Well here it is, number ten, boy time flies when you’re getting annoyed. This week is dedicated to one game as I’ve been playing Overwatch for the last week and it’s great fun. It’s just people on my team are just awful, like real awful people. It’s not their gaming ability, as I’m nothing great, why I’m as average as they come. No, it’s their personality that makes them dreadful. It’s like they are specifically there to make me question what I am doing with my life.
Now sure, I could spend this time just moaning about how if I see another Bastion or Torbjörn I will smash my disc and any other copy I can find in a 10 mile radius. But my team just makes difficult games like these that much worse. People playing Overwatch are some of the most infuriating there are, they just don’t want to have a well-rounded team. They also seem incapable to adapting to what characters their teammates choose to play.
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I pick the character I want, only to watch my teammate go and pick the same one. It’s like you’re playing chicken with some other person. Who can hold their nerve longer before switching? It’s not a mystery who I’ve picked, they couldn’t make it clearer. I bet they just sit there watching me, waiting for me to pick someone. Is this how they get their kicks? Have they gotten bored of being beaten and want to annoy someone else and specifically target their happy go lucky teammate? After both of you are locked in, it begins the, I’m not swapping you swap, tango. Until the game starts and they are clearly in this for the long run, which means you have to swap to someone else, more often than not that means the support character.
Another favourite of mine are the best team players around, the two friends. The people who might as well set up their own team, as they don’t want us, they’re just lumbered with us. One picks any character they wish, the other Mercy. This Mercy will not spend any second healing anyone else, oh no, that’s not why they are here. A healer who heals more than one person, come off it! You could be alone in the room with her, on 1hp standing right in front of her and she’ll still ignore you, waiting for her friend to get back. I’m surprised I haven’t seen a group like this just both pick Mercy and then sit in a corner somewhere just constantly healing one another.
The worst part is that most games have no support, so when you see a healer who does this it makes it that much harder to swallow. There are only a handful of a number of times where someone on the team other than me or my friend has chosen to be a support, while the other team appears to have to fight one another off from getting to play as a support. It’s not like support characters are just bad, Lúcio is arguably one of the best characters in the game, and it doesn’t even feel like you are healing people. You have a decent gun, abilities that can push people clean off a map, and other abilities for giving health or speed. It’s not like healing is a massive hindrance, you just have to be in the same general area as your team. But then, who wouldn’t want to play as Soldier: 76 who can just heal himself and ignore there even being a team, as standard Call of Duty guy is too much fun?
Well that handily brings me on to the next kind of people. The players who prefer to think of this game as an adventure game. The kind of person who goes out and will be anywhere on the map where your other teammates aren’t. “Hey look, we’re close to getting checkpoint A, maybe I’ll go help. Wait, I just saw something shiny in that room over there, it’s probably nothing but how will I know it’s nothing until I spend five minutes over there?”. Maybe they’re pacifists and wish to just enjoy their surroundings, why does everything have to be about killing?
Whenever you play as Reinhardt, everyone appears to have this playstyle. You could be surrounded by your team, but as soon as you use your shield and push forward, everyone seems to get cold feet and run away. It’s as if Reinhardt has cooties and they are scared they will catch it. This means Reinhardt unknowingly walks into the enemy, with no hope in hell of coming out alive. It’s sad to watch, he just goes on a death march, while the rest of the team sit back watching and not even using the distraction to push somewhere else. Even the other team must feel sorry for Reinhardt as they watch all of his allies just drop off. Well, they can’t be too sad as they still kill him. The worst part is Reinhardt never learns, he sees too much good in people. So, when he respawns he’ll try it again, even using the message to group up. The whole game is just him doing this again and again. He should record it and add some sad music, then send it to his teammates so they can see how they are terrible people.
Lastly, there are the people who see you do well as a character and think they could do the same if not better, so they proceed to switch characters. Even if you already have two of them they still make the change. Oh, that Mccree just got four kills, he must be great, it is clearly down to the character not the player, so I’m guaranteed to do well. The team dynamic is meant to shift around the other team’s playstyle, it doesn’t mean to actually change your team to the one person who does well. There must have been one poor person in a game who had a team filled with people who just switched to his character as he got five kills in a row.
Now, I’m sure over the months there will be more people on my team who will find ways to make me want to cry, but that’s the fun of online games, right?