After 10 matches, ten mostly terrible matches, I made it through the placement stage for the latest season of Overwatch Competitive, with a 3 win, 7 loss record and a 2000-ish rank.
As it tends to happen with Overwatch competitive, you sometimes have amazing matches, where even if you lose, it’s an intense fight from start to finish. And sometimes, you have a team filled with abuse-spewing nincompoops who focus on themselves and not the overall team effort yet find ways of making everything other people’s fault. I know I screw up, a lot, and I can accept that and move on, learning from my mistakes, but I’m continually shocked at how people refuse to accept their parts in a loss, opting for just vitriol to hide the fact.
I had one match so bad in this regard that I had to report the players. From the beginning of the match to the end, they abused each other and the rest of our team, to the point where they robbed me of the fun of the game.
I don’t mind if I lose. Sure, I lose ranking, but in the end it’s just a game and my first priority is having fun. So when people get salty, I usually don’t pay them any attention. But there are levels and many lines, and some players this season have not only crossed them but giddily jumped over them with pirouettes.
I love Overwatch to bits and I find the competitive mode challenging and fun, but holy damn how it brings out the worst in people. Over the course of these 10 matches, I’ve seen people quit at the outset of a match because they didn’t agree with the team composition. I’ve seen them quit because they died once or the team lost the first capture point on a payload match. Hell, those were the nice guys!
But the flip-side is that I played some astoundingly fun matches with people who were just as excited as I was to play the game. We laughed, had some friendly banter and even praised an opponent for his skill with “Harambe,” aka Winston. You can’t imagine how funny it was to hear someone shout over the voice chat “Harambe’s killing people!”
Over the next few weeks and for the duration of the third season of Overwatch competitive, I’ll continue to play matches during my Twitch streams, just because I love the game. But for these 10 matches, I’m made a little video with some of the best moments!
