Why do people insist that competition in this game is completely fair?

1. They nerfed Wrecking Ball even though he was near the bottom in overall win rate, because metal-rank players struggled to deal with him. The same thing has happened with Roadhog, Doomfist, and Sombra. (Doomfist is actually pretty decent these days, though.)

2. Despite all the boosted Mercy players running around, instead of restricting stacks, they actively promote grouping through ridiculous systems like Team Drives: basically, “Group up in Competitive and get bonus cosmetic reward points!” Isn’t that fucking insane?

3. Old accounts generally get placed around Gold–Platinum even if the player mostly plays Quick Play and only comes back to do placements. Just look at the people on the OW subreddit. They genuinely think they’re Platinum-level players.

This game goes out of its way to make casual players feel good, so it’s honestly baffling to me when people insist that the competitive system is completely fair.

There are tons of cases where two players at the same rank clearly aren’t at the same skill level. Smurf accounts are everywhere, boosted players exist at every rank, and the balance patches get weird. Just look at Kiriko going years without meaningful nerfs while they keep selling skins for her.

Now, if your response to all of that is, “It’s a live-service online game, and games are businesses, so some of this is inevitable. If you’re good enough and keep enjoying the game, you’ll succeed eventually,” then sure, I completely agree. I made it to Master myself, after all.

But what I don’t understand are the people whose response is basically, “If you say any of this, you’re the weird one. There’s nothing wrong with the game.”

What’s up with that?

I come from Asian gaming communities, and Reddit seems especially bad about this. More specifically, I mean the main Overwatch subreddit.