Overwatch Stadium released nearly one year ago. What is your opinion on the game mode itself and its current state?
This post is meant to start a discussion about Stadium, because i feel like most high rank players and streamers dont care about this game mode anymore.
Yes one year ago it was the shiny new thing and most people played it. They said in some dev blog some months ago, that i believe a third of the player base queues 1 game of Stadium each session. But most streamers dont even read the patch notes for it anymore. But i dont have the player numbers so my guess is as good as yours.
So lets do a recap, what happened in the last year and what Stadium was promised to be:
Starting Point:
Launch April 14th 2025: https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24188046/enter-the-stadium-get-ready-to-battle/
So what is Stadium?
Stadium is the new best-of-7, multi-round way to play Overwatch 2, where two teams of five face off in magnificent arenas as they purchase upgraded items and powers to radically transform their Heroes—all experienced through our new third-person camera.
Since then alot of things have been added or changed:
Introduction of many of new heroes
Gadgets: https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24239494/weekly-recall-go-go-gadgets/
Draft Phase
Starting with the no mirror matches, then going to picking after eachother and now each team picking at the same time.
This was not well recieved and many people complained, but in the end they listened to player feedback and ended on system that most people are fine with
Amount of Rounds played
another controversial change was when they switched from 7 rounds to 5 rounds and quickly back, when they realised that people really dont like it
Rounds in which you get powers
Last Season they switched the rounds in which you can choose a power to 1,2,4 and 6 from 1,3,5,7
I think that is one of the best changes they ever did. Most builds require 2 powers to function anyway and you get to experience the full build for 2 rounds instead of 1
Item Icons
In my opinion the worst change they have done, simply because it made the overall experience worse and nobody asked for it
Just go to the stadium subreddit r/OverwatchStadium and filter by top of all time and all you will find is people complaing about this change
My personal expiriences and opinion on Stadium:
Personal Bias: I hit GM last Seasons on all roles and have been GM on Support for about 2 years. I played Stadium since launch and put about 300+ hours into it in the last year. I have no problem hitting Legend and at about All Star 1 i lose points for a loss. Last Season i grinded enough to hit "Top 500" in Stadium on all roles. This season i have only played enough to get the free skins - so Elite and All Star
My take on Blizzards Power and Items Philosophy:
Just so everyone is on the same page here. I am using Definition 1:
Stadium was promised to "radically transform the heroes", but i think for most heroes this is just not the case:
For most heroes they are just upping the skill floor with every power and item
Focus on ability size, autoaim
Many powers and builds are just make this abiliy larger i.e hazard wall, block, brig flail and easier to hit or just taking the aiming out completely like with soldiers aimbot
so if every ability is easy to hit the only thing diffenciating a good player from a bad player is timing
Missing Skill Expression/Gadgets/get out of jail free cards
They are not just taking the skill out of most skillshots, but also add items and gadgets that are basically just one button press get out of jail free cards
Colossus core and Kitsunes Charm in particular: One button press can just negate everything you do
active punishment of cc
So everybody has way more uptime, thanks to larger abilities, shorter cooldows, hitting shots way easier, so cc becomes way more important, but since they added reflex coating and cushioned padding, every cc ability is just a joke
Doom is the biggest victim of this. You punch someone, they are barelly stunned and gain some hp/overhealth from it and now you are in a bad position
the only actually good cc that is not effected by this is grav
zero counterplay builds and abilities
- Mercy Rez and Colossus core
- Press E and Gadget Key and if you are not standing next to 5 people you are guaranteed to rez
- you cant be cced in any way out of rez, the only way to stop you is damage and you need multiple people
- Two Suzus and cooldown reduction
- Ever since the release of Kiriko it was obvious how strong suzu is. Everybody knows how frustrating it is to get your target suzud shortly before you can secure the kill
- Giving her 2 Suzus, not only means she can hold onto it for longer, because the second one is loading, it also means you have to bait out 2 suzus before anything dies and she will have 2 suzus after every team fight
- add -30% cooldown on that and playing into her and having your engage suzud every time just feels terrible
- Whatever this is: Replay Code: 9JNNT0
- Video i found for explaining this build and some aspects that break Stadium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K14s7BVYpro
- genuinely watch how broken this is
Lack of creative abilities and reimagining playstyles
After the whole Phara and Freja Ult and Ash Dynamite build fiasko, they have become way more careful with releasing new heroes
Just look at Vendetta at launch:
Most of her abilities are just cooldown reductions, attack speed increases, use cooldown x more often, gain overhealth when you do x. Nothing really new. Nothing that fundamentally changes the way you play her.
But there are genuinly good concepts to change how a hero can be played
Reimagining a heroes playstyle
The new april fools mode proves, that they are capable to come up with new ideas that change the way you play the hero completly
For example Spider JQ and Javelin Orisa: Changing one of their abilities from cc to movement
Here is a list of the abilities that would be nice for Stadium: https://www.reddit.com/r/OverwatchStadium/comments/1sce9s1/overwatch_april_fools_abilities_2026_that_should/
Vanadium
Vanadium is one of the items you buy, if you dont need your ultimate anymore, the ult isnt scalling witht the build. Giving up one ability for an overall better build.
Gadgets
Most Gadgets are nice, because they give you a movement ability, that lets you play heroes more agressive and lets you position more aggressive, but you can still get punished with cc or by not using it right
Conclusion: By taking alot of skill out of abilities, there is not much that differenciates a good player from a bad player. There are not alot meaningful ways for skill expression in this mode, since there are no long cooldowns or hard to hit shots. It basically becomes Marvel Rivals. Not to hate on this game, but alot of players that came back from it said it is just a game where you spam and press buttons and not much decission making.
Of course you will still be able to beat bronce players as a gm 100% of the time, but it will be alot harder for a masters player to beat a plat player in stadium, than in normal comp.
Ranks
Ranking System in General
Ranks
Ranks are cosmetic until you reach your predicted rank. You will put in Matches based on your MMR and not based on your rank.
How does Matchmaking work: https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24224365/weekly-recall-meet-your-matchmaker/
From what i have seen is, that if you are a diamond player you should be able to hit high all stars easily. I think everybody that is gold should be able to make it to mid to high pro.
Rank Resets
- Ranks are reset every season, so you have to get back to your rank every season. They higher your rank the longer it takes to get back up. The people you play against are still the same as always
- Doing this every season just gets boring
Grouping Restrictions
Since you have to climb back to your rank every season, while still having the same hidden MMR, having grouping restricions based on your rank makes no sense to me at all.
I am a Legend player, just because my other Legend player friends played 10 games without me after the rank reset, shouldnt mean we cant queue together anymore. This is one of the dumbest things they added. Having grouping restrictions based on MMR makes sense, but since this rank is mostly cosmetic this is just dumb. The game knows im Legend MMR, just let me play with my friends, after the rank reset
"Top 500 Leaderboard"
https://i.redd.it/iz7t0njyg9tg1.gif
Everyone talks about how bad the normal Leaderboard is, but the Stadium Leaderboard is bad on another level. Just look at the support Leaderboards, nearly all of the Top Supports last season hat a negative winrate on their most played hero.
The best player in the world could not even get close to the top, since the queue times would be insane. I had an average 30+ minute queues last season on support, because i had a 65% winrate. Something needs to change. Most of the top spots are just All Star Players with a negative winrate and 160 hours in the season + prob another 50 hours in queue.
You need to lose more points for losing, the ranks should be more spread out. Everyone is just Allstar 3 to Legend 3, so you nearly gain the same amount of points for a win, but the queue times are just so much longer for better players
Matchmaking and Queue Times:
High Rank Experience
Since there is a lack of masters+ players in stadium, the game solves this by giving you one alot worse player in your team to make a "balanced" match. And you can really notice this. There is always this one guy, that doesnt even know how the base game works, Every game feels like an uphill battle, since the game expects you to carry, but your impact is limited in later rounds because of the skill floor topic i describe earlier. At some point everything you do is just negated.
Average Experience:
The average player also notices the poorly balanced matches:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OverwatchStadium/comments/1say5a4/love_and_hate/
Queue times:
My queue times on support are just insane. I queue 15+ minutes right now and last season when my played this mode more and had a higher winrate a had 30+ minute queue times on support. These queue times make the rank resests even more annoying. WDYM i have to you 20 minutes to get a total bot on my team and i have to play at my best for a 50% chance at winning. I have to play 40 games like that just to get back to all stars for that skin. That is 3 hours just sitting in queue
Also DPS is by far the shortest queue, tank is in the middle and support is the longest. I think that is because of the following:
- Tank players can finally survive alot of cc and get alot of sustain with lifesteal and selfheal and dont need to rely on supports or their team
- Supports are basically immortal. I have way too much 0 death games on brig, while playing really aggressive
- DPS just feels misserable if you dont play meta: everything you do has 0 value. It is way harder to get any kills
I made a post a while ago why thes queue times are a problem:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/1mjymjf/stadium_support_queue_times_are_ruining/
Stacking
Stacking is also completely broken
Conclusion of Ranks and Matchmaking: There is just no point of playing soloqueue past All Star, because of the rank reset every season and the totally busted top 500 leaderboard. It just takes way to much time to get on it
Player Feedback and lack of Mid Season Patch Notes:
Wasting Ressources by adding things that nobody askes for or that would not be necessary with working matchmaking, like the spawn turrets or the icon change
Not having a mid season palance patch for this mode is crazy. Last season freja and ash were insanely broken and they didnt change anything during the mid season. Having 0 Balance changes in such a dynamic mode is just lazy. Even a 10% tweak to some ability would have been fine. Instead they wait the whole season, letting everyone suffer through it and completely rework ash the next season.
Blizzards Perspective:
But why wont blizzard do anything? With Stadium they put themselfs in a really tricky situation, because Stadium does not make money. Players buying skins make money and most players dont play overwatch for stadium. They play overwatch because they want to play overwatch. And they play stadium because it is a nice change from the normal game mode. I dont have the player numbers, but i doubt that there are alot of new players that came to this game for stadium. There will be some players that keep playing overwatch because of stadium, since they got bored of the base game. I doubt that Stadium was a huge success playerwise.
Adding new abilities is probably incredibly hard, since they previously said how hard it is to maintain this game with all the different abilities interacting with eachother. Abilities like Matrix and Copy were insanely hard to code. Doing all this work for a game mode that isnt really the main driver for player count ist probably just not justifiable for management. Why create new abilities for existing heroes when you can just create new heroes for the base mode and get way more players to play the game.
Me:
im also not gonna proof read all that, have fun, Reddit also just decided i cant use bullet points, so enjoy the wall of text
Posted Apr 5, 2026, 1:16 AM UTC