O.W.L. Season 2 Inaugural Day

Overwatch League Season 2 started yesterday February 14th.  With the Start of OWL Season 2, 8 new teams join the veteran 12 teams from last Season including, Toronto Defiant, Washington Justice, Guangzhou Charge, Atlanta Reign, Chengdu Hunters, Hangzhou Spark, Paris Eternal, and Vancouver Titans.  The first day of Overwatch league had 4 very exciting games.  The first game of the Season was the exact same as the last Grand Final Championship game of the first Season, Philadelphia Fusion vs. London Spitfire, in the Grand Finals the London Spitfire was victorious over the Fusion but this time it wasn’t the same the Philadelphia took their revenge by taking a nail biter 3-1 win.  The second game of the day was the New York Excelsior vs. Boston Uprising, New York Excelsior and Boston Uprising are both teams with lots of potential, when Uprising were in their peak in Season 1 they were the best team in the league.  However New York Excelsior is  just the most consistent team in the league and they are consistently in the top 3 teams, so Excelsior took the win 2-1.  The next game of the day was between a fan favorite Seoul Dynasty and a team playing in their own home the Los Angeles Gladiators.  These teams both have great individual players and have shown lots of promise in the past.  In their match-up Seoul Dynasty took the win in another close 3-1 game.  The last game of the day was argued to be one of the best if not the best, Shanghai Dragons vs. Hangzhou Spark.  Shanghai Dragons hold the title for the longest losing streak in all of sports history not only eSports but conventional sports as well, going 0-40 in the first Season of OWL never winning a game and not making the cut for the play-offs.  The Hangzhou Spark would also be the first new team we would see play.  But, ever since they announced joining the OWL they became a fan favorite with a vibrant cotton candy blue and pink color scheme and a very powerful roster coming mostly for a dominant korean team called Panthera which performed very well in smaller tournaments.  But, hopes were high for Dragons fans because the entire team had been redesigned by the organization with only a handful of players from the first Season staying on the team.  Sadly the losing streak continued for the Dragons losing to the Hangzhou Spark 3-1 in another very close match.  In the beginning of the game it seemed as if they were going to have an easy win but the Spark didn’t give up and always came back with a fight.

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My experience with Overwatch Competitive

I’ve been playing Overwatch for multiple years at this point ever since the closed beta.  Over the past year my love for the game has diminished to the point where I don’t really enjoy playing it.  Now when I play Overwatch it is to play my seven weekly competitive games so I can maintain my rank for the game, which I don’t even always do anymore.  Overwatch for me used to be a really fun game that I could always play and enjoy now now the game feels watered down and isn’t close to being as fun for me and I want to find out why so I think I should start at the beginning.

How my Overwatch journey began was one of my friends at the time had a beta account and he let me play on it because I saw game play of the it and wanted to try it out myself.  So till the full release I would share it with him. In the beta I came to love the game and would play every second when my friend wasn’t online and I had free time. When the game officially came out I really wanted to get it but I wasn’t able to so I would move on a different friends account, I would play on their only for a little while till I got my own account.

When I finally did get my own account about a year after the game officially released I jumped straight into competitive with my friend.  That was a bad decision because at the time my friend was in the upper 5% of players so everyone there was way better than anything I had experienced.  Even though I wasn’t absolutely terrible it was my first time playing in a more competitive atmosphere compared to the casual quick play where people would mostly just goof off.  Because of this I got placed in low gold which was below the average player.  This was because the game would compare my match statistics to other players that were in my MMR the hidden skill rating the game gives you, usually when you do your first ten ranked matches the game uses an algorithm to detect which rank you should be placed in and since it has no idea in the placement games it places you in your MMR.  So I should have been playing against people my own MMR in my placement matches but rather I ended up playing with the top 5% of players.  Because of this my statistics for the game were significantly worse than the other in my game and other players that have my MMR going against equal opponents.

When I first got placed in low gold I was a little bummed because I did want to do good.  So I decided to make myself improve as much as I could, I would record matches and watch them over and watch some of the best players in the world and analyze what they did that was good and what they did that was bad.  But, when I was doing all this I enjoyed it, I was having fun so it didn’t seem like work.  Then after doing all these things to improve I would slowly climb in rank going from Gold to Platinum then to Diamond and then Masters.  All that happened over around a year, over a year I had climbed up and improved to where I had originally been destroyed in my first 10 matches ever.

Cut to present day and I’m much better at the game but it turned out to be a curse in disguise more than anything, people in higher skill ranks people are more rude or commonly known as toxic, and the games variety gets boiled down to everyone playing the same thing because it is more powerful than everything else and gives you a winning advantage.  If I had stayed in lower ranks it might had lead me to stay in a more casual experience.  Also the game sadly has deteriorated over time heroes have been added in that don’t seem balanced in one way or another.  Some heroes are too weak, some are too powerful, some are only viable at a certain skill rank and the list goes on.  I think one of the reasons why the game ends up with such poor hero design is not because the team working on it for the game isn’t talented it is because they are rushed they make and release a new hero every 4 months. Along making new heroes the team also has to work on the things already in the game like fixing bugs, changing already existing heroes whether it is changing a cool down for a hero’s attack or entirely changing everything about the hero other than the model.  Though I used to love the game I don’t think I will be playing it much in the future sadly.

Related image (All Overwatch Competitive Ranks, the numbers on the right is the Skill Rating number)

Overwatch: Return of Junkenstein’s Revenge

October 9th marked the third year for Junkenstein’s Revenge, the inaugural Halloween event for the hero shooter game Overwatch. Every year this event comes with the limited time event called Junkenstein’s Revenge. It is a PvE (Player vs. Environment) horde mode where 4 players must protect a door from the onslaught of Professor Junkenstein and his creations. Junkenstein will send his minions which will act as bosses to defeat while killing the normal waves of enemies that stack upon the bosses will try to kamikaze on the door making it increasingly difficult to juggle all the enemies at once. There are also tires made by Professor Junkenstein that will speed through everything and head straight to the door to try and damage it. If the door takes too much damage to the minions and tires it will collapse ending with the fail of the mission. Another way to fail is if all 4 teammates die to bosses, minions, and tires. This mission can be played in 4 different difficulties Normal, Hard, Epic, Legendary. But, if all waves are survived and players defeat the final battle where players must fight all the bosses at once with more enemies and tires spawning than before than they will succeed and complete the event. There is also another way to play called Junkenstein’s endless, in this mode once players survive the regular amount of waves required to finish an event they will be thrusted into bonus waves where everything will become 10x harder.

Like any other Overwatch event it is not complete without it’s skins. This time around the Halloween skins were more detailed and innovated than ever before. For example the enchanted armor skin for the hero Pharah which is controlled by a ghost so when the hero dies the armor clutters to the floor as if the ghost controlling had disappeared. Another new skin is Jack-O-Lantern for Hammond aka. Wrecking Ball his skin was changed in that his suit of armor becomes a pumpkin that instead of shooting bullets shoot candy.

So come join the Overwatch community and enjoy the spooky festivities of Junkenstein’s Revenge.

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Enchanted Armor (Pharah)

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Jack-O-Lantern (Hammond aka. Wrecking Ball)