Scrappy Mechanic / Overwatch

• Very early in the game's life, multiple players, sometimes entire teams, were allowed to play a single hero, which led to serious competitive imbalances through the enemy having to put up with things like a team of Bastions or D.Vas attempting to push out last point, including in Competitive and even professional play. This was thankfully rectified when Blizzard implemented a one-hero cap in both Competitive and Quick Play mode, making a separate mode for hero stacking titled "No Limits".
• A relatively minor, but still puzzling option choice is that the kill feed (allowing teams to see who got killed and by whom) is turned off by default and is never explicitly mentioned in-game. Due to the importance of simply knowing who's dying and who isn't, other players are left having to tell newbies where the option even is and to turn it on.
• The exact mechanics of Pharah's Barrage ultimate are really base-breaking, leaning more towards scrappy-dom. The major complaint is simply how suicidal it makes her, since she hovers in place mid-air, making it much easier for enemies to shoot her down. It can definitely be used effectively in the right time and place, but even if you manage to get a kill or two, there's still a high chance you'll only manage to say "JUSTICE RAINS FROM—augh!", and not dying at all is something you kinda want to strive for.
• Ever since the October 10th, 2017 patch, the game makes it so the instant you activate your ultimate, it instantly drains all of your charge. Before this, it would just drain really fast as soon as the actual effects begun, but Blizzard changed this due to it being frustrating for players interrupting an enemy ultimate before they fully channel it, only for them to be able to use it again in no short time. Most ultimates — mainly ones that cast instantly like Pharah's Barrage or ones with a negligible channel time like Genji's Dragonblade — aren't heavily affected by this, but some ultimates have felt screwed over due to this mechanic:
  • Lúcio's Sound Barrier involves him having to leap into the air for a moment, with the shield not actually casting until he hits the ground. Prior to the change, he didn't expend his ult charge until he does hit the ground, but since then, it all vanishes once he hits Q. Considering how his rather-delayed jump leaves him very open to interruption, many Lúcio players find this a hard nerf on an already hard-to-time ultimate.
  • Mei's Blizzard and Tracer's Pulse Bomb are thrown abilities with a slight delay before they do anything, but due to a not-documented behavioural quirk where projectiles vanish once the hero dies, it can be very frustrating tossing an ultimate in the ideal position, only for it to vanish completely if you die. Mei got hit with this really hard, as not only is her tossing out her ult much slower and thus leaves more time for failure, it seems just about any crowd-control, even Roadhog's hook after she tosses it, will immediately despawn it and leave her back at zero.
• Plays of the Game are primarily focused on players who get the most kills in a short amount of time, but not those who actually set up the scenario for them to do so, such as with healing or a set-up ultimate (the only exception to this is Mercy's Resurrect). Zarya and especially Ana will often feel like having their PoTGs robbed despite how utterly game-changing their respective ultimates can be, all because they weren't the ones who got the most direct kills from it. There's also occasional Plays of the Game where the person that gets it has all their kills undone by a Mercy only seconds later.
• Competitive Mode has its own set of Scrappy Mechanics:
  • Ranking in Season 1 was criticized because losing decreased your rank far, far more than winning increased it. It was possible to lose lots of points for a couple of losses, but not progress at all despite several wins in a row. Furthermore, how much ranking points earned or lost was largely dependent on consistent streaks, meaning that winning consistently would barely tread water, while going on a losing streak could cause a death spiral resulting in dropping 10 or more ranks in a matter of a few days!
  • Making matters worse is that once you find yourself in "Rank 30 Hell/Rank 2000 Hell/ELO Hell", you'll be constantly matched up with the worst types of teammates, such as Griefers, complacent gamers, healers that do no healing, tanks that do no tanking, and so on and so forth. Overwatch is not a game that it's easy to "carry" a team in, and the odds of finding competent teammates decrease as you fall further and further into less and less competent player pools.
  • Matchmaking in competitive is notoriously awful. Want to queue solo? At least every other game you're almost guaranteed to be put with a group that will not listen to you at best, is completely toxic at worst, includes a troll or two, and/or refuses to change character to better fit team comp, thus forcing you to play a role you might not even be all that good at because nobody else will fill that vital role. Want to queue in a group? Get ready for a considerably longer waiting period only to suffer many of the same problems as solo queuing if you didn't find five other friends to make a full group. Even if you do have a full group, while the game does its best to match up groups against groups of similar size, parties and groups are still frequently matched up against solo queuers. You might have a bit of trouble reigning in that Ragtag Bunch of Misfits you got put with against a group of four, five, or even six friends who can coordinate near-effortlessly. Blizzard attempted to rectify this in later seasons by placing large groups against solo queuers of significantly higher skill (think a six-stack of Golds going against six solo Grandmasters/Top 500s) if it absolutely cannot match the group with another group of roughly equal size. As it turns out, group size does not make up for massive skill deficits, and as such, such matchups tend to devolve into Curb Stomp Battles in very short order. Some complain that this makes the matchmaking problem even worse.
  • Placement matches are frequently criticized as they don't seem to have much consequence, as players will almost always end up in the same division as last season sans maybe a few-hundred SR point difference regardless of their actual skill. This is especially frustrating since this means even if you win all of your games or lose all of them, you'll be roughly placed in the same place as last season, for better or for worse. While the exact calculations are kept secret, it's generally believed that SR after placement matches is almost entirely calculated by previous performance rather than current performance, which entirely invalidates the whole point of placement matches, or even competitive seasons in general. This got even worse in seasons 4 and 5, where the game deliberately set your SR lower than where you ended the previous season, regardless of your placement match record. Blizzard did this to give players the "feel good" sensation of climbing back to their previous rank, but this typically had the opposite effect of frustrating players instead (especially those who got bumped back into the aforementioned "ELO Hell" range after having spent most of the previous season clawing their way out of it), and placement matches became less about determining one's starting rank and more about minimizing how much SR the game would inevitably take away. When Blizzard announced that they were doing away with this mechanic in season 6, the internet practically exploded with rejoicing.
  • Competitive Mode is considered needlessly complicated compared to Quick Play. Payload and capture point matches come down to which team earns more points (you get a point for every payload checkpoint you pass or every capture point you take before time runs out, with a bonus for time remaining if you outright win the round); if there's a tie, it basically just repeats and renders the previous two rounds null and void. King of the hill matches, normally first to two wins, are inexplicably first to three instead, which can really drag a match out — even if a match is a complete shut-out, it still tends to last longer than an average match in the other modes.^*However, this was changed to Quick Play's "best of three" format in season 6, bringing match length back in line with the other modes.
  • You can only safely quit once the victory/defeat screen appears. Not during the Match Complete or final tally screens, even though you already know the result during these two screens and there's no more meaningful actions you can take. Players not aware of this, usually those ragequitting at the end of a Curb-Stomp Battle, may ALT+F4 when "MATCH COMPLETE" shows up and find themselves wondering why they've been given a timeout, or rush to exit back to the title screen and not notice the big red "WARNING — PENALTIES FOR LEAVING" banner until it's too late. Even if you don't do either of those, it's ten needless seconds of having to wait before you can safely exit. This was finally rectified in Season 6, where the final score is now incorporated into the Victory/Defeat screen
• There's a huge penalty for repeatedly quitting in the middle of games. Understandable, but if you get disconnected for reasons beyond your control — the internet flickers, or Blizzard's own servers have a problem with them — it still counts as you quitting. And since the game's release, Blizzard's servers for the game haven't exactly been flawless. It is entirely possible that you will attempt to see every game through to the end, but still end up with a huge penalty because of a problem on the end of the game creators that you get blamed for. In Competitive mode, quitting a game dooms the rest of team to pretty much a guaranteed loss. While it's possible for the leaver to rejoin the match within a limited time, if they actually did Rage Quit, that leaves the rest of their team to fend for themselves. If the teammates quit, they take a loss. So to summarize, if your teammate(s) quit on you in the middle of a match, you can either continue playing a lost cause (probably dooming your stats to drop as well) or you can quit and get ranked down. Making matters worse, you cannot invite anyone from your friends list to fill if someone leaves your team, meaning you're doomed to play with fewer people. Absolutely no one is happy with this system.
• By default, group voice chats are prioritized over team voice chat. While this might be fine for the most part, especially if you don't like dealing with toxic teammates, this becomes a problem in Competitive Mode where pan-team communication is essential, and those in groups may neglect to switch over to team voice chats to help coordinate the entire team. While textual team chat messages are visible to everyone in the team, you can't simultaneously type and play, plus players can each only be in one voice channel at a time. The Year of the Rooster patch attempts to rectify this by adding a "Join Team Chat" button on the Hero Select screen.
• A problem that popped up at the end of Season 2 called "Dodging". Dodging is a method players use to avoid an unfavorable game (such as a team composition they don't like or a battle that goes very badly quickly) by leaving the game and then rejoining it before a full minute has passed after the doors open. Doing this causes the game to end within ten seconds, with no penalty for anyone. As news about it spread, Dodging was suddenly everywhere.
• The Kill Cam mechanic has became this for Competitive play, which allows a player who just got killed to see through the POV of the enemy who just killed them during respawn time. Sounds good om paper to keep the dying player occupied, but in practice, this is very punishing for high skill-cap characters, as it can reveal the location of snipers and turrets, causing the players who worked hard to set up for their kill to have to reposition their turrets or sniping positions or risk getting discovered and killed by the enemies that didn't put as much effort to discover them in the first place. This was especially irritating if you played Symmetra before her 2018 rework, because not only could your turret nest can be revealed if it or you killed someone, so could the location of your hard-earned, carefully located, immovable Ultimate if you happened to look at its general direction when scoring a kill.
• Mei's Snowball Offensive became the least-liked of the special seasonal Brawls (the ones preceding it being Lúcioball and Junkenstein's Revenge). The reasons it's disliked vary and overlap. Starting off, the only character playable is Mei, who comes with her own set of Scrappy Mechanics (imagine five or six walls sealing off the exit at the start of the game, and you have a good idea of what you're in for). In addition, Mei's primary and secondary fire have been replaced with a very slow snowball projectile with a short arc. Snowballs cause a One-Hit KO, meaning that stealth and sneaking are extremely important. Her gun can only hold one snowball at a time, and normally the only way to reload is to find piles of snow on the ground, but even then, it takes several seconds for her to absorb the snow into her gun. She can reload instantly when she activates her new Ultimate, "Flurry", but its range is limited and only really helps if you can also dodge the enemy fire. All of these factors combine into a game mode that a lot of fans find irritating to play, and even those who like it find it extremely slow and not as fun as it could be.
• If you're playing as a healer, you have a special macro for specifically telling someone to group up with you for healing. The catch? To use it, you need to aim at your target and then use the "Healing" macro, and if you miss (very likely if you or your patient are moving very fast or far away), you'll end up saying "I need healing!" instead, making yourself look like an idiot.
• The first iteration of Capture the Flag, while popular, was plagued with massive problems. While symmetrical King of the Hill maps were used for the mode, they've received only minor modifications, so veteran players of the mode in other games feel that their knowledge doesn't translate well to it. Secondly, all heroes are available without any ability tweaks, but to prevent mobile heroes from being Game Breakers by swiping the flag and running off unhindered, capturing the flag wasn't instant (similar to capturing points in other modes) and could be interrupted by taking a single point of enemy damage, which meant that strong single-point defenders like Torbjörn, Symmetra, or Bastion could prevent the flag from ever being taken at all. When games lacked those elements, they were usually complete one-sided rolls, but when they did, they resulted in a lot of defense-heavy turtling, and many games ended up as draws with neither team ever taking a flag.
• Overwatch's color-blind mode has gotten a major amount of flack from color-blind fans for being a very poor accommodation. The game does require many visual shorthands for the fast gameplay, color-based indicators included, which would obviously be a detriment to color-blind players. Blizzard offers a solution with the color-blind mode, but their method is to provide a fixed, unchangeable filter over everything that doesn't seem to accommodate any of the types of color-blindnesses out there, and arguably makes the game even worse to play due to the disorientation and/or lack of contrast. The fact there hasn't been official responses by Blizzard on fixing it doesn't bode very well for the color-blind playerbase.
• Most heroes have some sort of sound cue or voice line to specifically indicate a friendly Ultimate usage. However, Roadhog and Winston have the same lines for Ultimate usage whether they're allied or not, which can confuse players who are hoping it's a friendly Ultimate that can be capitalized upon rather than an enemy Ultimate that means trouble. On a related note, Bastion doesn't have any sort of cue for friendly Ultimate usage at all. For a long time, neither did Reinhardt, until he was finally given one in late 2020.
• For whatever reason, if a player is backfilled, they won't be able to see what heroes are on the enemy team until after they face them upfront, meaning they won't be able to tell what hero they should use to fight against them until it's too late. Considering how if they were in a situation that warranted a backfill in the first place, they would already be at a serious disadvantage, it's really not helpful to pick a hero, walk all the way to the battlefield wasting precious time, then realize the entire enemy team is full of counters.
• If you respawn right before your spawn room changes (i.e. after capturing or losing a point), you're stuck there with no recourse to get to the next point other than walking. If you're on attack, this can mean valuable time lost, and if you're a healer, you're doubly screwed, as it means your team isn't getting health because you're a quarter of the way across the map. On defense, this means that you'll get 'spawn' camped right out of the gate, feeding ultimates. Oh, and if you were attempting to change to a different hero to counter a problem on the other team, you get booted out of that menu because you're no longer in a spawn room.
• Out of the gameplay itself, the reporting system has been reviled for being seemingly having no effect on problem players, and is commonly believed to just be a placebo since nobody, not even repeat-offense toxic players and throwers in competitive, ever seems to face any significant repercussions in spite of large amounts of reports. These fears were more or less confirmed when Jeff Kaplan directly responded to a troll complaining about being banned in quick play near the end of season 5, which inadvertently revealed that Blizzard considers 2247 complaints with 7 silences totaling up to 384 days muted only worthy of a ban for a week. Especially given how notoriously toxic and thrower-filled competitive had become at that point, fans have been demanding Blizzard to take its reports more seriously (not only criticizing the incredibly soft punishment, but also the fact he should've been banned much sooner), and while Jeff has responded with proposed changes in mind, only time will tell if it'll have any actual effect.
• Player icons in loot boxes. So many times has a player ground up another level, only for their hard-fought loot box to contain one or two of the game's extensive player icons.
• The final goal of the "Retribution" brawl is to survive the endless horde until the dropship arrives to extract you, but unlike Junkenstein's Revenge or Uprising, the mission doesn't end until everyone boards it. While the game makes it very clear what you're supposed to do, the entire mission can be needlessly extended or even completely lost all because of one uncooperative teammate, and nothing can be done if they simply refused to get onboard. This was changed a few days later to end when everyone is on the dropship, if players outside the dropship become incapacitated, or if simply too much time has passed due to their disobedience of the final objective.
• There has been a very real power creep in their development of heroes after Ana enabled a triple tank meta. In order to make tanks less powerful, a lot of characters were given increased mobility to get around them. In order to deal with this new focus on mobility, there has been an increase in the amount of crowd control abilities. Unfortunately, tanks are also weak to crowd control, and with each new patch, tanks become increasingly frustrating to play unless they have high mobility like D.Va and Winston. A lot of players are hoping for across-the-board nerfs to both mobility and crowd control in order to make tanks feel more generally useful.
• The lack of a "Quarantine" for Arcade mode. Because the difference between Quickplay and Competitive is like night and day, the Casual-Competitive Conflict is at its strongest every week, since most people don't actually care and are just only there for the free lootcrate. Thus every week, the competitive players complain about getting scrubs in their matches, and the casual players complain about having to mute screamers every week. Normally they never have to put up with them.
• The Replay Value of the Archives events (where the more you play, the more different dialogues play during the mission) is a good idea on paper. In practice, you have to play dozens of time to get even one differing interaction, and the subsequent times you play, it's up to the Random Number God if the interaction you'll hear is one you've heard plenty times before or not.
• The progression system of Overwatch 2 is hated for having rewards that are either ludicrously expensive or time-consuming to earn. At launch, a single Legendary skin costed 1900 Overwatch Coins (the in-game currency), therefore one needs to shell out $19 or grind weekly challenge to earn Coins. However, what makes the challenges so frustrating is that the total weekly rewards amount to just 60 Coins, meaning that one needs to complete all weekly challenges for 8 months just to purchase the Legendary skin. Even the less expensive Epic and Rare skins cost 1000 and 300 Coins, respectively, meaning that it will take 5 to 17 weeks to unlock a decent skin. Furthermore, unlike other games, the paid track of the Season 1 Battle Pass doesn't offer premium currency.
• The Season 1 Battle Pass became a sore spot for many players given its underwhelming rewards. Not only are most of cosmetics considered rather ugly, but they also don't fit the Season 1's Cyberpunk theme with the actual Cyberpunk skins being separate purchases. It also doesn't help that new Hero Kiriko is locked behind the battle pass. Speaking of unlocking heroes...
• The new Hero unlock system in Overwatch 2 was panned by for putting new heroes behind seasonal battle passes. Unlike the original Overwatch, in which all heroes were available with no restrictions, beginning with Season 1's Kiriko, all new heroes could only be unlocked by either by grinding the free battle pass, upgrading to the premium version or just buying the heroes with premium currency after the season ended. Given how Overwatch gameplay encourages switching characters mid-match to counter the enemy team's picks, locking Heroes could make this impossible for most players, and it didn'thelp that the possibility of new heroes becoming overpowered led to accusations of the system being pay-to-win. Fortunately, Blizzard eventually took the hint and finally reverted this system by season 10, with new heroes returning to being immediately available for everyone to play upon their release.

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