Let me pre-face this by talking about my own skill level first.

I'm good, not great and have mostly been stuck in the upper tier of the gold to the middle tier of the platinum rank.

I have a good understanding of the maps, the characters, the best choice of character for a given situation and am willing to change heroes regularly.

I also mostly play healer (cause no one else does, still), which isn't great for laddering. (How have they not fixed that yet?)

I'm mostly queing solo since my friends don't play this damn game anymore.

Anyway Overwatch isn't COD with the player base leaving for a new release every year. The game's been out for almost two years, most players have prestiged at least once or twice, meaning mostly everyone should have played dozens if not hundreds of hours.

So why is it that everyone still does the same shit as they did when this came out? I sincerly don't understand.

Here's some things I thought anyone who has played this game for a significant amount of time wouldn't do anymore:

Running up to the enemy spawn point alone (or at all) in a defensive battle.

Picking heroes that don't fit a certain situation in the game. (Don't play Bastion or Torbjörn on offense for example. There's exeptions of course, but that's only the case if you and/or your team are well-coordinated).

Never switching off a starting hero. (Your Hanzo gets harcountered and you die every 5 seconds? Look at the situation and switch!)

Picking 4 or 5 heroes of the same type. (We don't need Soldier, Tracer, Reaper, Sombra and Doomfist damn it!)

Never picking a tank or healer. (Selecting them dozens of times to signify someone else should play then does not help!)

Spamming emotes to show how unhappy you are instead of focusing on the damn game.

Never teaming up whatsoever. (Sure there sfe heroes thst work best at their own, but what good is a Reinhardt running around alone?)

Not playing the objective. (Play arcade mode please if you want a DM, if you don't then get on the damn point!)

Exiting the game after a minute because you thimk it's a lost cause. (I get the temptation but just try changing your strategy instead.)

I could go on but I don' just want this to be a rant. I just really want to know about you guys' experience with this stuff and what you think about this.

Are people just not willing to learn/team-up/change? Even after 2 years? What's the fun in that, you are just bound to lose over and over anyway then. I don't get it.

Are you talking about the season mode? I’ve played on and off for ages, but haven’t bothered with much beyond quickplay and arcade.

I guess I’d be surprised if folks were hanging in season mode doing those things. I assumed enough folks would be following the meta, keeping up on nerfs/buffs, etc. that that kind of behavior wouldn’t fly.

I totally get it in quickplay, though.

Learning only happens if you try. Some (a lot of) people just play and do the same things expecting different results. Or worse, attribute things their teammates do or other circumstances that wins a game to their own skill.

I also personally think Blizzards philosophy around the design of that game, nice as it sounded on paper, is toxic as hell for the playerbase. The coddling and fudging around numbers and how actions are perceived and rewarded allows an environment where people are dissuaded from looking at their own faults and learning from them, where it always seems like you are doing good because the game never shows you that you are doing bad... But that's just my opinion, I don't really play it much anymore.

Sorry, yes, I'm takling about season mode. Which is exactly why I'm that flabbergasted.

@TobbRobb

True, I've never been a fan of the medal system. They mean next to nothing when it comes to actual game performace. But shouldn't everyone have picked up on that by now too?

Of course you are right about people refusing to learn or blaming others too, bug why stick with this game then?

That's exactly what I don't get here. People who have played for hundreds of hours acting like total beginners.

@sessh: Yeah, odd...

It never occurred to me to even try any sort of ranked mode. Everything about the way that game feels just reads like positive reinforcement. Winning is fun. Losing is fun. The end of matches rubberband a bit. Ults come easily. The stats are all positive.

I know next to nothing about the meta. Is the game just too casual friendly? I can’t fathom high-level play being that sloppy.

Hell, with how deadly serious people can get about ranked games, maybe this is a bit of a relief...

@sessh: I don't feel like Ow does a good job at all at teaching players any of these concepts. All the tutorial essentially teaches is the controls.

The Hero selection screen last I looked still mentions "builders" as a class in some of the UI (as well as "snipers) and the defense class makes zero sense for most of the game anyway.

And then as @tobbrobb pointed out the game also doesn't surface information to you about your actual performance, so everyone thinks they are an all star and the loss is somebody else's fault. Blizzard started doing this with Starcraft 2 and I felt it hurt that game, even in 1v1.

And to make matters worse the way the game handles matchmaking actually tends to punish 6 stacks and rewards one-tricking. So poor teaching, misleading guidance and bad incentives. It's not a shock to me that people don't learn teamwork. The game basically never gives them a reason to.

At least at some point they changed the damage medal from being "total damage" to "total damage to heroes" which shut up quite a few Junkrat mains who you'd tell to change and they'd come back with "I have gold damage, stfu."

I had to stop playing around season 5 because I'd get placed into silver and then would just be completely unable to climb out (healer main) because for every match that I won there'd be two or three where someone on the team would just absolutely not communicate and picked a hero that had no place in the situation we were in. It can be a ton of fun when everyone is on the same page but people seem to want to hop into competitive and treat it like quickplay.

@musclerider: my friends and I talked about this recently (your second paragraph in particular). I really love overwatch but it does suffer from an over reliance on team strength. If you have one bad player on your team, they can completely weigh down the efforts of half (or more) of your team. I've only gotten platinum as my rank, but even at that level you would get people either intentionally sinking the team, or playing at a level of poorness that the rest of the team could not compensate for.

This is obviously a problem in other team games(CS:GO, DotA2, R6:Siege, PUBG), but in all of those games a very skilled player(or a cohesive functioning remainder of the team) is capable of overcoming a player who isn't pulling their weight.

I think there are a number of reasons for this, but changing them would basically make overwatch a completely different game. Because of this I really have no interest in overwatch for competitive play, but casual works fine.

While at the highest levels of play in Overwatch require a lot of coordination and teamwork, A mechanically skilled player (good and aiming/reactions) can get so far in the rankings without making any effort to work with a team. Once they reach a threshold of encountering teams that actually work as a team they become stuck (typically around gold/low plat) but since they got used to playing as a lone wolf and think that is the way to go they usually resort to blaming their own team for not pulling their weight and that they are "carrying".

That is my theory to why you still get people misinterpreting the way Overwatch is suppose to be played. If it was possible to make it so not working with a team would result in the lowest rank regardless of how good you are at the shooty stuff them more players would make more effort to work together but that would be practically impossible to do so we are at where we are now.

But that's a good thing. you learn how to play the game and the community evolves. You get the tools to play the game and then you figure out how to use them in the best way.

anyway to answer the OP's question, cuz people are dumb

I disagree. In single player games or deathmatch style multiplayer games, absolutely what you are talking about works. That's part of the core appeal of games like Dark Souls, yeah? Works just fine for CoD etc too.

In a team game? Naw. You need to be taught co-ordination and roles. Overwatch doesn't even give you the basics other than the name of the roles and some of those labels are basically wrong.

I think the lack of coaching encourages people to either learn bad habits or quit the game altogether. New players get thrown immediately into a pool with experienced players who either get salty with the newbies for not knowing what to do, or they win and the game tells the newbie they did well without ever telling them the full truth of their performance (which could reinforce bad habits). Both outcomes breed toxicity and communication breakdowns. Vets and newbies have a bad time as a result.

Ask yourself this. What team sport teaches people how to play that way? Could you imagine trying to learn football without knowing any of the plays? Or basketball without learning pick and rolls, plays or positioning to get open etc etc? I think you'll notice the more coordination a team sport requires, the more coaching is generally a factor. E.g. Baseball is a lot easier to just figure out on your own than Football. Managers don't do much in baseball, Football coaches are celebrities on par with star players. Overwatch takes a fair amount of coordination to play it well. A tough ask when strangers are essentially thrown into a game together, an even tougher ask when the game never taught them how to be team players.

Don't get me wrong , I love overwatch and I taught myself with the help of some friends how to play. Playing the game with an actual team or with strangers who are willing to work together is great. You can definitely learn all of these basic concepts of team play on your own if you want to, but how many people are actually willing to do that? And should we be that surprised that many people don't bother to if the game never asked them to or showed them how?

Spamming emotes to show how unhappy you are instead of focusing on the damn game.

This drives me the most insane even on quick play. No one wants to heal of course, so I pick and healer because I don't mind and I want a decent match. The team just runs off in different directions and leaves me pretty defenseless and I die. Then you hear nothing but "I need healing" spammed 3 times by everyone. Yeah, I usually just end up leaving the match, or just switching off a healer.