Overwatch 2's rewards suck harder than a DPS Moira. The pivot to free-to-play has made for some aggressive monetisation coupled with weekly rewards that Morgan Park validly described as "insultingly low." A legendary skin now takes around seven months to earn without whipping out a credit card. It takes so damn long that you may actually be better off playing an entirely different game.
That's what a couple of World of Warcraft fans have determined, anyway. A Reddit post earlier this week garnered a fair bit of attention as user Everdale claimed that you could probably earn Overwatch 2 skins faster by playing Blizzard's MMO than you could by playing its hero shooter. Turns out World of Warcraft has a system that lets you purchase tokens with in-game gold, which can then be converted into Battle.net credit. It works out at around $15 USD/£10 GBP per token, which isn't too bad a reward for a bit of gold grinding.
While it's not a directly comparable system, Overwatch 2 currently lets you earn a small number of coins per week by completing challenges. Completing all 11 challenges for the week nets you 60 gold coins, which roughly equates to 60 cents. Some of these challenges—like winning 10 games each as two different roles—can take a little bit of grinding out. It reduces the likelihood of earning the full reward week-on-week unless it's the only game you're playing. If you do manage 60 coins a week, that's around 16 weeks for a battle pass or just under 32 weeks for a legendary skin. It's a bit much.
you_can_earn_ow2_skins_faster_by_playing_wow_than from r/Overwatch
If you're playing WoW, though, those 16 weeks could get squeezed right down to about two. User Xenon1366 commented on the Reddit thread to say that the token method was "exactly how I got the battle pass." PC Gamer reached out for some further details on how they made it happen. "It really depends on how much you want to play the game," they said. "I have about six level 60s that I will do the mission board in your Covenant Sanctum with. I will then also do the daily Covenant callings, those yield about 2k each. So each day I get about 20k gold from very minimal playing. Last I looked a token cost about 230k, so about every 10 days I could get a token."
Of course, token grinding in WoW isn't definitively a superior method. Apart from needing one (or several) high-level characters for it to be beneficial, there's the monthly subscription fee and the cost of actually purchasing the game, whereas Overwatch 2 is free-to-play. There's also the case of token prices being subject to supply and demand, which can tack on a fair bit of time when their worth is on the up. But if you're already a frequent WoW player and also like to dabble in a bit of Overwatch tomfoolery, it may well be a method worth trying.
The situation also speaks to how dire Overwatch 2's monetisation really is. Aside from fans reacting angrily to "greedy" bundles and reselling of Overwatch 1 skins at $20 a pop, it's sucked to see any sense of reward effectively drained from the game. The battle pass is fine, bar my own personal distaste for them as a concept. Loot boxes sucked too, but it felt like a far steadier stream of goodies than what's offered now. Gone are the days of getting silly voice lines and sprays to mess about with before a match, unless you're willing to spend actual money on them.
