Scourge

It’s a really great single player game, but it is a single player game now. They really botched the co-op. Fun game, but huge let down for my wife and I who loved playing Pikmin 3 together all the time. We had even been naïve enough to hope for online PvP, so the contrast was stark.

I cannot give a super accurate account as I actually haven’t played OW2 at all, but that may also be for the same reasons it’s on the bottom.

OW1, when purchased at release, promised to be a “10 year game” or something like that. I played that game a lot and loved it for a long time. I played it so much that at one point I was just under being a top 500 player in NA servers. I never bought more than the original game though. I never bought a gun or character skin because the default skins seemed fine, but I did collect a lot from just the lootbox system. The game had some balance problems, but it was overall good game design.

So, why did I, specifically me not others stop playing?

They entirely nuked team composition in the game. It may not have been a great idea to be a squad with 6 dps, but you could do it if you wanted to, and on a rare occasion it may have even been a good idea. Then they forced set roles, so a team could only have two tanks, two dps, and two healers or something like that. Suddenly the variety of diverse compositions and strategy got restricted to only a handful, and games became much more… I dunno how to put it. Mechanical? Boring? Identical? Gameplay took a turn for the worse.

Then there was the Hong Kong thing which was a huge thing for me. A pro player made a pro-hong kong statement during the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard fuckin took all the guys prize money and banned him from pro-play Then, when the community loudly demanded to amend this, they sent out a letter to the community boot-licking to China and telling the players to fuck off. I think the last time I seriously played was the day the letter came out. Maybe one or two games over the following years total.

Then there was the sexual harassment and workers rights violations from blizzard right after that.

Then they announced that OW2 was going to come out at like year 5 or 6 of the OW1 lifespan, cutting the lifespan of the game in half.

Then they announced the PVE game mode, which was the entire reason they were making OW2 in the first place wasn’t going to be out in OW2, and would never be made.

Then they announced OW2 was going to replace OW1 entirely. They said all the skins and stuff would transfer over, but then a bunch of people couldn’t get their skins transferred over, even if they had paid for them.

Then they changed the lootbox system so that if you did not pay for skins your chances of getting pretty much anything you wanted was gone. You either bought it or you didn’t get it. Probably a slap in the face to the people who already bought it in OW1, had it taken away and then had to either complain to customer service for days or weeks or just buy it again. I still remember forum posts of people losing hundreds of dollars worth of purchases shortly after release, never found out if this was ever resolved.

Then OW2 came out and it was pretty much just OW1 with a couple new characters. They also completely destroyed niche characters for reasons I do not understand. Biggest one I can recall was a tank called Hammond whose whole shtick was being a high mobility-low damage disruption based tank. They turned it into a mobility restricted low damage bullet sponge. They completely fucked characters that were outside “the meta” which made the already stagnant gameplay become even more rigid.

I didn’t even play the game and all this shit pretty much had me swear off buying or playing any other blizzard games. Even if OW2 is playable right now, which I have doubts about, you can pretty much guarantee the company is going to cannibalize the remaining lifespan of the game more and more until they just entirely shut down the servers.

Because I find it unsettling on a personal level when my wife and I, in the privacy of our home away from the world have a conversation where we make a joke about buying a banjo, and then every day for the next three weeks everywhere I go is flooded with targeted banjo ads. Verbal conversations, away from everything but our phones and computers.

Because I find it unsettling when I go to a site I have never gone to before and it greets me with my name and already knows where I live with the shipping details even though I clicked “I do not consent” on every data pop-up that I’ve seen in the past five years.

Because people are selling that data, my data, data about myself, and I get none of that profit and it was done without my consent or knowledge.

Because a company having my information should be something I need to personally allow, not something I need to ask and beg them not to obtain.

Because I can think of very few, if any, benevolent purposes of using that data, but there is a legion of malevolent reasons for it, and of the ones I have seen, all of them fall into this category.

All this being said, I should not need to have a reason. The onus should not rest with the individual to prove that they deserve undisturbed privacy, it should rest with the institutions that want this information; that it is a requirement to obtain this information for valid reasons and not frivolous ones, or ones rooted in greed or ideology. Like a search warrant for example.

So if it isn’t sciencey to you, what would you say it is?