That's The End Of Activision Blizzard's $120 Million Overwatch League

and evolving competitive Overwatch in a new direction

Aye, rankings are based on who has the costliest skin equipped, of course!

finally, a ranking we can all actually care about

I'm not mad, e-sports ruin games for casuals imo.

ESports leagues only work when they come from the community. No amount of money will make people care about a random assortment of franchised teams

Reminds me of when Wargaming tried to push a World of Tanks e-sports league.

Turns out, if your players aren't making competitive tournaments for your game on their own, it's probably not suitable for e-sports.
Yep just give the community a good base and let them self organize. Maybe throw in a sponsorship here or there. But don't make that shit yourself.
- The problem with self-organizing is you get things like the Smash community, where the worst people imaginable take over the competitive level and then you've got a huge reputational problem on your hands. It's a delicate balance between supporting what the community develops on its own and going top-down and forcing it.

Miss you Jeff Kaplan

I mean I like Jeff but the OW1 eras of pretty bad gameplay and pretty long time waiting fixes happened on his watch. He designed a crazy fun game, but I think his stewardship in making it stay balanced and various and fun once you get good at it was a bit more lacking.
- The PvE pipe dream was also a result of Kaplan's direction.

From the comments here, apparently I was the only one who really enjoyed watching OWL.

Yeah, it wasn't perfect, yeah it always had a meta, but it was fun to watch.

I watched them live at gamescom once. Was a lot of fun!

This was too artificial and expensive, there wasn't a grassroots movement to make it happen

Noo, I love watching mirrored matches of 12 heroes for the entirety of the tournament duration, it was so much fun waiting for someone to press Q and the commentators getting hyped about it.

Jokes aside, they needed more heroes from the beginning, and instead of churning out heroes every season like OW2 does, they slowed down, ironically, because of OWL.

they needed more heroes from the beginning

Imho, the problem is the reverse. The game had enough heroes, it's just that too many existing heroes were boring, underpowered, or (if they got sufficient power) game-breaking, and so they were too hesitent to say "this power doesn't work with our format, we should get rid of it". Instead it was tweaking numbers. There's a place for tweaking numbers, but when stuff fundamentally breaks your chosen format (eg. ana antiheal) you have to take a firmer hand. But they let game-breaking powers like Mercy rez ult or just too damned many barriers sit instead of saying "okay, this isn't working, let's throw this bad idea out completely". But of course, gamers scream if their best girl gets touched, so they're really hesitent to make big moves.

Plus, too many of those heroes were damage heroes considering the team can only have 2 of those.
Overwatch was such a good game to watch. I watched some matches with my girlfriend back in season 3 or so. She had never seen overwatch and had no idea what it really was. But she was super into it. I really started to dislike when Ana was released, she was the "you need that hero to win" pick. She hardly ever suffered from any nerfs, and people lose their shit when you even suggest it. When heros like roadhog get too powerful and gets any pickrate at all, he got berfed to the ground. But fine, go on. GOATS killed it for me, it's like you said, 25 hero's, but you would only ever see 6 or 7. And it was just so boring.

Oh no!...

Anyway...

Looking back, they literally never had a good clean season. Season 1 was Mercy meta, and only branched out near the end. Season 2 was all goats until the finals where the meta did a 180. Season 3 was COVID, and after COVID they penny pinched on everything and nothing was impressive again. It was the source of so many bad decisions that only affected the actual game negatively. That's all I remember it for being now.

I always thought that competitive gaming is amazing, but competitive gaming like this will never be sustainable. For one, it relies on endless influx of people willing to spend money, and regularly watch the content. Given how little new stuff Blizzard actually made, it's impossible to remain interested.

But let's just take something else as an example. The League of Legends championships have been out there for like 15 years now. For the latter half of that, it's looked a lot like insider trading and money laundering, because it's not a competition for who wins the game. It's a competition for whose gaming brand stays in business

How would this be any different from the MLB and NFL? These sports have also remained unchanged for decades.
- It's not. Those sports leagues suffer from the same issues. The only difference is that you rely on maintaining real people's health to optimally perform in those games. It's similar to having online friends, vs seeing someone locally. Yes, they're still friends, but your body has physiological needs that you cannot trick

Sad about this. I know it's fun to hate on overwatch, but the idea of an esports league being city based was really novel at the time. Ive always enjoyed overwatch, and despite overwatch 2s monetization being absolutely atrocious, the gameplay changes I have enjoyed for the most part

I feel the opposite. The idea felt antiquated and corporate. I dont want nationalism in my exports thanks.
- I understand your point but I don't think city based teams have to be a toxic thing. Fandom for any team can be taken to the extreme, and I feel city based teams give fun ways to entice more people to care and have fun with it. Also, I mean pretty much every sport entity is corporate. Can't think of any esport team that isn't extremely corporate, city based or not.

OWL dying is a shame, I was excited for it, and right when they were about to do the games in the proper cities COVID stopped that, then whoever was asleep at the wheel let the GOATS meta run an entire season when it should have been stopped by a rule change after one match, destroying any desire to watch further.

A bit sad, but not surprising. It was always something that felt forced and only propped up by companies trying to create a new market in order to monopolize it.

If the NFL didn't exist, then suddenly just sprung on the public as it exists now, I think it would have also suffered a similar fate.

On the player and even team level, I'm sure it felt different, but as a spectator, it was hard to ignore the top down, corporate, ad filled, "fellow kids" feel of the thing.

Good, really don't care about everything surrounding eSports. Gamers are cringe.