Overwatch is the most popular arena-esque FPS on the market right now. For me, it's not actually that much like an arena FPS but for the people that never timed anything, never learned how to intercept opponents, always complained about the HMG and generally had no idea about arena FPS games, you will probably feel think it's very similar. You'll think it heavily relies on teamwork and jizz'ard at blizzard's awesomeness.

For myself, while I can appreciate the mouse input is superior to UT, the netcode is great, the bugs are fairly minimal and there are a few health packs to time, it's still pretty diabolical. When I gamed a lot in 2005, I could time the shock rifle, the LG, the 100 armour, the amp, the health vials, the flak and the rocket with a bit of practise (50 armour fucked me for some reason). In another game, I could time all of my recharges on my skills, plus 8 opponents and about 6 skills on each opponent. To put it into context, there were 1319 skills I had memorised completely. Out of that pool, I had to know 48 skills at any point in a game that could last 90 minutes. So when I play a game and all there is to time is one or two fucking health packs, spawn retimes, one or two skill recharges and a guestimate of the opponents adrenaline level, damnnnnnnnnnnnn son. That's fucked. It's too easy and too simple.

There's no balancing the game since it's inherently broken. There's about 9,000 different characters to pick from, and all blizzard can really do is balance about 6 at a time. When people get bored, they'll then nerf those 6 and balance another 6.

I'm used to this shit with other games, and to an extent it works. Subjectively, I'm like, what the fuck? I mean, if a guy can only rail, he's gonna be pretty pissed when he discovers he has to learn how to use rockets or track aim simply because the meta changed. I'm a fairly well balanced player in any game with any weapon, so I can get used to it. But a part of me thinks it's a bit like playing football. Wouldn't it be a bit weird if one month the ball was spherical and the next it was conical? Can you really master something if it's forever changing? So I repeat, what the actual fuck?

The matchmaking is pretty diabolical. For example, you have to play with people that're in a similar range to you. So if you just made an account and all your friends are top 100, too bad. You have to grind.

That's not so bad, except the people you play with are morons, and no matter how much you carry the team, if they pick the worst classes possible, scratch that, WHEN they pick the worst classes possible, you're inherently fucked. Towards diamond, this goes away a bit but it's still present.

It has a weird momentum to it. You build up your "ultimate" (an amp that each player has) and then push when all your ultimates are ready. You deplete the ultimate and rinse and repeat.

Personally I think the ultimates are shit. For example, the soldier gets an aimbot. There are times you can out damage this aimbot (it has 100% accuracy vs the body but if you sustain 80% vs the head, you'll out DPS it.) In my opinion, the ultimates should be items you time and collect or simply not exist at all. I'd rather a damage amp than an aimbot.

The scoreboard is fucking shit and doesn't show enough data. It tries to please trash players by giving everyone statistics they'll be happy with.

The teamwork is pretty simple; fight together in waves. I don't like that kind of teamplay. PF 5v5 is way better. You can each lock down a point of the map or you can fight in a wave or do powerplay (4v2) splits.

So the game is broken, it won't be balanced--not for a lack of trying but simply because it cannot be balanced--it's simplistic and it's got a lot of negatives.

It's still a lot of fun. You can intercept opponents at a low skill level but it's pretty hard if your opponent is smart. Even if your team is terrible, you should be able to sustain pretty big win streaks. It's heavily aim and position based. I don't mean dodging but rather your position on the map at any given time. If your aim is decent and you position well, you can stomp people pretty easily.

For that reason, I kind of like it. The fights are fast, the matches don't drag on and it doesn't take long to find a game.

Oh 2 words: Not interested.

i wish my qs were fast m8 plz


if you want to play this game move to korea tbh people cheat more but at least they aren't throwing all the time

That reminds me, I forgot to complain about the language. DVA speaks chinese and korean. Sometimes she'll say "ne hao" (I may have spelled that wrong; I don't know how to write chinese, I only know some of the audible sounds) which means "hello" in chinese and sometimes she'll say "an nyoung" which is a shortened, less formal version of "an nyoung haseyo"--this means "hello" in korean.

It seems like one of the designers said "make her sound asian!" but it's pretty unusual that she'd speak chinese and korean.

Fuck moving to korea, I have "hana dul set" drummed into my head (it means 1 2 3; koreans count upwards whereas we do countdowns starting from a high figure) and I'm sure its left scars lol . You'd like gaming with koreans. They sing a lot during the non serious matches, at least that was my experience with them.

The throws are real bad here in europe too.

I've had the chance to play this for a bit now.

Single queuing is great if you're sadomasochistic. In 50% of the games, people will pick a poor selection of heroes. In 25% of games, they'll just be completely unbalanced and 25% of games will be ok. My percentages are way off but to put it simply, there's very few really enjoyable matches. I'm still relatively low rank (diamond and climbing.)

In single queuing, there are a few things you can do to get the most out of it. You can view the enemy's profile and you'll get a rough idea as to what they'll be playing before the match begins. More importantly, you can view your team's profile and their statistics. If they're gold and all they've played is mercy (hold left click and win the game) but you're silver (does silver exist? I assume silver exists, I don't know) and all you've ever played is soldier, then it's likely you're better at soldier than them.

I played this with some cool people and it was the first time I really enjoyed the game. You can do way more shit and it's just a lot more fun in a group. Most of the single queuing is ruined for me by the bad team composition. This is pretty much blizzard's fault, which nick and I universally agree upon. There's a few ways they could fix this but it's pointless to get into here as it most likely won't get fixed.

The waiting times for matches increases as you rank up BUT it seems when you queue with a few people, the waiting times decrease. Could this be coincidental or anecdotal? Yeah, but it makes sense I guess. The better players are more likely to be higher ranked and higher ranked players are more likely to have a team. Since I believe the game queues you with groups (if you're in a group) then it sort of makes sense? I guess.

I've always had to wait a while in PF to get a match set up. I've watched others set up matches that had nothing to do with me and it was the same--people from this game cannot organise an orgy in a brothel. So I'm used to it by now.

So far, the highest ranked player I've played vs is the one below the top rank, whatever that is. Master? The differences between the higher ranked and the lower ranked players seems fairly minimal. It does exist, and the players that're like "I'm gold but that's because I've had BS teams!" are honestly just shit players. I was a bit like that when I first installed. Although a large portion of the games will be unbalanced tripe, you can still win on an average if you are better.

As the matches have gotten higher ranked, I've found them a lot easier. I found this in PF too though. When I played vs low skilled players like toure or one, sure I may have won 5 - 0, 30 - 0 or 100 - 0 (actually I think it was 100 to -1 in one's case, cus he killed himself), they were actually overly difficult matches. Players with no skill at all are essentially random. They don't do things for a reason and it's just hard as fuck for me to read. Bait the amp? NOPE. They don't know when the amp is gonna spawn. Bait an armour? NOPE DENIED. Hide somewhere? NOPE THEIR CROSSHAIR PLACEMENT IS RANDOM AS FUCK. Fight 100 armour vs 0 armour thinking they'll be defensive? NOPE. THEY'RE RANDOM. Avoid fighting 0 armour vs 100 thinking they'll be aggressive? NOPE THEY'LL BE HIDING IN THE SAME TUNNEL YOU ARE. Literally crazy.

You can rely on players tilting though. If you take this match. This was a 2v2, he never said he wouldn't "reg" it was a complete lie but that doesn't matter, my point is, if you fuck people hard enough they will tilt. In PF, it's counter productive, our time was wasted, fuv never gave us the $200 promised and we ended up playing a different map only to win it anyway. In games with matchmaking, you get rewarded for shitty opponent behaviour. I've been finding this quite useful to exploit. It is however bad play, like if you're soldier and you should be focusing a tank then it might generally be considered shit play to focus another soldier. Blizzard often puts you in matches with players you've played with before, so maybe you know he has a temper problem or you just get an impression from the way he plays. Once you aggrivate one of these fuckers, they'll either 1) tilt to the point they'll literally rage quit the match 2) their aim will go to shit 3) they'll change hero and start trolling their team.

I know it sounds like I'm trolling but this shit is awesome. I can't wait to get GM so I can see if getting players to tilt wins me matches, rofl.

Speaking to the majority here, you do have to be driven at this to get good at it, I think. I play it about 14 hours a day and honestly I'm pretty garbage. You won't have the luxury of having my aim (at least I don't think there's anyone in PF excluding nick that aims as well as me) to carry you and the positioning problems will be as big of a problem to you as they have been to me. Despite this, there's still something inherently simple about the game.

I remain undecided about a lot of things. I don't think I'm good enough to judge the top teams yet but if I was to guess, I'd say that the game has a higher skill ceiling than what the "pro" teams are showing.

Unrelated but I have a little gripe with the maps. The doors look upside down. What the fuck man? You don't have the window sections on the bottom of the door. That really ruins my day.

Final review... The better you get at this, the worse it gets. Crap game, avoid if possible.