The Overwatch 2 devs have revealed tests for 6v6 to return and determine if the game should permanently go back to the old format.
Lol. After all these years they're thinking of rolling back the 5v5 changes. To quote someone from Reddit:
PVE was dropped, heroes are free again, and now 6v6 is back. Blizzard spent the last couple of years turning overwatch 2 back into Overwatch 1.
Edit: See also the developer's blog post about this, which goes into great detail explaining their decisions over the year and how we got here. Really worth a read if you are (or were) an OW player.
Overwatch was so fun, the devs just kept adding and changing shit that we didn't need. OW2 is a complete distaster though, they can keep their predatory macrotransactions, just revert to the OW1 patch for everything else.
Non-essential and predatory are not mutually exclusive, especially given Blizzard's history of player manipulation. They have perfected the science of making you want someone that you don't need.
I appreciate the kind words, I was just joking around. I'm a happily taken man with a great girlfriend. To those considering bad choices, I promise the unknown is scary but has much greater rewards than going back to something that already failed.
Nobody is arguing that, I dont buy skins in games. The point is that a lot of people are cosmetic-minded and manipulated into spending large amounts of money on skins and other customisations, the system shouldnt exist.
I mean, cars aren't essential to existence either, just don't buy them <-- technically correct, but not at all a helpful statement when discussing car-price-related issues.
Microtransactions don't have to affect gameplay any more. The video games industry has successfully sold this narrative ("Please ignore cosmetic microtransactions mkay?!") while also raising a whole new generation of gamers that value ingame cosmetics to a social-interactions-affecting degree.
There's a reason kids laugh at one another over default skins in Fortnite or lack of cash in Roblox and so on.
Plus just as importantly, they normalize mtx on an industry level, making selling of other types of monetization easier in the future.
If cosmetics weren't important to players, people wouldn't spend money to buy them. We are human, we care about looks, that's why companies make so much money on cosmetics. So yes, it is important enough to dislike predatory microtransactions.
They actually changed that a while back, new heroes aren't in the battlepass any more, everyone gets them for free. I don't know how that works with the "new player experience" where you needed to win games to unlock the base heroes on a new account though.
Starting Season 10, all new heroes will be immediately unlocked when they launch. All existing heroes will also be unlocked for players. This means that heroes will no longer need to be unlocked through the Battle Pass to be playable in all game modes.
New players will still need to complete the first-time user experience to unlock heroes as they learn the ropes. Once the heroes from the original Overwatch roster have been unlocked, all Overwatch 2 heroes will also become available.
So unless there was another change, new players still need to play/win games in order to unlock the full roster.