Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
But what was actually being progressed? Your collection of skins. Which, in OW1, you could buy with real money directly or via lootboxes.

We don't look at an XIV raider and think, "Ahh, yes, their hours-played is their real progression, not his ilvl," do we?


On the whole, agreed. But both allowed you to speed your way towards their actual rewards / progression via direct payment. Neither was a closed economy.
Your level was being progressed, that by itself is a valuable stat. If you went over some threshold, color of your portrait changed and so on. I could find you some very old reddit posts from early OW1, where people were really satisfied with this simple element and were excited to get these better portraits. You always saw level and player's portraits in the tab screen, whenever you were loading it, etc. That, by itself, is a decent progression, because games like OW simply cannot have much more than this and some cosmetics.

Nothing meaningful was, in essence, being progressed, you're right about that, but what is being progressed in here? You work towards your gear, and in 8 months, you can throw it in a trash. Way you get glam here is different than in OW, but in essence, you just do X, and skin unlocks for you. You get achievements, but you cannot flex your achievement points. Progression is generally just an illusion, just a value game gives to our account for doing X or Y. Only real progression is you getting better, that's about it.