Hey Duders,

Overwatch has been a consistent part of my gaming routine since it came out. I enjoy playing competitive because building team comp's and countering the opponent is a large part of the appeal for me. I have spent most of my time in high-silver and low gold. By no means a pro. For the most part, I have found the community enjoyable. Mostly people trying to win and get better. Salt happens. But outward toxicity was pretty rare in my experience. Recently though, I am finding competitive in Season 10 really disappointing. My games with outwardly toxic teammates are rising, and I would say about 30% - 50% of games now end up having a leaver on one team or another. This is leaving me much more frustrated at the end of my sessions. Anyone else having this experience? Any thoughts on the drop in quality?

It kinda feels the same to me. I think the amount of toxic and trolling teammates varies heavily on daily basis but i havnt noticed anything from season to season.

If you dont want people leaving then dont play around the hour where kids have to sit down at the dinner table ;P

I would argue that the competitive experience was always that, it just sounds like you had been lucky not to experience it until now. I stopped playing in season 3 because of their god awful "competitive ranking system." They should have taken a look at halos ranking system from older bungie games, when you make everyone's stats outwardly visible like that it leads to people unloading blame on others. Until the completely overhaul it its going to suck.

I can't speak to Competitive, but that sounds about right given how much of that I see in any mode that isn't Random Heroes.

That's just how it goes with hugely popular games, especially ones with a pro league. Everyone gets mad about the meta/anything less than perfect play/anybody playing too well/what color the sky is. I can only imagine that Competitive has only gotten rougher and rougher since OWL started.

(all that said, I do feel like most games as popular as Overwatch tend to have far worse communities. I'll take the OW base over the CSGO base any day of the week)

I’ve played about 45 games this season so far and I’d say I’ve had fewer salty teammates even with attack Torbs or games when we completely get stomped. I’m hovering in and out of platinum at the moment.

Personally, I'm starting to think the OW comp ELO rankings are about as good as they can get while still being run by robots. However, I do see a larger uptick in toxic/salty teammates when not playing with people I know, probably people who also think they should be at a higher rank than they are and have less tolerance for mistakes, instead of trying to communicate well with the team or work around their quirks.

Having said that, I'll take randos in OW over randos in R6:Siege, where recently there feels like a 50/50 chance of some kid screaming racist profanities on my team.

Banning all the racists is about the only thing that has happened in OW. The rest is exactly like at launch.

Edit: and by racists i mean the attention seaking kids that shout every offensive word they can think of, not the actual racists.

Personally I've found the comp to be severely degraded by about season 4 lol. That said most of my friends play on PS4. I own both the PS4 and PC versions but I put 3-4x the time into the Ps4 version and I find the quality of players to be SEVERELY lacking on the consoles. Even when I lose on PC I can still have a good time. No so on console.

Comp has gotten bad ever since Bri came on and people don't know how to deal with her.

I haven't played much this season but from my past experience I found a severe drop off in community quality between Low Gold and High Gold. Myself and most of friends pretty consistently sit in mid-platinum but another friend typically lands High Silver or Low Gold and the difference in matches is crazy. He would get people throwing, quitting, sending salty messages, etc. practically every other game, while I normally see people quitting maybe 1 in 10 matches. My other friends around the same rating as me seem to have the same frequency as me. It could also be that I pretty much exclusively play with a couple other people, so the matchmaking puts us into more matches with groups, and thus people are less likely to quit or throw.

All I know is playing with a group is way better than playing with random people. Even if my friends aren't online i'll try to befriend someone on battlenet who seems down to actually have fun. I met a random guy who was cool and we moved up to platinum together.

LFG is a fantastic way to play the game. Do I think the ranking system is broken? Sure. The difference between a diamond and master player is miniscule because of what teams you are on. At least you can improve the match quality through lfg and control your own destiny.

The content updates with this game are unparalleled. New skins and heroes at this rate are ridiculous. Further, are you going to say Fortnite or PUBG really beat this game in sheer amount of content and quality? To me, this is still the best multiplayer shooter out on the market. No COD, Battlefield, or MOBA has taken my time as much as Overwatch.