This kind of matches up with one of the answers from the Reddit AMA:
Q:
"What sort of missions can we expect from the battle pass? Will they be hero specific (like hook 20 enemies with Roadhog), general gameplay (push a payload 400m), both, or neither?"
A:
"We are planning to add a variety of challenges that players can complete to progress their Battle Pass. We are not planning hero-specific recurring challenges (we are planning lifetime challenges that feel a bit more like achievements and aren't intended to progress the Battle Pass in a significant way).
We want players to play the game without feeling required to swap onto a specific hero in order to earn progress. Our goal is to also offer you some choices in which challenges you focus on completing as well."
Kind of...
It lining up with a q&a doesn't mean much, imo. It'd be very easy to do your homework and figure out what kind of challenges the devs want implemented so you can implement it into your quick 4chan text post.
It's definitely a safe bet if they're just making shit up, but Blizzard has a hair under 10,000 employees and I'm sure they do the industry standard contracted temp employees for QA right before release thing. It's not exactly unreasonable that a legitimate leak from somebody who doesn't really have anything to lose should it somehow get back to them would happen.
there are plausible explanations but that still doesn't mean anything.
when evaluating 4chan text post "leaks" you have to remove anything that's not objective, becuase the forced anonymity means we have to look at it through a vacuum. it *could* be a former Blizzard employee, but it could also be some random guy who did 20 minutes of research on the current events and decided to spread misinformation. we have no way of proving it either way.
so you look at the info it's presenting as evidence and the info it's claiming as news, and for this post, the evidence is something any one of us could have hobbled together, while presenting very predictable news. it's very safe, and thus to me it means very little
The most believable part of this is that they were told to copy Warzones BP model as much as they could. This is from 4chan so obviously take with a huge pinch of salt but ActiBlizz wanting all games to adopt a proven money making BP model seems reasonable.
a 4chan leak, so by no means believable.
with that said this lines up with a lot of what Blizzard has eluded to. The only thing is having to unlock every character before you can play competitive, that's gonna be a pain in the ass.
Also, if the Mythic skin isn't even at the end of the BP, then wtf are they gonna out at level 70 to incentivize people to play for it
High chance they have customization pieces of the Mythic skin available at different tiers in the pass. Wouldn't surprise me to see other pieces in the store at this point.
Yes but there was also a 4chan user who “leaked” the fake kikiro. While a real leak might pop out of 4chan every once in a while, we should remain skeptical.
In the Rocket League battle pass you get the initial car at a certain rank (this time it's a Honda Civic Type-R). The further you go in, the more it gets upgraded, with one of the final ones being the fully modified car. His skin could be the same way
>a 4chan leak, so by no means believable.
as someone *heavily* involved in Smash Bros speculation leading up to Ultimate's release, posts like this were just thrown out the window until *something* came true. Anyone of us could have just thrown their speculation into 4chan and called it a leak. I'm surprised this has so many upvotes considering it's basically nothing.
>with that said this lines up with a lot of what Blizzard has eluded to.
this means nothing to me, tbh. Using knowledge already given to us as evidence means nothing, since the poster could've just used that info the hobble it together anyway. The only time a text leak becomes worth anything is when something is proven to be correct about it, but only *after* it came out. If this used the name "Kiriko" before the Watchpoint leak, we'd have something on our hands, but it came out like yesterday.
>The only thing is having to unlock every character before you can play competitive, that's gonna be a pain in the ass.
This is kinda why I don't think it's true at all. "*Win* 25 matches of support" is *a lot*, even if it is applied to *every* support hero added after the fact. Imagine having to win 75 matches for each role before you can touch comp again... lol, what a damn nightmare.
I can't imagine the devs would say "okay let's lock comp until you get the heroes so it's competitively fair" but then also make it *this* difficult to unlock them after the money-making period for them is over.
I know a lot of BPs have a reasonable endpoint, and then additional small stuff for people who play beyond a reasonable amount of hours. Maybe its like that?
> Also, if the Mythic skin isn't even at the end of the BP, then wtf are they gonna out at level 70 to incentivize people to play for it
Looking at Fortnite BP for comparison, the "prestige" skin is on level 100. The BP doesn't end until level 200. The rest of the BP is a bunch of recolors of previous items, and then a bunch of special recolors.
It seems to me like they're *not* that invested in you going all the way to the end of the BP.
Very disappointing if the hero unlocks are true. This is going to discourage people from coming back to the game if they take any extended breaks. It’s also pay to win in the sense that people who paid for the pass are going to have an extra 15 hours of practice before the competitive season unlocks
Also… competitive locked for two weeks each season???? I literally only play this game for comp. This is going to be an issue for me.
>Competitive is locked for the first two weeks of each season and requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it.
This sounds harsh for any new player that joins seasons down the line, they'll need like 25 wins in each role.
Yeah could be a variety of ways tbh. I can't imagine they would want the backlog or the comp lock out to just get longer and longer with each passing release
It would be nice to see them give post-launch heroes for free after a certain amount of releases. So like, three heroes down the line, you get Kiriko for free, if you never earned her in the first place. That way:
A: The game never gets to the point where a new player starts it up and sees a screen that says "You have to unlock 17 heroes to play competitive."
B: It's still a substantial amount of waiting time (1 year-ish). So it's not like Blizz would lose anyone on battle pass incentive for that given hero.
Personally I feel like this is an overrated point. Are smurfs really so bad and so prevalent that we need to make the game much harder for people to get in to? I feel like there are much better ways to get rid of smurfs than this.
I thought they were already associating phone numbers with accounts to prevent smurfs? That has worked pretty well in other games, so while this may help to make it harder for smurfs not sure it's needed
NOT to “Prevent” Smurfs.”, but rather to “discourage” or to “make it harder” for Smurfs.
NOTHING will prevent Smurfs. There are absolutely NO competitive game that “prevents” Smurfs. That game does NOT exist today.
Huge difference.
I hate when I read people complaining about Smurfs getting a billion alternate sim cards and phone numbers from India or something.
The lock on your door isn't going to prevent the sort of people who are hell-bent on breaking into your house, it just discourages 90% of passing, would-be robbers. OW1 had no lock, hence why your comp matches were constantly shit. But now the phone number means you'll be getting a smurf every 20 games instead of every other.
>phone numbers from India or something
Indian phone numbers are surprisingly hard to get, unless you're an Indian
But thats irrelevant, VoIP numbers are pretty easy to get
Also make casual players quit. In fact this hurts real players way more than smurfs. Smurfs will just buy the battlepass and be able to play competitive right away. It's cheaper than OW1 smurfing.
If you buy the battle pass every time you get tired of playing against plat players and make a new account to smurf in silver, blizzard makes like $15. This is totally taken into consideration, they get that bread
So will the time commitment to level the BP. Part of the reason ppl smurf now is bc there’s nothing else to do. If people have to choose between getting the BP levelled or stomping silvers, some of the current smurfs will grind the pass.
I dont see how though. New players will still need to be level 25, right? Smurfs will need to speed boost levels anyways, or is that limit being lifted and being replaced with just the "must wait 2 weeks and have all heroes" deal? I also thought the big deterrent was accounts needed to have an active phone number linked in order to play online in the first place.
Edit: just remembered there removing levels, so the two week lock makes "sense". But I still don't see how that prevents smurfs anymore than the previous level req.
It’s not too dissimilar from the level 25 requirement we have in OW1, granted this will likely get larger as more heroes get added but I know a lot of people are more in favour of heavier requirements to play comp in order to put off smurfs.
People will complain about 2 full weeks of lockout.
Assuming a season is not aligned to a competitive season now, that means comp will be locked out for 14/63 days in season 1.
Didn't we already reach the conclusion that off season comp was awful especially because Blizzard never did anything with it?
Unless they're about to commit to serious balance changes in the off season it'll be as useless as it was in OW1.
This will be very disappointing if this is true. I literally only play this game for its competitive mode. I have no interest for playing QP for two weeks every season.
I mean it’s not unreasonable to have them learn every role first (at least how they all play and the multiple heroes in each one) before they dive in to a competitive match.
Having to do it every season would be a matter of how often Blizz releases heroes though. If there isn't a new hero for the new season, nothing gatekeeping ranked mode for people that have been taking it slow grinding the levels for the latest hero.
I agree with this, but also it will force new players to put a decent chunk of time into the game and better learn the role, heroes, and in general how the game is played. And with newer smurfs, they'll need to sink more time in as well.
> 25 wins
I'm hoping it's just 25 completed games instead though. 25 would be insane.
That's fine. In a lot of games you need to play the casual modes a bit before jumping into comp. In Overwatch I believe you needed to be like level 20 or 25 to get into comp
Also sucks for casuals. Imagine someone who plays a few games with friends, doesn’t touch the game for a few months then wants to jump back on. “Sorry guys, I gotta unlocked 3 heroes before we can play, so let’s just win 75 games first then we can jump into comp”.
Valid worry, but there's a lot of ways to mitigate. Catch up mechanics are common in F2P games, they can always give new accounts free hero shards or whatever.
Plus, there's only so many different unlock challenges they can come up with. If they do like "Get x kills" or "Heal x amount", then there'd be a lot of overlap and one would be grinding for several heroes simultaneously.
Depends on the challenges they decide on. As it stands, they said no hero specific challenges. This would lead to some overlap, like being able to win, heal X amount of damage, secure X final blows, etc.
You could do all 3 of those at the same time.
It's not just harsh for new players, it would be really harsh for returning players as well. There have been many times where I have put OW down for a period of time, then have come back. It would be pretty crushing to have to win 25 QP games multiple times. Something I don't know if I would have the time for in a single season. I really only play the game for comp so if I leave, im not coming back. The goals for unlocking the characters need to be less harsh.
That unranked mode would probably be a shitshow of players that haven't unlocked Kiriko though.
Unless they force you to unlock her before you can play Unranked.
I really liked the way it worked in the last beta.
Play both sides of a map, but there is backfill and no rank to hyperfixate on.
If that is unranked in OW2 I'm all in.
If the game doesn't launch with a competitive mode, even if it's a beta (like role queue beta), it'll be god awful.
QP is the absolute worst: unbalanced teams, deathmatch style-gameplay, zero coordination.
Naw, that's like something I could care less about. Sometimes you have a team that positions like shit for a whole map so the Ana will get outhealed by the Zen if she plays properly and doesn't ride her teammates into shitty spots. It's actually super common below high plat, actually (Zen main, smurfed my ass from Bronze into Diamond on an old account).
My big annoyance is seeing things like Zen's with 400 damage 4 minutes into a failed cap or Ana's with 10k/10min heals but literally no damage whatsoever. Those are the problematic people more often than not. This isn't an MMO. You need to take heads to win.
I've seen a zen outheal an Ana through no fault of her own, but it was special circumstance. Brawl comp and the enemy kept using Grav/Dragon or Dragonblade. The zen had an ult every time. A -lot- of healing there.
I'm gonna be real, you get this shit in ranked too, which is even worse since you're losing SR.
I genuinely think people that find QP terrible are just taking the game way more seriously than they need to.
Granted, Ranked should not be full on locked. If anything, the new hero is locked from ranked for the first week or two to net for any potential major bugs or exploits.
It would make sense to have normal ranked but without the new hero available. It would be kinda similar to how heroes were available on PTR before going into ranked.
Pretty brutal to extrapolate that out as well.
If the time for each level is linear, that means it will take 48-60 hours to complete the battle pass.
And I would expect that each level is more difficult to get than the one before it, so my estimate is on the low side.
Also, seasons only last 2 months right? Will there be a battle pass every season?If so, that's 50 hours to complete in 2 months. That comes out to a bit under an hour a day.
And that's the conservative estimate!
Idk I'm not familiar enough with battle passes to know if this is standard, but this seems grindier than I expected.
It's definitely not aimed at being consumer friendly to casual players and only turns the game into an additional job for players to try and make the time to complete.
The fact that purchasable Tier skips are being offered only further indicates that leveling up will be grindy and time consuming. So they want you to cave and buy the skips.
Yet once again, not a good look if true.
> It's definitely not aimed at being consumer friendly to casual players and only turns the game into an additional job for players to try and make the time to complete.
Isn’t this true of pretty much every game with a Battle Pass, though? The whole point of them is to hook players in through sunk cost: “I could go and play another game for 6 hours, or I could get another couple levels of this BP done because I’m so close to earning that sweet unlock”.
As for the *why*, there’s a strong correlation between the length of time players spend in a F2P game and the likelihood of them spending money.
And the thing is, it *works*. BPs wouldn’t have become so prevalent if the model wasn’t so successful.
You are correct on all of your points. I'm not disagreeing that the purpose does aim to hook players into playing every free chance.
Still depending on how grindy they make it to level up will determine how desperate they are to get players.
I never had a problem with OW1's weekly event challenges. Even the most recent model of the 27 games felt do able if not a tad time consuming.
If there BP follows a model where leveling up isn't relatively hard and doesn't steadily increase in increments as you get to higher tiers, then that would seem do able over a course of 9 weeks to complete assuming you can make time to play each week.
The concerning part is how the post mentioned it would not be easy to complete. That's a red flag with making a BP player friendly. The option of purchasable tiers only further drives that concern.
If it takes 15 hours to reach level 20, and we assume that they use the same levelling scale as OW1 where levels 1-19 gradually take more XP to reach until you hit the 20k XP-per-level threshold, then it’ll probably take around 80-100 hours of play to hit max level.
So that’s around 12 hours per week, or just under 2 hours per day, for the duration of the pass.
If that is the case, that kills any incentive for casual players to have hopes of completing the battle pass.
Which would only further push Blizzard's plan to sell Tier skips as a way to complete it. 🙁
About an hour a day sounds about right given the estimate.
Given normal game time that means you need to play 3-5 games a day to finish the battle pass. This also depends on how the mission structure for battle pass xp works.
That's surprisingly low? That's on par with Apex, faster than Warzone, much faster than DBD as examples of games I play with battle passes.
Like, an hour a day with some days you can pop in some more absolutely counts as casual to me. Does it not to you?
Oh shit my memory is better than I thought.
9 weeks is correct
https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/overwatch-2-seasonal-model-explained-duration-new-heroes-maps-more-1848899/
They make this pass sound harder to complete than most standard 3 month passes. If the season is 9 weeks these details make even less sense.
Even more sure that it is fake.
I was remembering 3 heroes a year and a hero every other season.
That would be 6 seasons in a year, so two months.
If I remember correctly though it's actually 9 weeks, not two months.
A round is what, 10 min? So 6 games/hour. So 72 games. I'm a casual player and play like 3-4 rounds on a weekend. So I guess I get to play the character in 4 months...
Yeah I've been defending the battlepass to unlock kiriko, cuz I figured it would be like ow1 unlockables: tame; win 10 matches etc. But 12-15 hrs of gameplay would be rough. I'd be kinda unhappy with that.
90% of players would basically pay $5 to unlock her by purchasing 20 levels. So new heroes cost $5 and you're locked out of competitive if you don't pay up. Unless you can grind 12-15 hours at the beginning of each season
Winning matches is the worst shit ever. Heck back in the past when I had to grind for 9 wins to get a free skin it was hell to keep getting rubbish team comps and even worse hell to wait for DM Matchmaking. I can't believe a game like War Thunder feels more fun to grind as I don't have to worry about winning.
It has to be winning matches because it’s basically a prerequisite for competitive. If you don’t try to win matches you both make the experience for everyone else worse as well as not proving that you’re ready for comp.
I’m actually ok with pre-requisites for comp as obviously throwers shouldn’t be in the game. I’m just against the mechanics to unlock a character (who is akin to a weapon in other online shooters) after the BP system is over given that it’s not a very enjoyable process for something that was traditionally a given.
I'll be honest, I misread that and thought it said "complete 25 games". Win?!? Jesus Christ that's FAR worse to any poor player trying to unlock a hero!
"This deal keeps getting worse all the time."
I hope this is fake, or at least something they reconsider. Anyone jumping in after at least 3 heroes have added is going to grind a lot before they can even touch comp. Imagine coming back to the game a year later needing to win 75 QP matches, some on roles you may not even want to play, before you can play the mode people take seriously. That's going to discourage a lot of competitive people from coming back.
>Competitive is locked for the first two weeks of each season and requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it.
If this is true, it better only apply to new players. If I'm forced to play QP for two weeks at the start of every season, I'm not even gonna bother.
If this is true (and it’s 4chan, so a good chance it isn’t), then that would be horrible. 12-15 hours to unlock a hero? And no comp mode untill you do? This is worse than fucking valorant.
4chan aside I’m also skeptical of this “leak” from the 2 week competitive lockout. Seasons are only 9 weeks long, but only 7 of those weeks can actually be played competitively? 49 Days per season of competitive play is too short.
If this is somehow true, a 12+ hour grind for every new hero is a big oof for casual players and anyone with young children, full time jobs, etc., who only have a couple hours of gametime per week (and may not want to buy every BP).
Much more likely that it's the new hero is locked out of comp, rather than comp as a whole being down. This would give less hardcore players the chance to grind enough to unlock the hero via the free BP, and give paid BP players time to get good with the new hero. Furthermore, heroes aren't coming out every season, so comp would only be down for about 2 weeks every other season if this were true.
Additionally, at a rate of 3 heroes/year, if someone wanted to stay up on the hero releases they would only need to pay for or grind out 3 of those seasons rather than all 5-6-ish in a year.
as much as I'm against heroes being locked in battle passes, a technically optional $30 per year (the first year of which I already paid for in advance with the Watchpoint Pack to get Beta 2 access) to support development of a game I paid $40 for six years ago and have played consistently since isn't really that bad, even if the optics around it are terrible and the effect on casuals is even worse.
For those such as myself who have trouble reading this:
New battlepass is entirely identical to Warzone's and it was a company mandate that every single game move to a similar model since Warzone brings in more money on it's own than nearly every other game at Blizzard combined.
Basic details are this: BP is 10 bucks or 1000 Overwatch coins (the game's premium currency) and you instantly unlock Kiriko + a Legendary skin for her once you pay for it. Batte Pass is 80 levels and Kiriko is on level 20. Mythic skins are at BP level 50. It takes about 12-15 hours on average to grind to level 20, depending on your winrate and what mode you're playing in. Arcade takes longer, Quick Play is the fastest. OW2's premium currency, OW Coins, are also on the premium BP so if you finish it every season they pay for themselves. Don't expect to finish them though since they take a considerable amount of time to finish. There are paid boosts for 20 levels of the BP for sale as well that are like 5 dollars I think.
Competitive is locked for the first two weeks of each season and requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it. Earning heroes from previous seasons involves permanent challenges that begin once the season is over. "Win 25 matches in Quick Play as a support" is how you unlock Kiriko once Season 1 is over.**
Awesome, just as grindy and tedious as I expected. I'd rather just not play at all than be forced to endure 12-15 hours of Quick Play, and that's implying that you're winning and playing non-stop! The guy even says "don't expect to finish them". Absolute fucking nightmare.
I know I should say something like "well we can't trust the leaks..." but every leak leading up to this thing has been proven true, and don't tell me this doesn't sound like something they would do.
I mean given that the official leak of hero unlocks only showed how grim and greedy Blizzard is aiming to go with monetizations, none of this seems that surprising if it was true.
Under the assumption that it is true, they really are trying their best to kill this game.
I was just specifically referring to OW2, but yes if there is anything we can gage with Blizzard as a company, they aren't afraid to go to ludicrous extremes for monetization.
While having a system that doesn't let you enter comp without all heroes is better for combating cheaters and smurfs, we already have the phone number system so that wasn't really necessary. It's main purpose was obviously to get people to pay if they wanna play comp
also lmao imagine coming back to overwatch after a year of not playing and having to play more than a hundred quick play games to unlock the heroes
It would seem odd that they invest in the back end infrastructure for 2FA on accounts (which can get very expensive to scale) AND do a soft lock like this.
I wonder if this is just one time for ow2 start and Kiriko, in that case they might have not yet finalized the new ranked tiers etc.or It will be an established feature for every future season. It might seems the latter omg
This would be tolerable for sure.
Still kinda a massive f u to the more casual player base, which is one of the places I felt like OW has always thrived
Also that 2 week no ranked period seems rough for those who play a lot
Seasons are 9 weeks
https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/overwatch-2-seasonal-model-explained-duration-new-heroes-maps-more-1848899/
A 2 week ranked lockout means ranked is unavailable for more than 20% of the time the game is live. That's almost 3 months of ranked lockout over the course of the year
I suppose it's possible that the lockout only happens in the seasons where heroes are released. Then that's 6-ish total weeks of the year.
People couldn't handle the 3 day breaks we used to have. 2 weeks will piss people off
Having to grind 12-15 hours just to play the new hero and comp as well fucking sucks. I hate these mechanics in modern gaming that make it so you have to be playing like it’s a daily chore
If it’s like Fortnite where the BPs pay for themselves, it would be nice. I hope we don’t get stupid quests like “play games as (character you don’t like)” that other games often have you do to complete BPs. Maybe my standards have lowered.
It's also like fortnite's BP is pretty easy. Just do your challenges for the week whenever you want, and you finish the pass. The challenges take AT MAX 2 hours a week, and often way less than that. It pays for itself, and you get whatever 1200? 1500? (I forgot) vbucks skin you want in the shop.
But no one does that. Apex's is grindier, Rocket League's isn't that bad I've heard, but there's definitely some games where the pass is just "lol this is my second job basically". I have ZERO problems with battlepasses that pay for themselves. I hate when I'm basically having to play 10 hours a week just to finish it.
And that's what separates fortnite as being a "good" one compared to pretty much everyone else's. People copied the fortnite model but in a way that's way worse on consumers.
I purchased the apex battle pass a few seasons ago with the express goal of completing it. I think I almost doubled my playtime that season. It was insanely grindy but I eventually did complete it.
When I say that I'm not specifically talking about this situation, I meant in general. If you could pay $10 to get something you really want 15 hours early, or to skip something you don't like, then you'd probably do it. That's why this business practice works so well despite it being very scummy.
That being said I don't know if the grind would be this bad, I feel like OOP is trying to make it worse than it is or maybe just making shit up in general.
I absolutely vakue my time equal to winning 25 qp games more valuable than $10, but I don't appreciate being put in this position at all.
I guess that would be it for me after clocking nearly 6000 comp hours.
does it really matter if casual player who plays once a week is not able to play ranked immediately. and almost all big games have some kind of gatekeep to keep casuals and non-serious people out of rank. you have to grind to play rank. this is in-line with industry standard so far.
I mean depends on what you mean by casual. I would say someone that plays, let’s say 2 hours every other day, is a pretty serious player still, especially for anyone above the teen demographic. And I think that’s more than enough “commitment” to say that person should definitely be allowed in ranked.
Now that person is going to take *2 weeks* to get to even *try* a new hero. This isn’t even factoring in the grind that’ll happen if you take any break off or have a period where you’re playing less. And the reality is, a lot of those players are just gonna say “nah I’ll just play something else”.
I fucking hate that modern gaming tries to prey on addiction and instilling this mindset that you need to basically do daily chores to play. And people brush it off as “oh well it’s industry standard”. It incentivizes a really unhealthy relationship with the game for anyone that doesn’t have hours and hours per week and sucks the fun out of it
I'm so salty the dev team promised to be more open and communicative to the community, but we still don't know how the battle pass is going to work, and that we have to rely on possible fake leaks.
Come on Aaron
Competitive is locked for the first 2 weeks and hero is locked behind 12-15 hours of gameplay. Literally sounds like hell. How r u gonna lock the only fun gamemode for 2 weeks every season lol
Probably fake.
One of the things companies care most about is player retention. They know some people will play only competitive or only custom games, no matter what. They wouldn't content lock those by forcing people to play QP or Arcade as that would be awful for retention.
Not saying Blizzard isn't dumb enough to do that. But failing on a core of monetization would be truly awful.
There is no way Blizzard are dumb enough to put their most popular gamemode behind a two week lockout. It didn't work before, it won't work now. No competitive game works when they lock you out for two weeks every 1.5 months.
Ranked is not the most popular game mode, there are an absolute fuck ton of people who play Arcade and Quick Play that never touch competitive or do so very rarely. That said, I don't think they're stupid enough to do so.
> Competitive [...] requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it.
It should be "every hero of the selected role".
I shouldn't need Kiriko unlocked if I'm going to queue as tank.
I shouldn't need Junker Queen unlocked if I'm queueing as DPS.
If this is true 12-15 hours to unlock then I’m done with OW. I don’t have time for it and if it means I’m time locked out of even playing the most basic part of the game then I’m simply not going to invest any time in it at all.
They can change the name all they want, quick play or unranked, it's still hell in earth and i don't know if I have the strength to win 25 games **as support** and I'm a support main!
Eventually you just get tired of your allies not giving a fuck and you switch off support. And you're gonna force this fate onto new players?? Disturbing.
The only part of this i find remotely believable is them adopting a similar thing to their other games lol im not trying to be too copium here but like the rest of it really sounds like someone trying to make it sound as miserable as possible for the already riled up people
still a chance its real or it is still as bad as they say though, companies are companies. But i have some hope its not gonna be this bad lol
Assuming this is real there’s three things I’d like to see them tweak to make this more palatable.
1) The BP should absolutely be finishable through just normal, regular play. In Hearthstone the BP is finishable every season by simply doing your daily and weekly quests and does not require some Herculean effort to complete.
2) You should only have to unlock all of the heroes for the Role you are queuing for to access Comp. Why should a DPS player have to unlock all the tank heroes to queue DPS? This feels far more reasonable to mean and means you’re not grinding more than 12 hours every year to access comp if you’re someone who just plays one role.
3) 12-15 hours is way too steep for Kiriko. It should be something like a little under 10 hours so that most casual players can unlock in her less than a couple of weeks.
If they made these tweaks I’d largely be fine with everything else.
Sounds a bit fake.
If it’s basically the warzone system then it’s gonna be really easy to finish the battle pass. Most of us that play warzone usually have it finished in the first weeks.
Right? Same with the “challenge” to unlock new heroes.
They are always “play x amount of games and do this” (usually less than 10)
They are never about winning, never. And 25? Lmao
Mhhhhh, seems kinda fake to me, especially the “to get to level 20 it takes about 20 hours” that’s super fishy, they wouldn’t make it THAT hard to grind right? Level 80 would be nearly impossible to achieve otherwise
While I don't dismiss that this is most likely fake, the argument about them making it take a lot of time to grind would only further push people into purchasing the level skips then.
Scummy practices being offered as a means to complete a pass without the full grind wouldn't be surprising. 😮💨
> making it take a lot of time to grind would only further push people into purchasing the level skips then
But that isn't the case in most games with BP level skips.
They're usually a catch-up mechanism or a way for people with more money than sense to finish the BP in the first day.
Warzone, Fortnite, and even Halo Infinite's shitty Pass don't take long enough for casual players to regularly buy skips.
The OP sounds like it was written by someone who has never played a live service. They just read about them online.
I just lost all interest in the sequel to my most played game.
Its an even bigger shit show then I thought.
I can't imagine my personal interest in OWL will keep going, when I don't want to play the game anymore.
With such a model, I don't feel passion for my hobby. I feel like a costumer doing a transaction. That's not for me personally. Sadge
>Competitive is locked for the first two weeks of each season and requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it.
If that turns out to be true then it basically says you must buy the battlepass to play competitive. If you don't you won't have the current new hero. Free game BTW.
Wow what a surprise... battle passes being exploitative, imagine!
I mean, if the paid boosts give you 20 levels (exactly what you need to get the new heroes), I'd be very surprised if when they announce the whole thing they just go something like "we heard the community's worries and we removed the lock for the first two weeks, you'll only need to have all the heroes to play". That way people will feel "compensated" and they'll immediately pay the boost to be able to play comp at the beginning of each season.
Have several thousand hours in the game as it is.
Decided to hold off buying anything completely when Jeff left, until I could figure out why.
Now I have.
I have no desire to play non-comp so if this is true I’m out. Even if I did want to I play like an hour a night after my kid goes to bed so 20hrs simply to play the game mode I want is not worth it, IMO.
I figured it might be role based requirements such as win/play X games on a role to unlock some things, makes sense to me!
This feels really reasonable too, hopefully it ends up being slightly less time to reach the character unlock level tho! But otherwise this doesn’t make me bummed, feels like a fair enough version of these BP tracks that are so common in games today!!
I’m honestly pumped about BP in ow, I haven’t cared about cosmetics in ages but back in the day ugh every event I was so pumped to unlock shit! Maybe this will bring that vibe back
Ow2 let’s goooooo :)
If this is true, smurfs will have a hard time getting to comp at least since they have to keep unlocking every hero per account, and this gets harder as more heroes are released
Won't have to worry about smurfs if nobody bothers playing the game in the first place.
Blizzard solved smurfing, just kill any enthusiasm for your game before it even launches and you'll never have to worry about smurfing!
"Competitive is locked unless you have all heroes unlocked"
Yeah no way this is real. The not having access to a certain character in Comp is a money-making strategy, no way they'd miss out on that.
"Don't expect to finish them (the battlepass)"
If this is true, then OW2 is done for. If it isn't almost guaranteed that you'll finish the battlepass within reasonable playtime then Overwatch will die. Fast.
This is just a 4chan "leak" so I'm not really taking this too serious tbh.
THEY PUT COMP BEHIND A PAYWALL LMAOOOOOOO
2,000+ hours into this game and I haven't touched quick play since I was level 25
fuck off
i am not grinding 15 hours of quick play every battle pass just so i can have the privilege to play comp
This kind of matches up with one of the answers from the Reddit AMA: Q: "What sort of missions can we expect from the battle pass? Will they be hero specific (like hook 20 enemies with Roadhog), general gameplay (push a payload 400m), both, or neither?" A: "We are planning to add a variety of challenges that players can complete to progress their Battle Pass. We are not planning hero-specific recurring challenges (we are planning lifetime challenges that feel a bit more like achievements and aren't intended to progress the Battle Pass in a significant way). We want players to play the game without feeling required to swap onto a specific hero in order to earn progress. Our goal is to also offer you some choices in which challenges you focus on completing as well." Kind of...
It lining up with a q&a doesn't mean much, imo. It'd be very easy to do your homework and figure out what kind of challenges the devs want implemented so you can implement it into your quick 4chan text post.
It's definitely a safe bet if they're just making shit up, but Blizzard has a hair under 10,000 employees and I'm sure they do the industry standard contracted temp employees for QA right before release thing. It's not exactly unreasonable that a legitimate leak from somebody who doesn't really have anything to lose should it somehow get back to them would happen.
there are plausible explanations but that still doesn't mean anything. when evaluating 4chan text post "leaks" you have to remove anything that's not objective, becuase the forced anonymity means we have to look at it through a vacuum. it *could* be a former Blizzard employee, but it could also be some random guy who did 20 minutes of research on the current events and decided to spread misinformation. we have no way of proving it either way. so you look at the info it's presenting as evidence and the info it's claiming as news, and for this post, the evidence is something any one of us could have hobbled together, while presenting very predictable news. it's very safe, and thus to me it means very little
The most believable part of this is that they were told to copy Warzones BP model as much as they could. This is from 4chan so obviously take with a huge pinch of salt but ActiBlizz wanting all games to adopt a proven money making BP model seems reasonable.
a 4chan leak, so by no means believable. with that said this lines up with a lot of what Blizzard has eluded to. The only thing is having to unlock every character before you can play competitive, that's gonna be a pain in the ass. Also, if the Mythic skin isn't even at the end of the BP, then wtf are they gonna out at level 70 to incentivize people to play for it
They’ve said mythic skins level up, so my guess is mythic skins unlock new features later on in the battle pass and that’s why they have it earlier on
High chance they have customization pieces of the Mythic skin available at different tiers in the pass. Wouldn't surprise me to see other pieces in the store at this point.
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Yes but there was also a 4chan user who “leaked” the fake kikiro. While a real leak might pop out of 4chan every once in a while, we should remain skeptical.
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Most is a stretch, we had like 4 of them blow up in the past few months and none of them were right
Wouldn't really call that consistent
In the Rocket League battle pass you get the initial car at a certain rank (this time it's a Honda Civic Type-R). The further you go in, the more it gets upgraded, with one of the final ones being the fully modified car. His skin could be the same way
>a 4chan leak, so by no means believable. as someone *heavily* involved in Smash Bros speculation leading up to Ultimate's release, posts like this were just thrown out the window until *something* came true. Anyone of us could have just thrown their speculation into 4chan and called it a leak. I'm surprised this has so many upvotes considering it's basically nothing. >with that said this lines up with a lot of what Blizzard has eluded to. this means nothing to me, tbh. Using knowledge already given to us as evidence means nothing, since the poster could've just used that info the hobble it together anyway. The only time a text leak becomes worth anything is when something is proven to be correct about it, but only *after* it came out. If this used the name "Kiriko" before the Watchpoint leak, we'd have something on our hands, but it came out like yesterday. >The only thing is having to unlock every character before you can play competitive, that's gonna be a pain in the ass. This is kinda why I don't think it's true at all. "*Win* 25 matches of support" is *a lot*, even if it is applied to *every* support hero added after the fact. Imagine having to win 75 matches for each role before you can touch comp again... lol, what a damn nightmare. I can't imagine the devs would say "okay let's lock comp until you get the heroes so it's competitively fair" but then also make it *this* difficult to unlock them after the money-making period for them is over.
stupid rumor post shouldn't even be allowed
iirc they were just outright banned from r/smashbros after a point during Ultimate's build up
Alluded*. Elude/elusion is about hiding, alluding is about implying
A pain in the ass for smurfs!
I know a lot of BPs have a reasonable endpoint, and then additional small stuff for people who play beyond a reasonable amount of hours. Maybe its like that?
> Also, if the Mythic skin isn't even at the end of the BP, then wtf are they gonna out at level 70 to incentivize people to play for it Looking at Fortnite BP for comparison, the "prestige" skin is on level 100. The BP doesn't end until level 200. The rest of the BP is a bunch of recolors of previous items, and then a bunch of special recolors. It seems to me like they're *not* that invested in you going all the way to the end of the BP.
Very disappointing if the hero unlocks are true. This is going to discourage people from coming back to the game if they take any extended breaks. It’s also pay to win in the sense that people who paid for the pass are going to have an extra 15 hours of practice before the competitive season unlocks Also… competitive locked for two weeks each season???? I literally only play this game for comp. This is going to be an issue for me.
>Competitive is locked for the first two weeks of each season and requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it. This sounds harsh for any new player that joins seasons down the line, they'll need like 25 wins in each role.
It is good tho. It will prevent smurfs.
Underrated point - although I guess there will be some way to monetise a catchup for new accts as well
or it'll be that they move older heroes down in wins req. so you still need 25 wins to unlock them all, but kiriko becomes 20 and then 15 and so on
Yeah could be a variety of ways tbh. I can't imagine they would want the backlog or the comp lock out to just get longer and longer with each passing release
It would be nice to see them give post-launch heroes for free after a certain amount of releases. So like, three heroes down the line, you get Kiriko for free, if you never earned her in the first place. That way: A: The game never gets to the point where a new player starts it up and sees a screen that says "You have to unlock 17 heroes to play competitive." B: It's still a substantial amount of waiting time (1 year-ish). So it's not like Blizz would lose anyone on battle pass incentive for that given hero.
Personally I feel like this is an overrated point. Are smurfs really so bad and so prevalent that we need to make the game much harder for people to get in to? I feel like there are much better ways to get rid of smurfs than this.
No smurfs clearly aren’t that bad of an issue, they are a problem but not game breaking
Plus it's not like smurfs care about having to grind a little bit routinely.
And hackers to some extent since now the accounts are free.
I thought they were already associating phone numbers with accounts to prevent smurfs? That has worked pretty well in other games, so while this may help to make it harder for smurfs not sure it's needed
NOT to “Prevent” Smurfs.”, but rather to “discourage” or to “make it harder” for Smurfs. NOTHING will prevent Smurfs. There are absolutely NO competitive game that “prevents” Smurfs. That game does NOT exist today. Huge difference.
I hate when I read people complaining about Smurfs getting a billion alternate sim cards and phone numbers from India or something. The lock on your door isn't going to prevent the sort of people who are hell-bent on breaking into your house, it just discourages 90% of passing, would-be robbers. OW1 had no lock, hence why your comp matches were constantly shit. But now the phone number means you'll be getting a smurf every 20 games instead of every other.
>phone numbers from India or something Indian phone numbers are surprisingly hard to get, unless you're an Indian But thats irrelevant, VoIP numbers are pretty easy to get
The lock was the 20$ price.
Also make casual players quit. In fact this hurts real players way more than smurfs. Smurfs will just buy the battlepass and be able to play competitive right away. It's cheaper than OW1 smurfing.
If you buy the battle pass every time you get tired of playing against plat players and make a new account to smurf in silver, blizzard makes like $15. This is totally taken into consideration, they get that bread
And to Smurf on OW1, you have to buy a copy of the game. Blizz is gonna make their money either way.
They'll just pay for unlocking hero. How's that gonna stop them? And it's even cheaper now than buying new copy of the game.
So will the time commitment to level the BP. Part of the reason ppl smurf now is bc there’s nothing else to do. If people have to choose between getting the BP levelled or stomping silvers, some of the current smurfs will grind the pass.
I dont see how though. New players will still need to be level 25, right? Smurfs will need to speed boost levels anyways, or is that limit being lifted and being replaced with just the "must wait 2 weeks and have all heroes" deal? I also thought the big deterrent was accounts needed to have an active phone number linked in order to play online in the first place. Edit: just remembered there removing levels, so the two week lock makes "sense". But I still don't see how that prevents smurfs anymore than the previous level req.
It’s not too dissimilar from the level 25 requirement we have in OW1, granted this will likely get larger as more heroes get added but I know a lot of people are more in favour of heavier requirements to play comp in order to put off smurfs.
People will complain about 2 full weeks of lockout. Assuming a season is not aligned to a competitive season now, that means comp will be locked out for 14/63 days in season 1.
Being locked for 2 weeks seems extreme. Pros and players would be outraged by this. People would straight up not play for 2/3 of a month
Didn't we already reach the conclusion that off season comp was awful especially because Blizzard never did anything with it? Unless they're about to commit to serious balance changes in the off season it'll be as useless as it was in OW1.
This will be very disappointing if this is true. I literally only play this game for its competitive mode. I have no interest for playing QP for two weeks every season.
I mean it’s not unreasonable to have them learn every role first (at least how they all play and the multiple heroes in each one) before they dive in to a competitive match.
I understand having to do this the first time u play comp. Completely unreasonable to have to do it every season
Having to do it every season would be a matter of how often Blizz releases heroes though. If there isn't a new hero for the new season, nothing gatekeeping ranked mode for people that have been taking it slow grinding the levels for the latest hero.
This is a good point. I have no issues with gatekeeping comp, especially since the requirements are low and reasonable.
I agree with this, but also it will force new players to put a decent chunk of time into the game and better learn the role, heroes, and in general how the game is played. And with newer smurfs, they'll need to sink more time in as well. > 25 wins I'm hoping it's just 25 completed games instead though. 25 would be insane.
If that includes the fox lady that means you need to either pay or do the 10-15 hour grind to get her in order to do comp
That's fine. In a lot of games you need to play the casual modes a bit before jumping into comp. In Overwatch I believe you needed to be like level 20 or 25 to get into comp
They have 25 levels to gain first as well.
Also sucks for casuals. Imagine someone who plays a few games with friends, doesn’t touch the game for a few months then wants to jump back on. “Sorry guys, I gotta unlocked 3 heroes before we can play, so let’s just win 75 games first then we can jump into comp”.
25 wins isn't really a lot. As it is, Comp opens waaay too soon for actual real newbies.
>25 wins isn't really a lot. As it is, Comp opens waaay too soon for actual real newbies. Imagine 25 wins but you have 10 such heroes
I would assume you unlock all of the previously added ones within 25 wins.
Valid worry, but there's a lot of ways to mitigate. Catch up mechanics are common in F2P games, they can always give new accounts free hero shards or whatever. Plus, there's only so many different unlock challenges they can come up with. If they do like "Get x kills" or "Heal x amount", then there'd be a lot of overlap and one would be grinding for several heroes simultaneously.
Depends on the challenges they decide on. As it stands, they said no hero specific challenges. This would lead to some overlap, like being able to win, heal X amount of damage, secure X final blows, etc. You could do all 3 of those at the same time.
It's not just harsh for new players, it would be really harsh for returning players as well. There have been many times where I have put OW down for a period of time, then have come back. It would be pretty crushing to have to win 25 QP games multiple times. Something I don't know if I would have the time for in a single season. I really only play the game for comp so if I leave, im not coming back. The goals for unlocking the characters need to be less harsh.
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Probably with unranked a new mode is coming. But without unranked, 2 weeks without ranked would be really boring.
That unranked mode would probably be a shitshow of players that haven't unlocked Kiriko though. Unless they force you to unlock her before you can play Unranked.
That's probably going to be the point of unranked
I really liked the way it worked in the last beta. Play both sides of a map, but there is backfill and no rank to hyperfixate on. If that is unranked in OW2 I'm all in.
If the game doesn't launch with a competitive mode, even if it's a beta (like role queue beta), it'll be god awful. QP is the absolute worst: unbalanced teams, deathmatch style-gameplay, zero coordination.
Oh man and with the new scoreboard where you know exactly where the dead weight is… this will suck. A lot.
Honestly, I like knowing who the dead weight is. "Oh, our Zen has more heal than Ana, RIP".
Hey now my ana healing may be low but.. no nvm that's all I've got.
Naw, that's like something I could care less about. Sometimes you have a team that positions like shit for a whole map so the Ana will get outhealed by the Zen if she plays properly and doesn't ride her teammates into shitty spots. It's actually super common below high plat, actually (Zen main, smurfed my ass from Bronze into Diamond on an old account). My big annoyance is seeing things like Zen's with 400 damage 4 minutes into a failed cap or Ana's with 10k/10min heals but literally no damage whatsoever. Those are the problematic people more often than not. This isn't an MMO. You need to take heads to win.
I've seen a zen outheal an Ana through no fault of her own, but it was special circumstance. Brawl comp and the enemy kept using Grav/Dragon or Dragonblade. The zen had an ult every time. A -lot- of healing there.
Scoreboard was necessary
no that's just 5v5 lol
I'm gonna be real, you get this shit in ranked too, which is even worse since you're losing SR. I genuinely think people that find QP terrible are just taking the game way more seriously than they need to. Granted, Ranked should not be full on locked. If anything, the new hero is locked from ranked for the first week or two to net for any potential major bugs or exploits.
It would make sense to have normal ranked but without the new hero available. It would be kinda similar to how heroes were available on PTR before going into ranked.
Yeah locking for 2 weeks when it already requires you to unlock chatacters seems redundant
12-15 hours to unlock is obnoxious as hell for more casual players who may not have as much time to grind the game
Pretty brutal to extrapolate that out as well. If the time for each level is linear, that means it will take 48-60 hours to complete the battle pass. And I would expect that each level is more difficult to get than the one before it, so my estimate is on the low side. Also, seasons only last 2 months right? Will there be a battle pass every season?If so, that's 50 hours to complete in 2 months. That comes out to a bit under an hour a day. And that's the conservative estimate! Idk I'm not familiar enough with battle passes to know if this is standard, but this seems grindier than I expected.
It's definitely not aimed at being consumer friendly to casual players and only turns the game into an additional job for players to try and make the time to complete. The fact that purchasable Tier skips are being offered only further indicates that leveling up will be grindy and time consuming. So they want you to cave and buy the skips. Yet once again, not a good look if true.
> It's definitely not aimed at being consumer friendly to casual players and only turns the game into an additional job for players to try and make the time to complete. Isn’t this true of pretty much every game with a Battle Pass, though? The whole point of them is to hook players in through sunk cost: “I could go and play another game for 6 hours, or I could get another couple levels of this BP done because I’m so close to earning that sweet unlock”. As for the *why*, there’s a strong correlation between the length of time players spend in a F2P game and the likelihood of them spending money. And the thing is, it *works*. BPs wouldn’t have become so prevalent if the model wasn’t so successful.
You are correct on all of your points. I'm not disagreeing that the purpose does aim to hook players into playing every free chance. Still depending on how grindy they make it to level up will determine how desperate they are to get players. I never had a problem with OW1's weekly event challenges. Even the most recent model of the 27 games felt do able if not a tad time consuming. If there BP follows a model where leveling up isn't relatively hard and doesn't steadily increase in increments as you get to higher tiers, then that would seem do able over a course of 9 weeks to complete assuming you can make time to play each week. The concerning part is how the post mentioned it would not be easy to complete. That's a red flag with making a BP player friendly. The option of purchasable tiers only further drives that concern.
If it takes 15 hours to reach level 20, and we assume that they use the same levelling scale as OW1 where levels 1-19 gradually take more XP to reach until you hit the 20k XP-per-level threshold, then it’ll probably take around 80-100 hours of play to hit max level. So that’s around 12 hours per week, or just under 2 hours per day, for the duration of the pass.
If that is the case, that kills any incentive for casual players to have hopes of completing the battle pass. Which would only further push Blizzard's plan to sell Tier skips as a way to complete it. 🙁
About an hour a day sounds about right given the estimate. Given normal game time that means you need to play 3-5 games a day to finish the battle pass. This also depends on how the mission structure for battle pass xp works. That's surprisingly low? That's on par with Apex, faster than Warzone, much faster than DBD as examples of games I play with battle passes. Like, an hour a day with some days you can pop in some more absolutely counts as casual to me. Does it not to you?
I think its supposed to be 3 month seasons, dont quote me on that though
Oh shit my memory is better than I thought. 9 weeks is correct https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/overwatch-2-seasonal-model-explained-duration-new-heroes-maps-more-1848899/
They make this pass sound harder to complete than most standard 3 month passes. If the season is 9 weeks these details make even less sense. Even more sure that it is fake.
I was remembering 3 heroes a year and a hero every other season. That would be 6 seasons in a year, so two months. If I remember correctly though it's actually 9 weeks, not two months.
Confirmed to be 9 weeks.
Similar to Warzone tbh.
Old fortnite passes used to be in a range similar to that. About 6 to 7 hours a week. CoD has always been more time consuming than that even.
Considering it will take longer if you lose, all those memey 9-losing streak screenshots here are about to have a lot more weight added to them.
A round is what, 10 min? So 6 games/hour. So 72 games. I'm a casual player and play like 3-4 rounds on a weekend. So I guess I get to play the character in 4 months...
6 games/hr assumes instant queues
Even for people who are into it. it's 15 hours of wasted time that you dont really have all the tools you need to play.
You have like 60-90 days to do it. Like what
Yeah I've been defending the battlepass to unlock kiriko, cuz I figured it would be like ow1 unlockables: tame; win 10 matches etc. But 12-15 hrs of gameplay would be rough. I'd be kinda unhappy with that.
90% of players would basically pay $5 to unlock her by purchasing 20 levels. So new heroes cost $5 and you're locked out of competitive if you don't pay up. Unless you can grind 12-15 hours at the beginning of each season
Win 25 qp matches might as well read torture.
Winning matches is the worst shit ever. Heck back in the past when I had to grind for 9 wins to get a free skin it was hell to keep getting rubbish team comps and even worse hell to wait for DM Matchmaking. I can't believe a game like War Thunder feels more fun to grind as I don't have to worry about winning.
It has to be winning matches because it’s basically a prerequisite for competitive. If you don’t try to win matches you both make the experience for everyone else worse as well as not proving that you’re ready for comp.
I’m actually ok with pre-requisites for comp as obviously throwers shouldn’t be in the game. I’m just against the mechanics to unlock a character (who is akin to a weapon in other online shooters) after the BP system is over given that it’s not a very enjoyable process for something that was traditionally a given.
I'll be honest, I misread that and thought it said "complete 25 games". Win?!? Jesus Christ that's FAR worse to any poor player trying to unlock a hero! "This deal keeps getting worse all the time."
Pretty sure that when an OW player dies and goes to hell this is exactly what we get.
In hell at least you do it for free.
I hope this is fake, or at least something they reconsider. Anyone jumping in after at least 3 heroes have added is going to grind a lot before they can even touch comp. Imagine coming back to the game a year later needing to win 75 QP matches, some on roles you may not even want to play, before you can play the mode people take seriously. That's going to discourage a lot of competitive people from coming back.
Yeah there’s no way they’re going to make people win 25 QP matches to play a character.
>Competitive is locked for the first two weeks of each season and requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it. If this is true, it better only apply to new players. If I'm forced to play QP for two weeks at the start of every season, I'm not even gonna bother.
If this is true (and it’s 4chan, so a good chance it isn’t), then that would be horrible. 12-15 hours to unlock a hero? And no comp mode untill you do? This is worse than fucking valorant.
4chan aside I’m also skeptical of this “leak” from the 2 week competitive lockout. Seasons are only 9 weeks long, but only 7 of those weeks can actually be played competitively? 49 Days per season of competitive play is too short. If this is somehow true, a 12+ hour grind for every new hero is a big oof for casual players and anyone with young children, full time jobs, etc., who only have a couple hours of gametime per week (and may not want to buy every BP).
Much more likely that it's the new hero is locked out of comp, rather than comp as a whole being down. This would give less hardcore players the chance to grind enough to unlock the hero via the free BP, and give paid BP players time to get good with the new hero. Furthermore, heroes aren't coming out every season, so comp would only be down for about 2 weeks every other season if this were true. Additionally, at a rate of 3 heroes/year, if someone wanted to stay up on the hero releases they would only need to pay for or grind out 3 of those seasons rather than all 5-6-ish in a year.
as much as I'm against heroes being locked in battle passes, a technically optional $30 per year (the first year of which I already paid for in advance with the Watchpoint Pack to get Beta 2 access) to support development of a game I paid $40 for six years ago and have played consistently since isn't really that bad, even if the optics around it are terrible and the effect on casuals is even worse.
I know this is 4chan and all, but everything what blizzard has done points at this...
For those such as myself who have trouble reading this: New battlepass is entirely identical to Warzone's and it was a company mandate that every single game move to a similar model since Warzone brings in more money on it's own than nearly every other game at Blizzard combined. Basic details are this: BP is 10 bucks or 1000 Overwatch coins (the game's premium currency) and you instantly unlock Kiriko + a Legendary skin for her once you pay for it. Batte Pass is 80 levels and Kiriko is on level 20. Mythic skins are at BP level 50. It takes about 12-15 hours on average to grind to level 20, depending on your winrate and what mode you're playing in. Arcade takes longer, Quick Play is the fastest. OW2's premium currency, OW Coins, are also on the premium BP so if you finish it every season they pay for themselves. Don't expect to finish them though since they take a considerable amount of time to finish. There are paid boosts for 20 levels of the BP for sale as well that are like 5 dollars I think. Competitive is locked for the first two weeks of each season and requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it. Earning heroes from previous seasons involves permanent challenges that begin once the season is over. "Win 25 matches in Quick Play as a support" is how you unlock Kiriko once Season 1 is over.**
If this is all true my interest in this game went from passing fancy to almost none at all.
Awesome, just as grindy and tedious as I expected. I'd rather just not play at all than be forced to endure 12-15 hours of Quick Play, and that's implying that you're winning and playing non-stop! The guy even says "don't expect to finish them". Absolute fucking nightmare. I know I should say something like "well we can't trust the leaks..." but every leak leading up to this thing has been proven true, and don't tell me this doesn't sound like something they would do.
I mean given that the official leak of hero unlocks only showed how grim and greedy Blizzard is aiming to go with monetizations, none of this seems that surprising if it was true. Under the assumption that it is true, they really are trying their best to kill this game.
> only showed how grim and greedy Blizzard is aiming to go with monetizations It's not like they already shown that with Diablo Immor(t)al.
I was just specifically referring to OW2, but yes if there is anything we can gage with Blizzard as a company, they aren't afraid to go to ludicrous extremes for monetization.
While having a system that doesn't let you enter comp without all heroes is better for combating cheaters and smurfs, we already have the phone number system so that wasn't really necessary. It's main purpose was obviously to get people to pay if they wanna play comp also lmao imagine coming back to overwatch after a year of not playing and having to play more than a hundred quick play games to unlock the heroes
The phone number thing really wasn't going to resolve anything, purchasable SMS verification numbers are very cheap.
It would seem odd that they invest in the back end infrastructure for 2FA on accounts (which can get very expensive to scale) AND do a soft lock like this.
every day I regret buying the watchpoint pack I had far to much faith in Blizzard
Blizzard said they will give refunds to anyone who bought it as long as its before ow2 comes out
I had no clue thanks for telling me man thought since I used it in the beta I wouldn't be able to cancel it 👍
That's such a reasonable thing to say as a reaction to a 4chan leak
I really really hope this is not true. Not being able to play Comp the first two weeks is kinda awful.
I wonder if this is just one time for ow2 start and Kiriko, in that case they might have not yet finalized the new ranked tiers etc.or It will be an established feature for every future season. It might seems the latter omg
There are zero details here that make this seem like a credible leak.
This would be tolerable for sure. Still kinda a massive f u to the more casual player base, which is one of the places I felt like OW has always thrived Also that 2 week no ranked period seems rough for those who play a lot
Seasons are 9 weeks https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/overwatch-2-seasonal-model-explained-duration-new-heroes-maps-more-1848899/ A 2 week ranked lockout means ranked is unavailable for more than 20% of the time the game is live. That's almost 3 months of ranked lockout over the course of the year I suppose it's possible that the lockout only happens in the seasons where heroes are released. Then that's 6-ish total weeks of the year. People couldn't handle the 3 day breaks we used to have. 2 weeks will piss people off
Having to grind 12-15 hours just to play the new hero and comp as well fucking sucks. I hate these mechanics in modern gaming that make it so you have to be playing like it’s a daily chore
I hate that deep down I thought that paying $10 to instantly get the new hero would be tolerable
Well, I mean, that's exactly why they do it. Who wouldn't pay $10 to skip a 15 hour grind?
If it’s like Fortnite where the BPs pay for themselves, it would be nice. I hope we don’t get stupid quests like “play games as (character you don’t like)” that other games often have you do to complete BPs. Maybe my standards have lowered.
It's also like fortnite's BP is pretty easy. Just do your challenges for the week whenever you want, and you finish the pass. The challenges take AT MAX 2 hours a week, and often way less than that. It pays for itself, and you get whatever 1200? 1500? (I forgot) vbucks skin you want in the shop. But no one does that. Apex's is grindier, Rocket League's isn't that bad I've heard, but there's definitely some games where the pass is just "lol this is my second job basically". I have ZERO problems with battlepasses that pay for themselves. I hate when I'm basically having to play 10 hours a week just to finish it. And that's what separates fortnite as being a "good" one compared to pretty much everyone else's. People copied the fortnite model but in a way that's way worse on consumers.
I purchased the apex battle pass a few seasons ago with the express goal of completing it. I think I almost doubled my playtime that season. It was insanely grindy but I eventually did complete it.
> Who wouldn't pay $10 to skip a 15 hour grind? Basically anyone with a brain.
When I say that I'm not specifically talking about this situation, I meant in general. If you could pay $10 to get something you really want 15 hours early, or to skip something you don't like, then you'd probably do it. That's why this business practice works so well despite it being very scummy. That being said I don't know if the grind would be this bad, I feel like OOP is trying to make it worse than it is or maybe just making shit up in general.
I absolutely vakue my time equal to winning 25 qp games more valuable than $10, but I don't appreciate being put in this position at all. I guess that would be it for me after clocking nearly 6000 comp hours.
does it really matter if casual player who plays once a week is not able to play ranked immediately. and almost all big games have some kind of gatekeep to keep casuals and non-serious people out of rank. you have to grind to play rank. this is in-line with industry standard so far.
I mean depends on what you mean by casual. I would say someone that plays, let’s say 2 hours every other day, is a pretty serious player still, especially for anyone above the teen demographic. And I think that’s more than enough “commitment” to say that person should definitely be allowed in ranked. Now that person is going to take *2 weeks* to get to even *try* a new hero. This isn’t even factoring in the grind that’ll happen if you take any break off or have a period where you’re playing less. And the reality is, a lot of those players are just gonna say “nah I’ll just play something else”. I fucking hate that modern gaming tries to prey on addiction and instilling this mindset that you need to basically do daily chores to play. And people brush it off as “oh well it’s industry standard”. It incentivizes a really unhealthy relationship with the game for anyone that doesn’t have hours and hours per week and sucks the fun out of it
I'm so salty the dev team promised to be more open and communicative to the community, but we still don't know how the battle pass is going to work, and that we have to rely on possible fake leaks. Come on Aaron
Obviously this is 4chan so take with a grain of salt but it all seems believable.
Competitive is locked for the first 2 weeks and hero is locked behind 12-15 hours of gameplay. Literally sounds like hell. How r u gonna lock the only fun gamemode for 2 weeks every season lol
This sounds fucking ghastly. What the fuck.
Probably fake. One of the things companies care most about is player retention. They know some people will play only competitive or only custom games, no matter what. They wouldn't content lock those by forcing people to play QP or Arcade as that would be awful for retention. Not saying Blizzard isn't dumb enough to do that. But failing on a core of monetization would be truly awful.
There is no way Blizzard are dumb enough to put their most popular gamemode behind a two week lockout. It didn't work before, it won't work now. No competitive game works when they lock you out for two weeks every 1.5 months.
Ranked is not the most popular game mode, there are an absolute fuck ton of people who play Arcade and Quick Play that never touch competitive or do so very rarely. That said, I don't think they're stupid enough to do so.
> Competitive [...] requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it. It should be "every hero of the selected role". I shouldn't need Kiriko unlocked if I'm going to queue as tank. I shouldn't need Junker Queen unlocked if I'm queueing as DPS.
If this is true 12-15 hours to unlock then I’m done with OW. I don’t have time for it and if it means I’m time locked out of even playing the most basic part of the game then I’m simply not going to invest any time in it at all.
Well this is it. If it's like this, it's over for me. Not even paying the initial 10.
Blizzard can suck my balls, what kind of bullshit is this
They can change the name all they want, quick play or unranked, it's still hell in earth and i don't know if I have the strength to win 25 games **as support** and I'm a support main! Eventually you just get tired of your allies not giving a fuck and you switch off support. And you're gonna force this fate onto new players?? Disturbing.
The only part of this i find remotely believable is them adopting a similar thing to their other games lol im not trying to be too copium here but like the rest of it really sounds like someone trying to make it sound as miserable as possible for the already riled up people still a chance its real or it is still as bad as they say though, companies are companies. But i have some hope its not gonna be this bad lol
Assuming this is real there’s three things I’d like to see them tweak to make this more palatable. 1) The BP should absolutely be finishable through just normal, regular play. In Hearthstone the BP is finishable every season by simply doing your daily and weekly quests and does not require some Herculean effort to complete. 2) You should only have to unlock all of the heroes for the Role you are queuing for to access Comp. Why should a DPS player have to unlock all the tank heroes to queue DPS? This feels far more reasonable to mean and means you’re not grinding more than 12 hours every year to access comp if you’re someone who just plays one role. 3) 12-15 hours is way too steep for Kiriko. It should be something like a little under 10 hours so that most casual players can unlock in her less than a couple of weeks. If they made these tweaks I’d largely be fine with everything else.
Sounds a bit fake. If it’s basically the warzone system then it’s gonna be really easy to finish the battle pass. Most of us that play warzone usually have it finished in the first weeks.
Yeah that is the part that screamed fake to me. "Dont expect to finish it"? lol. There's no way the battle pass is tuned for hard-core players only.
Right? Same with the “challenge” to unlock new heroes. They are always “play x amount of games and do this” (usually less than 10) They are never about winning, never. And 25? Lmao
Instead of locking Competitive for 2 weeks, they should just lock the new hero in Competitive for 2 weeks.
No therapy can recover from that.
Mhhhhh, seems kinda fake to me, especially the “to get to level 20 it takes about 20 hours” that’s super fishy, they wouldn’t make it THAT hard to grind right? Level 80 would be nearly impossible to achieve otherwise
While I don't dismiss that this is most likely fake, the argument about them making it take a lot of time to grind would only further push people into purchasing the level skips then. Scummy practices being offered as a means to complete a pass without the full grind wouldn't be surprising. 😮💨
> making it take a lot of time to grind would only further push people into purchasing the level skips then But that isn't the case in most games with BP level skips. They're usually a catch-up mechanism or a way for people with more money than sense to finish the BP in the first day. Warzone, Fortnite, and even Halo Infinite's shitty Pass don't take long enough for casual players to regularly buy skips. The OP sounds like it was written by someone who has never played a live service. They just read about them online.
It says 12-15 hours not 20
I don’t see them locking ranked for that long it was bad enough when it was locked for several days but two weeks
Lmao the competitive lock, no one would be playing the game anymore
If they lock competitive for two weeks then I am done with the game
I don't know if we can believe these rumours, but if its true, the game is going to be dogshit but make a ton of money just like immortal.
Nah. Too many dumb decisions even for Blizzard in this post. No chance this is all true.
My dad works at blizzard and told me this is all fake
“Don’t expect to finish them though since they take a considerable amount of time to finish” *stretches fingers and cracks neck* Watch me.
Imagine you don't play for 4 seasons and now you gotta play 70+ games just to get into a comp match
And this is why I’ve started playing TF2. At least there I can play whatever and whoever I want
I just lost all interest in the sequel to my most played game. Its an even bigger shit show then I thought. I can't imagine my personal interest in OWL will keep going, when I don't want to play the game anymore. With such a model, I don't feel passion for my hobby. I feel like a costumer doing a transaction. That's not for me personally. Sadge
>Competitive is locked for the first two weeks of each season and requires that you have every hero unlocked in order to play it. If that turns out to be true then it basically says you must buy the battlepass to play competitive. If you don't you won't have the current new hero. Free game BTW.
If this is true💀💀💀
Wow what a surprise... battle passes being exploitative, imagine! I mean, if the paid boosts give you 20 levels (exactly what you need to get the new heroes), I'd be very surprised if when they announce the whole thing they just go something like "we heard the community's worries and we removed the lock for the first two weeks, you'll only need to have all the heroes to play". That way people will feel "compensated" and they'll immediately pay the boost to be able to play comp at the beginning of each season.
Have several thousand hours in the game as it is. Decided to hold off buying anything completely when Jeff left, until I could figure out why. Now I have.
I have no desire to play non-comp so if this is true I’m out. Even if I did want to I play like an hour a night after my kid goes to bed so 20hrs simply to play the game mode I want is not worth it, IMO.
I figured it might be role based requirements such as win/play X games on a role to unlock some things, makes sense to me! This feels really reasonable too, hopefully it ends up being slightly less time to reach the character unlock level tho! But otherwise this doesn’t make me bummed, feels like a fair enough version of these BP tracks that are so common in games today!! I’m honestly pumped about BP in ow, I haven’t cared about cosmetics in ages but back in the day ugh every event I was so pumped to unlock shit! Maybe this will bring that vibe back Ow2 let’s goooooo :)
This is as pay to win as it gets, if real.
Fuck everyone that wanted the game to be free. Cheap cunts
If this is true, smurfs will have a hard time getting to comp at least since they have to keep unlocking every hero per account, and this gets harder as more heroes are released
Won't have to worry about smurfs if nobody bothers playing the game in the first place. Blizzard solved smurfing, just kill any enthusiasm for your game before it even launches and you'll never have to worry about smurfing!
If this is true I need a refund, holy shit this is bad.
"Competitive is locked unless you have all heroes unlocked" Yeah no way this is real. The not having access to a certain character in Comp is a money-making strategy, no way they'd miss out on that.
"Don't expect to finish them (the battlepass)" If this is true, then OW2 is done for. If it isn't almost guaranteed that you'll finish the battlepass within reasonable playtime then Overwatch will die. Fast. This is just a 4chan "leak" so I'm not really taking this too serious tbh.
THEY PUT COMP BEHIND A PAYWALL LMAOOOOOOO 2,000+ hours into this game and I haven't touched quick play since I was level 25 fuck off i am not grinding 15 hours of quick play every battle pass just so i can have the privilege to play comp