I think a lot of it is because these games are set up such that they only “work” when everyone plays “correctly”
and as weird as it sounds having a higher rank means having more of a chance for people to play in that manner, as you wouldn’t have gotten there without playing “right” and you have more to lose if you play “wrong”
it’s a really tough problem to solve, getting 12 people to play “correctly” for 15 minutes or so straight, especially when the reward for doing so is simply the intended experience
(correct play in this case being base level of competence + understanding of meta w/r/t character picks + understanding of map strategies based on team comp, etc. etc.)
The loot-box stuff is only for cosmetics. The gist is that it’ll take something like 30 hours to unlock each operator in the starter edition, so you’ll be limited to an operator with no special abilities (but arguably an interesting weapon loadout) unless you pay money for more operators.
In the ‘normal’ edition, you can unlock the 16 base operators with relative expedience (it feels like a smart level of gating, where you get spoonfed a new operator every 30-60 minutes).
Otherwise you can pay money for ‘packs’ of operators from each season that you didn’t get a Year Pass for, or slowly unlock those operators, again at about 30 hours per operator.
It’ll go on a 50% off sale for the holidays, I imagine, which will bring the ‘normal’ edition down into the $20 territory. Well worth it!
I appreciate all that you’re writing. Overwatch is the first team game I’ve played since TF2 in 2007, so I’ve had 8 years of team online game design & culture to catch up on. I think you’re giving me very practical advice: if I care about ranking, I ought to play to the ranking. If I want too much for ranking and matchmaking algorithms to work ‘correctly’, I’m setting myself up for disappointment.
sure the remaster only costs five dollars and looks nicer but what sense would there be in making @Father.Torque happy if I couldn’t jump through a bunch of dumb technical hoops for my own edification first
Gorogoa is good, I got it on switch too so my wife and I could play it together. It’s really good, the leaps of dream logic are intuitive and thought provoking, the art is fantastic, and my wife likes it so that’s always a ringing endorsement.
my wife is stuck at the very end on something semi-unintuitive that didn’t stop me up at all after getting past a lot of to-me harder parts over a couple sittings and now I wonder how well this part playtested
Segment #5 is a bit rougher. ‘Point me in the right direction’ is a bit thudding for the rest of the game’s logic and that it gets reused is odd. I was stuck for several minutes on the bedroom view – I didn’t realize one of the poster sets had clickable/zoomable areas and was hung up on moving the bed around based on where the frame was lifted.
)
