2300 UTC. 1900 Eastern. 1600 Pacific.

Overwatch unlocks for play later today. I’m pretty excited to jump back into the grind of unlocking and completing a new game again, and if the beta was any indication, I won’t rage out on it so much–especially considering matches usually take less than ten minutes to complete.

That’s one of the major sticking points that I have with trying to compete in the CS:GO matchmaking mode as presented in the client. I can’t handle the range of other people who play matchmaking–from players who don’t effectively communicate to those that would rather spam the dankest of memes and not even bother to try. It becomes a crap shoot as to whether or not I am going to be matched up with competent teammates and other players who seriously just want to try to play their best–or at least give an honest go at the game.

It’s not like I have thousands of hours in the game or anything, but when you end up playing at least forty or fifty minutes per map and being locked into playing with shit teammates who leave early, who decide not to listen, and/or who intentionally lose the game makes for a certain extra dramatic element that Valve isn’t addressing or making an effort to fix.

Sure, the Prime Matchmaking scheme they announced might help remove the more suspect accounts from matchmaking contention, but it won’t completely remove them unless they allow for Prime players to only be matched with other Prime players. I seriously doubt the likelihood of Valve attempting to fight off the epidemic of smurf accounts that are commonly used to circumvent the matchmaking system in the interest of not closing off additional vectors for revenue.

Meanwhile, I seem to be the only person in my group of friends that haven’t intentionally left a match in the Overwatch beta due to pure rage. I don’t see how I can get upset with a game that I will end up playing for an hour straight and not be limited to one match.

I might have been salty on more than one occasion with how our team’s composition might not have been effective against another team’s, but there always seems to be a rock, paper, scissors approach to composition strategy that’s fluid enough thanks to being able to swap between heroes during the respawn timer. However, I generally feel more confident in being able to suggest a character swap in Overwatch than I am to suggest a plan of attack in CS:GO.

Forget tactical strategy as a parallel, consider buytime in CS:GO. Entire classes of weapons are considered too unreliable to be used at a competitive level–leaving you with four rifles, four pistols and sometimes a shotgun. Maybe SMGs if you’re looking to out-play your opponents or play like a complete moron who can’t hit shots to save his life (as I end up being on a regular basis).

For some reason I don’t feel as critical about my teammate’s decisions in Overwatch when I was playing the beta. Perhaps that’s only a temporary thing, but I think that on the whole, I might find that I enjoy how Blizzard has casualized the team arena shooter while making it feel fun to play in a way that only Blizzard could.

I’m looking forward to this evening. For sure.

TLEP #033 – Overwatch Is So Damn Fun

OverwatchFollowing a week of upcoming shooters being announced and other contenders being released (like Battleborn, whatever that’s supposed to be), Overwatch’s open beta rightfully stole the weekend–not to mention the hype from everything else being released in the next two months. At least that’s how I see it. It reminds me of the best parts of Team Fortress 2 combined with Blizzard’s ability to rearrange the formula of a given genre (as in Heroes of the Storm) to make it better.

battlefield1-00Also, I didn’t make a post about Saturday’s episode at the time because of pressing personal reasons and exponentially worsening levels of panic attacks, but I talked about the Battlefield 1 announcement and tried to give it a little bit of a reality check–especially with regards to the series hit-and-miss esports relevancy.

As always, the podcast feed and episode list can be found on the lowercase esports podcast index.