“We don’t expect Sombra to ever be a vicious assassin,” Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan once said. Players seem to agree: Sombra is not typically understood to be a competitively “viable” character. One player took that notion as a challenge, and the result is beautiful.
Watch as Bunsen gets bullied and harassed for picking Sombra in competitive, only to play so well that everyone who talked shit against Sombra end up giving props instead. Below, you’ll find a video diary of their journey from gold to diamond, and it is delicious:
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3 responses to “Sombra Player Proves Haters Wrong About Competitive Overwatch”
Disclaimer: Not an Overwatch player (the ingame chat in the video explains why).
I could swear that I saw an article just like this one recently only it was Widowmaker, and the comments (both on and off this site) basically boiled down to: Overwatch is not a game about playing what you want, it’s about playing what your team wants you to play.
Team “heard” that Sombra is not “meta” therefore no one should play Sombra EVER.
While in reality, a bunch of the complaining players (of any game) are only average (by definition), and it probably really doesn’t matter which character they play, they could do better by just L2P.
That was pretty badass, I wouldn’t say it proved Jeff wrong or anything though. Bunsen still wasn’t being a “vicious assassin,” they were being a map/enemy-controlling support – an awesome and totally viable one at that.
Just because a really good player can string enough good plays over the course of god knows how long, it doesn’t mean Sombra is viable. I’m not saying that she isn’t, but a highlight reel like this doesn’t prove much. Just like a Hanzo highlight reel doesn’t prove that he isn’t the wrong choice 99 times out a hundred.
One of the most frustrating things about laddering in Overwatch is the communities slavish obsession with the meta to the point where people who pick heroes that are off-meta get brutally harassed.
It’s incredibly stupid not just because it’s always incredibly stupid to be a dickhead to your teammates but also because metas change, and Overwatch is a game that’s largely built around skill, not a MOBA – picking a hero you’re actually good at playing completely trumps ‘correct picks’.
If you have no healers on your team you’re going to have a bad time, but telling one of your DPS players to switch to a different DPS character because META is really stupid – let them play the DPS character they actually know how to play.
2-2-2 is also not actually mandatory.