Yeah, I wasn’t too impressed with it, though I can see why it’ll be popular. But, I already have it (figured I’d probably buy it anyway so I may as well get Tracer for HoTS) and if other people are playing I’ll definitely play.
Alright alright minions, I went ahead and ordered it, so you can order it too if you want to be one of the cool kids.
Make sure you get the $40 regular edition, Blizzard defaults to the $60 edition with the extra cosmetics. I mean, grab that if you want, but be aware there’s a $40 version.
Launch is tomorrow at 4pm pacific, you can preload now. A lot of us are getting it, probably enough to fill up a private game if we want to do that. It’s best to connect with me on steam since I’m always there and only sometimes on battle.net, but contact me either way if you want in.
SenorBeef#1394 on battle.net, just SenorBeef on steam.
EU or USA server? I’m getting it too, and I’d love to find a regular group to play with. I just happen to be in Germany, and this isn’t a game like Hearthstone where you can get away with playing mostly with people on the other side of the world. 
We’re all in the USA. You could try to play across the world, but that approach has some significant technical drawbacks. I’m not sure if Blizzard allows you to switch region freely or what.
I found some information on ranked mode. The good - they don’t treat assault and defense as being two independent, unrelated runs. The bad - they don’t do the obvious thing like I said and flip the map and start the countdown from the amount of time the other team took to win. Rather, you play attack/defense and if you each win one, you get a sudden death king of the hill over one control point. Better than nothing, but less than ideal. It’s going to come down to that sudden death a lot.
Also, I was hoping that competitive mode would mean 1 player per class/hero. I would be okay if casual was unlimited, but ranked mode enforced it, but it doesn’t. Seems like it’d be easier to balance the game around 1 player per hero anyway, and seems like something obvious that should be enforced in a ranked game.
Also, their ranking system is dumb:
So it has a Hearthstone-like “rank” system where it’s about grinding your way along, not an actual good league-based rank system like every other fucking half-decent game has. Even HOTS, their MOBA, is switching away from a dumb grinding rank system to a league system, and yet they make the same mistake with their new game.
Oh, sure, they make it seem superficially like a league system - by having leagues and ranks within those leagues - but reading the description it’s basically like Hearthstone. You get a fixed amount of points for winning, a fixed amount for losing, bonus points for a win streak, everyone starts at the basic rank and has to grind their way up.
And… I didn’t read the entire page before I wrote that. Yep:
So they’re basically using Hearthstone with divisions instead of ranks 25-1 to make it sound like it actually has a decent ladder system like csgo or rocket league or dota/lol or what HOTS will become.
I can’t believe they’re repeating Hearthstone’s monthly grind ladder system for a shooter.
The critical issue I forgot to mention is:
Will this have an mmr-based matchmaking system, but only have the façade of an artificial progression system on top of that, sort of like the current HOTS system? Or will your matchmaking rating actually be your monthly-resetting level like Hearthstone? Which would be an utter disaster because it would match people up who were very different in skill level based on how much they played that month.
Wow, a new season every month? That doesn’t sound like nearly enough time to sort the playerbase. It might work OK at the highest levels, where everyone is playing 15 hours a day, but all casual players are going to be indistinguishable from each other.
Why can first-person games not implement a third-person play perspective option as standard?
I - any many others, it must be said - despise being forced to play in the ‘disembodied arms’ view for the entirety of a game. If we want to aim / use “iron sights”, we’ll do so. But why must we traverse environments, suffering the myriad shortcomings inherent with this restrictive perspective, doing without the actions that are standard for the TP variety of games (cover, evasion, rolling etc.), just to appease the copy-paste mantra of this cancerously ubiquitous game genre…?? :dubious:
Moreover, what’s the point of character aesthetics when one cannot even see the character they’re controlling – only for others to see?! :smack:
It’s not just a matter of aesthetics, it’s a matter of game design. 3rd-person perspective gives a much broader view of the playing field. Making it a choice means it’s no longer a choice at all - players who don’t use 3rd-person perspective will be at a consistent disadvantage.
In other words, if you want to play a 3rd-person shooter, go play a 3rd-person shooter.
Man, maybe sounds like something you should avoid altogether…?
So you want to be able to choose to dodge, use cover, and have a wider perspective than everyone else while you play? You think that should be a standard option?
This is actually exactly what happened with the new Star Wars Battlefront.
They didn’t for Hearthstone, and I really wouldn’t want to play with that kind of ping anyways. Nuts. Ah well, guess I’ll have to look for a Kraut group. 
You won’t keep your cosmetic items between regions, but that doesn’t really matter. Otherwise you can change regions easily.
Launch day went really well. They were about 15 minutes late to launch the game, but once it was, everything went very smoothly. Surprisingly good considering there were probably roughly a billion people playing.
I guess they learned from Diablo III. Good on them.
…Anyone else depressed that “Launch day wasn’t a complete disaster” isn’t a given? 
But yeah, this game is taking up a lot of my free time. So much fun. I’ve fallen in love with Roadhog. Being able to just pick off annoying characters in one quick shot and being a constant threat at the margins because of how impossible it is to kill me? Fun stuff. (Oh yeah, fun fact: if you use Take A Breather, you can just facetank Hanzo’s ult. ) Also loving Symmetra - sure, her damage output is blech and have fun landing anything, but just getting and keeping one teleporter can be an absolute game-changer.
My wife got me to try it this weekend and I ended up purchasing it. We got a few 5-6 person groups together and we’ve had a lot of fun so far. As nearly everyone everywhere has already said, it feels a lot like TF2. Not a ton of actual content, but polished to brilliance. I hope they add new maps and game modes in a few months, or it will face the same problem as TF2, where some people will get bored with the repetition and lose interest.
I like how there are a wide range of characters with more specialized abilities than TF2. There’s a lot more options to accommodate different play styles. Each play type has at least two characters I feel comfortable with, and I’ve only been playing for two days. I can easily switch types to fill gaps in the team. The little notices on the character select screen about team deficiencies are also great, as they get people to make decisions based on team welfare rather than personal glory.
The replay system was a great idea. It gives you something to do while you wait to respawn. It helps you learn from your mistakes better, and reveals information about the enemy team, which forces everyone to keep changing up their tactics. A sniper or turret can’t just camp in one spot and rack up a ton of kills, because the replays give away their position.
I will probably be playing too much of this game.
You know, I’m no fan of the loot boxes, I just don’t really care about them, but I still sort of disagree with this. Blizzard is all about releasing new content for free (see Diablo II and III, with all their game-changing patches). The loot is uninteresting to me, but they’ve implemented it similarly to how Valve did TF2, and that worked out well for them for a very long time. Granted, TF2 was free-to-play by then, but still.
If you don’t care about the loot, like me, then just enjoy the game. The people who care enough to spend an extra $20 on the game for the “Origins” cosmetic stuff, or to spend extra money on loot boxes, are the ones subsidizing the additional content that is surely to come. It’s “pay to put stickers on your character” not “pay to win”, and I’m OK with that.
Missed the edit window. I also appreciate how Blizzard is only charging $40 for the game, and the normal $60 for the limited edition cosmetic stuff. The game is a bit light on actual content, so $40 seems right, but they toss in a few bonuses to people willing to pay the $60 that’s expected for Triple-A games these days.
If EA was publishing this game, the base game would have been $60 and the “deluxe” edition would have been $90. Not to mention the $30 Season Pass that would have entitled users to the next six months of added content, which Blizzard will probably be releasing for free.
Another design decision that really shows this off? Not displaying everyone’s K/D. Nobody cares if you’ve gone 5-1 running around the back with McCree, get on the point. Nobody cares if you’ve gone 2-7 with Reinhardt; you stuck with the payload for 80% of the time it was there. It’s all about what you can do for your team and the objective, and the game is really great about that.
It sounds like they’re trying to do the same thing for team shooters that they did for MOBAs in HotS: Focusing more on teamwork and good sportsmanship, and less on individual braggadocio. Good on them, and if only more companies would follow suit.
Symmetra is one of my top killers. Sentry turrets ftw!
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