I'm interested to see how Blizzard is going to handle its Overwatch community. It's very likely Overwatch will become incredibly competitive, and I don't think Blizzard has ever been a part of that scene (competitive WoW, anyone?)
Time will tell.
Time will tell.
I'd argue that Blizzard was largely responsible for defining modern eSports. Blizzard games helped drive the creation of many of the gaming leagues, ESL/IEM started with Warcraft III and the original Counter-Strike. Starcraft and Starcraft 2 had huge competitive communities in their prime and really drove the growth of eSports.
Starcraft 2 is tapering off today but Hearthstone is huge and Heroes of the Storm, while not nearly as popular as LoL/Dota2 is still built as a competitive game.
I'd say Starcraft, SSBM, DotA, Q3 CPMA/Reflex are games that are geared toward competitive play. Whereas HotS, LoL and Overwatch seem much more aimed at being fun and satisfying to play for the average person who isn't interested in sinking 40 hours into a game just to learn basic skills like how to strafe jump or tech/wave dash.
I'm not really trying to push a particular viewpoint though, just curious if you'd expand on what YOU think makes a game competitive?
Another simple metric is to look at eSport tournaments by prize pool. If people are playing the game in an attempt to win hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, it's a competitive game.
I get the impression that you are conflating 'competitive' with 'difficult'.
I understand your point about conflating "competitive" and "difficult", but there is a reason why people couple the concepts together: there's no point in competitively playing a game with a low skill ceiling. An extremely contrived example of this: Rock-Paper-Scissors is a competitive, PvP game and yet no one would ever host tournaments for it because of the ridiculously low skill ceiling; there's not enough to differentiate an experienced player from a brand new one.
Almost all such games maintain some sort of per player rating (ELOish usually) which is separate from ranked play and often hidden. You certainly don't need to play ranked modes just to be paired with similar skill level players.
> there's no point in competitively playing a game with a low skill ceiling.
Sure, but in combination with previous comment your inference appears to be that HotS, LoL and Overwatch are low skill cap games. I'm curious what your argument for that is. Using LoL as an example the overall ELO distribution is extremely bottom heavy with a smooth taper to the top; vastly more players in lower ranks than higher despite having consistent promotion rules. A ranking for a low skill cap game would be expected to have a bunching at the top as the skill cap is quickly reached and the outcome becomes more random.
One thing these 3 games do have in common is a low barrier to entry, but I see no correlation between that and skill cap in video games or traditional sports. e.g. a very young child can start to play soccer, but that doesn't mean soccer has a low skill cap.
As a result, there's very little "git gud" trolling or toxic chats were a player will blame his whole team when losing. It's a much friendlier atmosphere overall, and seems to attract a more diverse crowd.
What it does help with is teamwork imo, as the scoreboard in other games like CS usually diverts attention and makes play focused on individuals.
(I've also seen very little positive chat. Most matches have no chat at all, or just some default "Hello!"s.)
However, I'm noticing that as I've ranked up into the sub-population of more experienced or dedicated players, in-game chat has gotten uglier, with people ending games typing "gg ez" or "l2p noob" in chat.
Compared to the kinds of things you'd see in League of Legends, that's pretty benign, but I'm definitely seeing a steady increase in the number of angry or bad-mannered messages in my games of Overwatch.
Fortunately there are "avoid this player" and "block this person" buttons that you can use to tune them out and avoid ever playing with them again. Part of me wishes that Blizzard would shove players with high incident rates into some sort of toxic player purgatory.
You can see a similar trend in lots of online games like Rocket League or TF2.
Arenas? starcraft? WC3?