Taylor

jk played another one anyway. I don't know if this was just the servers being awful. But apparently players can crash the server in Nepal.

Hidden message says "buy loot boxes". I gave competitive another chance as I would like to get a golden hook but I think this was enough to seal the deal. First one we lost and I had all 5 gold medals for our team, which made me a little upset but I shouldn't expect to one-man carry so that's fine. Next game the teams are horribly stacked as we're all randoms versus a 2 man and 3 man queue, but we actually win it pretty hard... until someone disconnects and then we lose. So, I notice when my team disconnects I still lose a shitload of rank, which is in stark contrast to when the enemy team ALL LEAVES and I get 5% of the rank for winning. This is completely ass backwards. I don't really enjoy competitive. It seems to go against every every design principle of this game for DIGITAL SPORTS. It makes a feel-good game with a positive loop feel like a constant kick in the ribs, especially when every game is full of horrible players (in terms of personality) and it provides open insights into how utterly broken the ranking system is. Back to quick match for me. If you want to give me 300 points just let me know. The Blizzard polish seems to have all been chipped off this last patch and it's unfortunate. UI VFX lingering during screen fades, popping back into the game after rounds end, lots of interfaces fighting for your attention at the end of a match, UX being really bad in places (the alert telling me I can leave the game after my team mates leave is drawn on top of the overtime display ffs). Would be nice to see that stuff fixed up. Just feels like it lost something in the updates. Also, DotA does that "you can now leave" thing... but in DotA you can actually leave. In Overwatch you're still going to lose rank so why even bother displaying it?

I never played ranked again after I was punished because the enemy team rage quit. No joy to be had there at all.

I imagine the under performance of the WiiU and success of the DS is why they're combining the two. I also had a lot of fun with my WiiU. Still not convinced them trying to reel in third party is a good idea given their audience (and how much power they'd need to stick into a handheld). Maybe if they focused on remote play instead, but I think we're a decade too early on all that.

The updates to their flagship franchises are usually really good. They also created great new titles like Splatoon and gave Platinum all the money they needed for Bayonetta 2. Haters. People buy Nintendo hardware for their first party games so the pissing contest with other console specs almost seems pointless. Doesn't really matter if gritty sepia man shooter 12 will run worse on it because it's going to be used for rendering a cell-shaded Mario onto a minimalist landscape, or Pokemon games that are still using gigantic blocky tiles after 20 years. A lot of the time when I'm playing my WiiU I don't bother turning the TV on and I spend ample time on my DS. It seems like a good move to combine the too. People are putting some pretty good graphics on mobile. The problem I find is people also want to use their smartphones for other things and these games kill your battery in about 30 minutes. It also seems like the market is shifting more and more casual, so I'm not sure controllers are really going to change anything.

New D.va is ridiculous. Her block is always up when you need it so you're shooting down a lot more ultimates. I still hate that she's immune to her own ultimate explosion, mostly as a D.va player who thought it was fun to have to scramble away from it with everyone else - now I'm just guaranteed I'll kill at least one person shooting them in the back of the head and daring them to stay in the blast radius. Ana is strong but people just player her like Widowmaker even though her gun does half damage. In my experience you want be with the offense heroes, usually not bothering with your scope, throwing grenades at your feet and sleeping people so they can run a train into them. Her sleep is really good for stopping Bastion, too.

D.va buffs sound absolutely ridiculous. Too bad people still won't shoot that turret or bastion you're pointing your defense matrix at.

Edit: It doesn't use damage or medals. But it does punish healers.

50 is average. The system is 0-100 and you start 45-55 based on placements. Getting only a tenth of a level for winning was because the enemy team left. It's extremely frustrating after a big loss streak to get so little for finally pulling out a win. It's not "off," you can deny people rank xp by rage quitting.

I take it all back. I went 1-5 today and each loss took a whole rank. But when I win I get about 10% of one level. What the hell is this? I'm going to need like a 50 win streak to get back to that sweet, sweet 50 "you're average" rank. And how am I dead with 4 health? 4 health is not dead.

You have to not care. These ranking system take hundreds of games to actually give accurate results and you only have agency in ~30% of your games (the others are going to be stomps either way). You're only getting some shit weapon reskins anyway. Wow a gun nobody can see on one of my characters is now gold. The only really bad thing with competitive is you get matched up with full teams queuing solo instead of just other solo players. DotA removed this, hell even HotS removed this. LoL added it, said they were going to remove it, then said JK dynamic queue for life. Because Riot Games.

There's something in the patch notes about aim snapping. But Roadhog ultimate still has that bug I posted a few pages back where an elimination makes him look at the ceiling.

Going better now we're an organised group. Honestly, I went in with all this baggage because LoL ranked made me basically hate the game. Mostly because you need to reach the reward tier or it's a waste of time and the constant BO3/BO5 promotion/demotion nonsense. However with Overwatch the moves are tiny even within the placement games. It seems what you mostly need to do for the higher ranks is play a shit ton of Overwatch. Not sure how many points you get at the end of the season, or if the idea is Season 1 is all about golden guns (so you'll get a lot of them) and Season 2 is something else (pink guns, perhaps).

Nobody has a MMR value yet so it's a gamble whether a slot is a complete newbie or god. I think the only way to mitigate it is playing as a group, which I'm definitely going to be doing from now on.

I had to change it a little bit.

So far I've played two competitive matches and screamed at my computer once. I have never seen players this bad before.

I have very few people voting leave in my Facebook echo chamber. The one that did was posting union flags all over his Facebook in celebration, and when it was pointed out this might trigger a Scottish independence vote so good luck with that flag, his reply was that we should let them go independent and then invade them with the British army. What worries me is the leave campaign was... really bad. Dan Hannan did a pretty good speech at the spectator debate, but outside of that it's headed by Nigel Farage who runs a party with openly racist members, BoJo the Clown in his Big Red Bullshit Bus, and spokespeople who say "what do experts know?" Regardless of the merits of leave and remain these are clearly grade-a morons who should not haven be taken seriously.

Finally, I got it. This happens on two different PC's (well, one is a Macbook Pro with Boot Camp). Pretty rare and usually coinciding with an elimination.

I think if he was in phase it would just go through him tho

This isn't the bug I mentioned above with Roadhog ultimate pointing straight up. I wonder if this Reaper was doing something funky?

Mei is all about stalling the points. She has above average health on purpose so she can ice block during combos like Roadhog hook and McCree flashbang into fan. This means you cannot just blow her up like an offense character and need to respect her ability to draw out everything. Although, I would like some more warning on her ultimate given she also has a frickin' wall to stop your escape. At the moment she's all like "dong zhu, buxu zou" and you get half a second to walk towards the edge, freeze, and wait for the sweet embrace of death. Zarya barrier gets a vignette and the icon is yellow while it's on. It would be nice if something ticked down but you'll get a feel for it. Like my D.va feedback previously I think Zarya would benefit from having it clearer when she is being useful. I barriered up my friend as he was Reinhardt charged and he seemed to have no idea I'd saved his bacon in the heat of things. It's strange that Symmetra gets an automatic "thanks" for mashing shield as she comes out of spawn but allowing someone to absorb a D.va ultimate gets you nothing! Roadhog bug is still in this patch. Hopefully I'll catch it on record soon. Also:

It matches off a hidden MMR value.

Mmmh, you seriously do not want to publically show peoples skill ratings and highlight discrepancies in the averages. I could go into this and give examples, but the short version is: people are dicks, massive dicks, and the less ammo you can give them the better. You might as well streamline this sequence to a screen that gets the lowest level guy on your team, points to him, and says "hey, flame this guy. It's all his fault, what an uncarryable fucknut. This is why you're stuck in elo hell." I think an individual skill rating is cool, I like seasons like this in other games, I like tiered rewards, and I even like the ability to peacock. But it should be at peoples own discretion. "Then go Quick Play" is a bullshit argument as well, just to square that one away, putting up with toxic pricks is not a staple of competitive games.