I’m just trying to put my thoughts on paper here, and while this post might end up sounding to you like “League > Overwatch”, that’s certainly not what I’m aiming for. I want to compare how the developers treat their games and the reaction the community has as a result.
I just wanna hear your thoughts on this because honestly, it’s been on my mind for a long time. This is going to be a long wall of text, so if that’s not your piece of pie, it’s okay. I’ll leave a TL;DR at the end for the core of the argument.
League and Overwatch are the two games I play the most, or at least, this has been true until I started playing Divinity 2 with friends about a week back and we didn’t do anything else since.
To explain how much love I have for both games, I’ve been playing League since 2011 and I have 5 OVW accounts on PC, spread between Diamond to low Grandmaster. Or, at least, had. Thing is, I stopped playing Overwatch around the time Brigitte was released. It wasn’t Brigitte alone, it was DF, Moira, everything at the time, but those things weren’t enough to make me quit the game. You can joke about me being a horrible Tracer main who wasn’t wiling to adapt and, maybe I was, sure. But what made me leave was ultimately Blizzard’s silence and ignoring the community.
I do still play League however, even if I think inherently, it has more toxicity in it. League is, I think, one of the most toxic games with one of the most toxic communities out there, and this is also the public image the game has attained over the years. It’s true, there’s even more raging and flaming in chat than in OVW, but honestly, it’s easy to brush off in League. Why? Because it’s… literally every single game, out of 10 players, 5 will be badmouthin in all chat for the entire game. It’s something you get used to.
So is that why League is easier to stay interested in for me? No. I’m just saying it has even more toxicity to it, and as awful a company as Riot Games is, they also do one crucial thing Blizzard doesn’t: actually care about and update their game.
League has 150 or so characters. In a game, while there’s only one map, there’s also 300 items in the game that inherently change how your character players. A number of these will be broken beyond belief at ANY given moment, 100% of the time- either the character or an item build on them is busted. The game never feels close to balanced, it never did. It has, by sheer volume, a greater number of things that CAN be broken, compared to Overwatch. My argument isn’t that League is somehow superior because “more stuff”, however.
Now here’s where the core of this whole argument lies; Redundancy and caring about the game and the playerbase. Riot will pull a Blizzard often and not nerf something incredibly broken for half a year, for a year, sometimes for years- but they have something to fall back on.
There’s a numerous amount of things that Riot does with League that Blizzard could do with Overwatch that simply make League of Legends bearable on a week-to-week basis, while Overwatch… isn’t, at least to me.
Firstly, the amount of content in the game alongside a ban system. No matter who is broken beyond belief at any given time, the game will always remain interesting as every match will be unique. You have 5 idiots fighting 5 idiots and each team can only have a champion usually, meaning no doubles (at least, in the most played modes.) This means that, without accounting for playstyle, player action and reaction and the possible amount of item builds, just by the sheer amount of champions, there are an approximate forty-six quadrillion possible 5v5 matchups. This means that even though there are metas, every single game is different and basically every single character is a niche pick to its own playerbase.
This alone isn’t enough- I said this isn’t purely about the amount of content in the game. Yes, League has more sheer options than Overwatch, where you’re doing one of three basic objectives each game with a very very small roster in comparison, which gets boring really quickly. However, they’re different games and Overwatch, at least currently, can’t just pump out a million heroes and call it a day. (A ban system would be much appreciated however, I feel.)
No, here’s where the difference in developer care comes in. The main thing is, Riot updates the game every 2 weeks. Every 2 weeks, there’s balance changes. Every 2 weeks, they can admit they messed up on something and roll it back. Changes on the PBE (PTR basically) that are broken are usually fixed and rolled back immediately, they’re not stubborn with the “I can do no wrong” mentality like the folks at Blizzard. There’s new skins every 2 weeks. They roll a system of big patch-small patch, meaning in the span of a month, we’ll get one big balance update and one small balance update. This keeps the game fresh. Meanwhile, even though Overwatch’s seasons last shorter than a Toblerone in front of me, its meta doesn’t change for months and months and months and months on end. Add to this that there’s just so much less variety in the game, and it just feels like… the game doesn’t change and broken things are something you will have to deal with Every. Single. Game. For months.
Riot makes less money than Blizzard does and has a smaller team, yet they can pump out not only a bunch of quality content every 2 weeks (This might be harder for Overwatch as they need to create higher-res models, but even then there shouldn’t be a month without content being added.) but also more importantly, balance changes. League is also a free game, meaning Blizzard with a comparable playerbase (at least it used to be) who all paid for the game (not including lootboxes) more than has the means to update their game and care about the playerbase. They simply don’t. Like with all their games, they make something great and then neglect it until it starts dying.
Overall, League simply adds variety over and over and over again, keeping the game feeling fresh even after almost 8 years now.
Which game you prefer is entirely up to your own preferences and taste, but there is something to be said about the way Blizzard treats their playerbase and how infrequently this game gets updated and big problems get looked at.
TL;DR: A company that’s much smaller than Blizzard can update their much more complex game (due to the sheer number of possibilities in any one game) frequently twice a month and hear what their players are saying, while provably making equal or less money (it’s F2P) and having a smaller team to do so. They can also listen to the community and the awful problems they have with the game and try their best to change that, while it seems all Blizzard does is balance around OWL.
It feels like they put no effort into the community whatsoever, and it feels like they can’t even be bothered to patch it frequently. I loved this game, I love this game still, I’m simply starting to resent the developers behind it and their neglect.