swap your players so often. Im thinking of dallas and nrg as examples of how swapping doesnt work. If anything you just want room to add one or two players who can cover a new meta. And you want players like seagul or mickie. Adaptable, experienced, and bringing something extra to the table. Then more than anything you want to stick to your players as much as you can. One of the main things holding people back is their own psycology and the teams dropping players all the time adds a new dimension.

Im not trying to say you should ALWAYS stick by your team. But I think there will be teams that do that prove that it can be a really good strategy.

Too bad. They showed some promise at the end. Super volatile league right now. What team will have the balls to stick with thier players? Not florida

:🎂: I have mad respect for the guy. Think he is one of the smartest players. But he gets the birthday cake cause he is doing what he wants. Will rock the dallas fuel pharah skin for him.

As for gameplay changes I think it has become a bit TOO much of a rock paper scissors game. If you play dps its like you HAVE to flex instantly when the enemy changes. Supports are becoming part of this too. Its so bad Ive had games where an enemy dps and I are just holding tab switching back and forth in spawn while our teams fight. Because the difference in being one second late to the fight with the right hero is that big.

Also the hitscan range buff could be toned down a bit for soldier and mcree. Not sure people realize it yet but it makes a big difference not only vs pharah but all heroes.

As a fix for pharah mercy I feel like it was kindof penciled in. Its devistating vs solo longrange pharahs but still mcree and soldier are less than ideal vs pharmercy by themselves. If they want to fix pharmercy they are going to have to spend some time comming up with something better.

And it really speaks to what is causing the whole rock paper scisors problem. The release heroes to fix issues. This has always been the policy. To balance one hero ths just buff others to work against them or add a new hero that crushes them with no skill. To some extent they need to tone the whole thing back and just let skill be skill.

Yeah I agree with this. It got alot better when they increased the report sensitivity for abusive but... I THINK they also just changed the punishment to a one day silence. They need to make it so that it ramps up and they need to make silences after the first also count as a ban from competitive for the durration.

People just laugh when I say enjoy the silence. Im pretty sure its just a one day silence over and over and you can still play comp.

I literally get 5 thank you for reporting messages a day when im playing frequently. The punishments especially for recursive actions have got to be too light. I really love it when my team communicates and stays confident. Almost always win that way.

the owners are probably losing money. they gotta give em something

yeah london was my 1st team i wanted to win and phily was my 3rd

the differences between best of 5 and best of 4 with a tiebreaker and some maps possible to tie are subtle. the main reason its considered a tiebreaker is to cover cases where you could have each team with 2 wins and a tie. besides that its basically bo5

flexibility on the individual level and also coordination and flexibility on the team level with both compositions and strategies has always been something that impressed me with korean teams in general

dallas vs the fuel for the final is gonna be sweet

free fissure

The whole point of this is really that the committee wants to communicate to the gaming design and development community that they should look at terms like "killing spree" or "team kill" if they want to be taken more seriously by the olympics. The most any gamer representative could speak about is the gereal mentality of competitive gaming around these games and their depiction of violence. Which honestly won't ammount to much. If blizzard is interested in the olympics then they will have already talked about design elements that can be more appealing and may talk more after the committee. Thats the real meat of the situation. What jake and geguri say matters little if at all. What does matter is how the committee feels about the whole thing and as with most human beings that has alot more to do with how people talk to them than the intellectual content communicated.

As far as overwatch or video games being at the olympics I don't think it maters. What matters is really just the populairty and proliferance of video game competitions. This will rise even without being in the olympics.

It's ok dumb people like you will of course not understand and even feel threatened by this.

The difficulty level should be one up from that tv show he was on. I still think the general principal of jake looking good and being pleasant to be around is way more important than anything either one of them could say. And it doesn't hurt to point out the fact that overwatch has a girl in the league representing the pinnacle of competitive play. That alone will surely win some people over automatically.

The whole debate is silly really. Video games are not considered sports because the definition of sports seems to have "and it can't be a video game" in it. What can and can't be a sport is already incredibly vague and is just basically what people want it to be.

Go there, smile, be a female, maybe say something smart while you kiss ass and make "important" people feel good. Then video games are one step closer to being a sport.

Often times there are multiple forum posts on the same thing or copying articles. It would be nice to have comments carried over when the subject matter is exactly the same what do you guys think?

Looks good to me. Also ana is best support right now.

We wanted rocket cat but i guess this will do.

Edit: this will somehow counter the zarya rein hanzo meta. and then rocket cat will naturally counter the mouse robot meta

Im gonna be strafe spamming all day

it will be something meant to balance out the hanzo zarya rein meta by countering the fuck out of half the hero pool and forcing a new oppressive meta as is blizzards policy

Yeah its nice. The camerawork and casting has improved over the season. Was a bit disappointed with the dallas start and the xqc drama but its pretty understandable i guess. Overall i think its on par with the scene it replaced and thats really all i can ask for.

As far as being profitable / continuing well its obvious that that was a big risk from the start. Given how much outside investment they procured I dont think blizzard was ever too concerned about thier own financial risk. And i dont think anyone expected it to blow up like pro sports leagues. The real reason for it to exist is for fun / to make the game feel alive.

Someday esports will blow up. Overwatch still has potential. Blizzard has a tendency to slowly get things right. Right now its mostly an issue of balance patches, patch harmonics with league schedule, and report system effectiveness. As far as the execution of the league itself everything is fine.

I say its a success and i have posted some pretty critical posts about the whole thing before.

3-2 los angeles