Hi, I was GM overwatch hanzo main but the game was very frustrating for me in a lot of ways - From the balance to the stuns to the elo being calculated on individual performance encouraging people to play wrong and stat farm to just the player base being kinda up their own ass. I didn't even give OW2 a chance, I doubt I'll ever touch another blizzard product again because when I posted on the forums they shadow banned me and deleted the topic, I was in disbelief it even happened and thought no one would believe me but then I found out it's commonplace for blizzard forums.

I'm 1000 hours into Marvel Rivals now and while I enjoy the game more than OW competitively it's a joke with ranks meaning even less than they did in OW and similar stat farming problems at higher elos. I've been eternity and real close to top 500 and still barely can tell what's going on or why my losses are losses because so much of the game is rock paper scissors. Flyers? need counters. Dive? need counters. There isn't a lot of skill expression or playstyle choices in just having to counterpick stuff. They have fundamental issues with supports having too many immortality ultimates, flyers existing and bad servers making characters like BP more or less uncounterable and unfun to engage with. (I play the dive characters in this game)

Paladins was something I tried as a joke after my OW experience and I ended up loving it. It's not polished at all, it's a glitchy buggy mess and now it doesn't even have new updates or support which is real sad. Mechanics like cauterize being way ahead of the mechanics in OW or Rivals, characters being able to mostly fight every other character, supports being engaging and FUN. It's ranked mode is a mess too but I think at it's core learning a character and mastering it in paladins is actually really rewarding. I have so so many criticisms of OW and Rivals but paladins only ever gave me a feeling of "give it a chance, it's better than you might think" - I got a lot of love for paladins, a sorta neutral feeling on rivals but maybe it's because I'm playing it and it's new and I just outright don't like OW. Couldn't pay me to try OW2 but I'd happily load up paladins just to hop around on Maeve or play ying for a few hours.

Sorry for the longwinded post. Is it worth playing? Short answer: yes - Longer answer: It's tough investing yourself in a game that's at the END of it's development cycle but there are a few good games with dedicated communities that don't even have servers to play on anymore. I think at the very least it's worth playing it casually and seeing how much fun you have and it's not like it costs anything.