Let’s be honest. It’s not about the 5v5. It’s not about the CC. It’s not about the balance changes. It’s not about the cancelled single player.
It’s about the free stuff. Blizzard took away the free stuff, and everybody’s angry about it. Now you have to pay for a decent amount of cosmetics, and getting a new hero requires a grind (a big grind for current-season hero, small grind for past ones) unless you want to pay.
There are two viable business models for service-based games (and running servers and paying moderators is service, that’s why they’re called servers):
Sell a game and then support it right up until everybody’s already bought the game, then sell the sequel and repeat. Otherwise how do you fund development when nobody is paying you anymore?
Sell a game and then harass your players into giving you recurring payments.
don’t make the game a service. The game is a product and not a service, the service is the bare minimum to keep the master server up. Players run dedicated servers, make the expansions through modding, etc. This is how it used to be for everything before Xbox Live.
I get that it’s disappointing, but when you get angry about not getting enough post-release content you’re asking for 1 or 2. And the industry has pretty much moved away from type 3 – I can’t think of a modern popular game that isn’t a decades-old institution like Minecraft Java that fit into that category.
That’s not the balance, that’s the gameplay. There are still balance problems like the era of Mercy damage amping.
And while they’ve solved the CC and barriers problem, they’ve made teamfights too swingy. With only 5v5 and a single op tank, teamfights are often basically over after a single death or a single Rez. Especially for the tank. That’s just too much pressure, so nobody wants to tank anymore.
So don’t? You get the new hero like a month or so later then. I haven’t put a dime into ow since I bought it. You don’t need the cosmetics. Let the dumb whales fund the game.
It’s not that bad. It’s basically just your Battle pass score, and your progress on the various goals that contribute to the battlepass score. That plus your kudos from other players thing. Not a crazy amount.
You want a real “point salad” FPS, play Deep Rock Galactic. I’ve got a decent number of hours in that and I still have no idea what 90% of the explosion of post-mission data is.