Overwatch
The discourse is unfortunately making me think about Overwatch, which started as a game I enjoyed quite a lot and became something I loathed. It's hard for me to think of another game that I both liked and disliked to such a degree at different points (MMOs would be the usual suspect for this, but I've never played an MMO very seriously). I'm not even talking about the OW2 stuff--I don't play FOMO-based service games, and I also don't give Blizzard my money or time anymore for all the reasons you'd expect, so I have no idea what's going on there. Can't imagine I'd like it very much, though.
It was always Blizzard's attempt to conjure a fully-formed esports scene out of nothing, so I only have myself to blame if I hoped for anything different. But the thing that made me hate playing Overwatch was the process of its being balanced per Blizzard's ideas about what high-level play should look like. At launch the heroes felt varied, and then over the course of a couple years they all became slightly different flavors of straightforward DPS.
There's a point beyond which balance sucks the life out of a thing. Making every character aggressive and useful in all circumstances is maybe better for the purposes of competitive spectacle, but I liked playing as highly situational characters, characters whose main purpose was to stop the other team's advance at a doorway or push down a corridor of a specific width. All the goofy edge cases you'd see in OW helped me get over team shooter fatigue after a lot of TF2. But that was all just an accident, an error in the design of a game that was really meant to cater to a hyper-specific and extremely sweaty style of play. Whether it's fun for most people is beside the point, given that most people aren't supposed to play OW, they're supposed to watch people better at it than them play it.
It's all sort of irrelevant to me now. Having experienced three-minute matches with no chat, I'll never be able to play another of these games unless it has the word Splatoon in the title. Fuck Blizzard anyway though.