"Marvel Brawl" completed the six-year journey of "OW" in two days
"Marvel Brawl" is on fire.
Open the Steam platform, the number of online people remains at 30-40w all year round, and it seems that there are always people playing superheroes.
It can be said that it is even more difficult for a new game to enter the online number of people, and there are not only 10,000-year-old nail households such as DOTA2 and CS2 in the top 10, but also cutting-edge users such as Infernal.
Maybe the results have become a booster, or maybe the game has been laid out in advance, almost at the same time as the game was put on the shelves, "Marvel Brawl" began its own e-sports road. The Champions Cup of Season 0 is menacing, which seems to show NetEase's impatience in creating e-sports hits.
Online directly open the league, this kind of operation is rare
Judging from today's market, NetEase's e-sports plate is far from being as big as imagined.
As the only two gaming giants in China, NetEase has been deeply involved in the field of e-sports for many years, but the speed of progress seems to be a little slow.
There are many factors that have contributed to this situation.
The first is the category of fist products.
As we all know, the pillar of NetEase games has always been an MMORPG, and in this field, it cannot be said that it is unbeatable, at least it is also the head boss. Whether it is the new "Against the Cold" or the dream that has been in operation for more than 20 years, it is showing NetEase's advantages in this category.
But the shortcomings of MMOs are also obvious, they are not dominant in the field of esports.
Of course, this doesn't mean that this kind of game can't engage in e-sports, it's that the game can be divided into high and low, and there can be a match three games, not to mention MMO. It's just that compared with MOBA, FPS, and chicken, which are more direct, more enjoyable, and have a lower entry threshold, the road to e-sports of such games is more difficult. For the audience, they may not be able to understand the top props of professional CS players, but they can easily understand which side is the advantage and whose marksmanship is better.
However, MMO games, the setting of long TTK, and the threshold of professional skills need to be understood, so that most non-gamers can only simply watch and have fun. This is destined to the so-called MMO e-sports events can only closely follow the player group and develop more entertainment-oriented national e-sports, making it difficult to build a mature professional event ecology.
In several popular e-sports categories, NetEase has coverage, but it doesn't seem to work well.
"Operation Apocalypse" was still posting photos of the weekly champion of the professional competition at the beginning of October, but in the middle of the year, the news of the game's suspension was released, and the change was in an instant.
短短一个月游戏状态跟过山车一样，man，what can I say
In such a situation, will "Marvel Brawl" be NetEase's next e-sports hit?
Not optimistic, at least for now, it is likely to turn out to be a second Overwatch in the future.
On the one hand, NetEase does not have systematic experience in the operation of shooting games and e-sports events. Therefore, the simplest, most convenient and effective way is to cross the river by touching the predecessors. And this must be inseparable from a legendary game - Overwatch.
Although the original smash hit Overwatch League (OWL) is a thing of the past, you have to admit that it did make a good start for the esports of this new FPS genre, and it also proved that hero shooters have quite a wide esports soil.
Not only the TGA esports games in 2016, but also the Esports Awards in 2018, OW also won three major awards
It seems that "Marvel Brawl" can also make some achievements in the field of e-sports as long as it avoids Blizzard's thunder point in event operation.
Looking back now, there are many reasons why OWL went from glory to extinction - the high entry threshold of professional events, Blizzard's poor event operation capabilities, etc., but the most critical of them is that Blizzard's series of riotous operations gradually pushed players away from the game. It was the lack of support from the player base that caused a chain reaction of OWL, with sponsors withdrawing funds, exposing the league's financial problems, and ultimately failing.
For example, Blizzard's almost paranoid "balance changes" have dissuaded many players. OW1's once iron fist is simply a nightmare for countless milk positions and C positions. This is the same thing as a ghost, TTK is super short, a set of E connected to a civilian triple of uppercut + basic attack, which can kill most heroes, and there is quite a sense of beauty that does not care about the life and death of ordinary players.
Sister, who is sniping here?
However, due to the cooperation of professional players in place and strong awareness, the iron fist that kills all sides in the passerby bureau is not so threatening in the professional arena. Therefore, while listening to the opinions of players to weaken Tekken, the official slashed other heroes with backhands.
Focusing only on the balance of competition, regardless of whether the entertainment player lives or dies, this is perhaps the deepest grudge that most players have towards OW.
This kind of ultra-short TTK second man hero is more in "Marvel Brawl", and the countermeasures are relatively scarce, when you see a shark ready to take a, there seems to be no better solution than to quickly hide or run out of range.
There's no tricks, it's all the beauty of numbers and mechanics
Such a design may be cool, but everyone is a supermodel, and it is by no means the best answer to the balance of the game.
As for the follow-up 222 lock class, it's more like a one-size-fits-all approach to the game in the over-pursuit of balance, which has pros and cons. The good thing is that he can ensure the basic stability of a team, so that there will be no situation where 6C goes out and is directly shattered by the opposite side.
But it also restricts the player's freedom to a certain extent, after all, everyone is good at different positions, and playing other positions can't play all their strength. In the eyes of many players, it is still the earliest version of ow that is the most fun, There is no limit to the choice of heroes, although the fight is very undisciplined, but the happiness is real.
Take out the old man's 5Dva lineup
Another important reason is the spectacle of the event.
In fact, NetEase is not without experience in the operation of systematic e-sports events, and the asymmetrical categories of "The Fifth Personality" and "Naraka: Bladepoint" e-sports events have already shown a fairly mature event and youth training system.
Taking "Naraka: Bladepoint" as an example, NetEase's investment in the "Naraka: Bladepoint" e-sports event is not small, and it invested tens of millions of dollars in prize money to create a series of Heist Cup events in the first year.
However, both the scale and popularity of the event are far lower than those of LPL, KPL and other head events. A large part of this is due to the fact that compared to traditional esports such as MOBA and FPS, survival competitive games are slightly less enjoyable to watch.
Since the "chicken" fire, how to improve the viewing experience of survival competitive games has always been a big problem. Whether it is "PUBG", "Apex Legends", or "Naraka: Bladepoint", they have tried various methods, but they have never been able to completely solve a series of problems such as the slow pace of combat in the mid-term, the chaos of the battlefield in the later stage, and the lack of substitution from God's perspective.
Hero shooters face a similar contradiction.
In the past, OW, with Blizzard's reverse balance, the arena was always a permutation and combination of several supermodel characters, and under the continuous exploration of professional players and coaching teams, the way to win has formed a standard formula, and it is difficult for players to feel the freshness from the game.
And today's "Marvel Brawl" is also unsatisfactory in terms of balance.
Perhaps in line with the powerful abilities of superheroes in the setting, the character performance of "Marvel Heroes" is obviously stronger than that of OW. Many of the characters in the game are able to fly away and make all sorts of outrageous displacements. For example, Iron Man and Star-Lord are not only able to move quickly in all directions, but they also have no energy limit for flying, which simply makes the eagle of the pharaoh next door greedy.
However, the difference in abilities between the characters makes it too obvious to have a strength ladder between the characters of the same positioning, which also causes some characters to either go unnoticed or are not required to be selected.
In competitive games, getting the version of the hero is to get a better game experience. This leads to the fact that in order to win the game, players will inevitably go to utilitarianism, and choose characters with relatively simple operations and greater benefits. Although the number of heroes is extremely large, the difference in value and strength makes the lineup and gameplay of "Marvel Brawl" simply not as diverse as when OW opened the server.
Admittedly, the esports process of Marvel Brawl has not yet begun, and we can't label future Marvel Brawl events as OWL remastered based on the current game experience alone.
However, due to the balance of the game, today's "Marvel Showdown" also has a trend of solidifying the lineup. Although it has not yet begun to lock positions, there are already many players who have tried to study the utilitarian play of the 303 lineup in order to pursue the winning rate. And if the feasibility of this routine is verified, then even if the official promises that there will be no restrictions on the lineup, it is likely that some "special means" will be used to "balance adjustment" in the future. This is undoubtedly an opening of Pandora's box for e-sports events that are still in the embryonic stage of players.
Someone on the ladder has already started to drive the 303 convoy
epilogue
"Marvel Brawl" is the new hope of NetEase's e-sports disk today, after all, today's results, especially the popularity overseas, are quite eye-catching.
But it can't be denied that there are indeed problems with the game at present, just like the problems that OW once faced, after the "fresh period" when the game was just launched, after the ebb of pan-entertainment players, it is the beginning of the real test of this game.
After all, after the OW fire, there are also many imitators, and the popularity is not bad.
And where have they all gone?
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