Statements like that are just nonsense to me and honestly bothers me quite a lot.
I have been coaching people on and off for years now and I can tell you that the vast majority of people don’t even play live OW with any resemblance of strategy or even thought. I have seen gameplay from Bronze to GM and you’d be surprised at how much nonsense happens at every rank, obviously less and less as you get to diamond+ but it’s still pretty tragic.
Plat and below people don’t even know where to stand most of the time, what position to fight for and take and how and when to engage fights. People have mains who they haven’t understood how to play to the strengths of that hero.
Most of the time you see people just gunning towards the objective regardless of what heroes have been picked. Often people are in different 1v1s even when people are all together. Tanks who pick heroes that have synergy but don’t actually make use of those synergies, supports who don’t keep each other alive, hitscan players who don’t realize that high ground is generally a good place to be. Sometimes you see a few people on either team who actually seem to have a decent idea of what they should be doing but in general most people don’t.
I watched a plat player recently who picked Sigma and decided to go straight for the objective and basically squared off against a Reinhardt instead of playing positioning that makes sense for Sig that actually plays to the characters strengths. The strangest part is that it actually worked out for them because the person who picked Rein didn’t realize that they could just walk at the Sig and start to batter him.
It’s a complete mess.
Mind you I’m actually spending time watching the PoV of people who want to improve and they do, but first time I see their gameplay it’s rare that you see someone below diamond who actually gets it.
It’s not surprising that people who didn’t get live OW don’t get OW2 either. OW2 lost tank synergy and cut down on possible team comp combinations which was already more than people could realistically deal with. But other than that, it didn’t really lose much else. Even Push that people say is just death match has lots of strategy to it despite the flaws that the mode has, like insanely long spawn distances and that dumb curve on Colosseo before the last stretch towards completion.
Just because you don’t understand it or see it, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I don’t see how anyone can watch the good teams in OWL play and say it’s just death match or there’s no strategy, it just shows that you don’t understand the strategies of the game and you likely didn’t understand the ones of live OW either.
Being able to have pop off moments where one player can turn the fight does not make the game less strategic, it’s just rewarding someone for popping off.
I don’t care if you don’t like it, everyone has their preferences, but it’s just very weird when people are making claims like this when they just don’t get it.
