Have you heard? On Tuesday, the Overwatch Uprising event began. My wife and I were both pretty excited as the new game mode promised to bring PvE back to the online shooter. Until May 1, players can engage in a four-person mission to take London back from hoards of evil robots. They know how to get my attention. Because this is the first instance of story content in Overwatch, players are limited to the four heroes who canonically took part.

The missus and I have fun in Overwatch from time to time, but if there’s nothing special going on, we get a little bored of all the player-versus-player. Thus, we signed on as soon as we could on patch day. Our first attempt on normal mode went well until our Reinhardt dropped out of our game right before the final push. I suppose I’ll never know what happened to him, but we could not beat the odds without our tank.

Our second attempt was rougher, as our Tracer kept running too far ahead to be healed or protected by Reinhardt’s shield. This was how we learned that the whole team will fail the mission if a downed member is not revived quickly enough. But then the floodgates opened.

Our overly eager Tracer (let’s call him Tomato for the sake of storytelling), began spewing bile in the chat about how horrible the rest of the team was. We didn’t give him enough healing. We didn’t advance to the next point fast enough. Certainly, it could not have been the great Tomato who erred.

My wife and I just shrugged it off and queued for another round of PvE. We found a match quickly, but to our dismay, we’d been grouped up with Tomato again. He wasn’t exactly thrilled either. This time, the team stuck together mostly and we made it much further. Tomato continued to overextend and needed several revivals, but we muddled along. When things got a little crazy in the final phase, we started dropping like flies and lost again. I’m sure Tomato had plenty to say about it, but I’ll never be sure because I muted him at the start of his second tirade. We might’ve tried another queue, but my PC began seizing up due to an unexpected memory leak.

These are the things that happen when you play an online game casually. The verbal abuse, not the memory leak; that one was new. This isn’t the environment all the time, mind you, but it occasionally comes with the territory of having a life. Overwatch is almost a year old, and we didn’t play it exclusively even when it was new. It’s an experience entirely about competition, which isn’t what we look for in a game. We play Overwatch when we feel like it and not a minute more. And since we don’t like playing alone, it’s a somewhat rare event. We play to win, but we don’t have an aching need to be the best at it. I’ve never even touched the competitive mode, a wise choice I think.

In an ideal world, we would find ourselves signing on with all of our other friends who play. We would probably feel like playing for longer sessions with familiar voices in our headsets. If we succeeded, it would be because we worked together well. If we failed, we could respectfully discuss what might worked and what didn’t. Sadly, those friends also have lives to balance, so we do what we can with a parade of strangers. Most are courteous enough, but once in a while, the matchmaking throws at tomato at you.