I believe it's not about whether the game is actually any good or not. It's about what Highguard represents.
Let's be honest, hero shooter isn't an oversaturated genre in any sense. Upon looking up what hero shooters are available right now I managed to find around five of them: Overwatch 2, Fragpunk, Valorant, Apex Legends, Paladins. If Highguard survives it will be the sixth.
That number is a joke compared to boomer shooters (which itself I'd argue isn't oversaturated in the first place) and downright sad compared to metroidvanias or deckbuilders. Don't even think about incrementals. But those releases don't get this near unanimous levels of animosity from the community.
The fact is liveservice games completely lost any goodwill they once might have had. 90% of the time nobody is excited when a new one is announced because almost nobody respects this genre. It's primarily seen as a soulless, corporate product made for maximum profit potential, and nine times out of ten that is true. Even if you give one a shot it can disappear a few years later (or two weeks in case of Concord), so all the money and time you've invested is down the drain. It's no wonder people look at this game and immediately start thinking about the apology tweet and the end of service announcement.
I believe if hero shooter devs want to be taken seriously by the community they need to adopt the Xonotic model. Xonotic is a community developed open source arena shooter. In Xonotic hosting and moderating the servers is the community's job. This immediately solves everything and is the reason a game with a playerbase measured in dozens can be sustained with effectively zero monetization. Translating this to a commerical title can be quite tricky but I think it has great potential.
People say they're sick of live services, but the successful ones are still doing hella numbers. Execs have seen how much money Marvel Rivals is making and they want a piece. I think the real problem is that they've become so saturated. Most gamers already have one or two live services they're hooked on, and these games demand so much of your time that they're not going to fit another into their rotation. Do people truly hate live services, or do they just hate the ones they're not currently playing?
Live services also come with an expectation that they have to be a massive megahit overnight or else they're dead on arrival. All or nothing. With the budgets that get poured into these games, the only way to get a return on investment is to hit it big big big. I have a lot of opinions the way gamers throw around the word 'dead' to describe any multiplayer game with a less than Fortnite-sized playerbase, argumentum ad SteamCharts has done irreparable damage to gaming discourse, but it is a sad truth that a lot of modern multiplayer games can't just find their niche and be comfortable with that.
And I say all this as someone whose favorite multiplayer games have a matchmaking system that consists of just pitting you against whoever's available, or even a Discord server where you ping a matchmaking role and hope someone responds. A modest little indie game can sustain a tight-knit community that way, but it'll never fly for a big budget live service. I have games I love dearly that I can't actually recommend to people because getting matches can be a chore that I doubt most of you want to deal with.
This then leads to this self-fulfilling prophecy where a live service with this kind of anti-hype train is what seals its grave. Live services are an investment to get into, but it's already been pronounced dead, so don't sink any cost into it because no one else will. I have games that I've enjoyed but couldn't justify putting money into because the future looked too uncertain, which is exactly how they ended up dying.
Maybe there's even a bit of us vs. them, because market saturation has made the fight for an active playerbase so cutthroat, people don't want to see a competing title risk siphoning players away from their preferred game. I've even been there too, my favorite game of all time dropped off because another game came in and split its playerbase.
But mostly, I think a lot of people just like shitting on the new target of the day without even thinking too hard about why. Making fun of a flop has always been a popular gamer pastime. I've seen this sort of thing happen all time time, dating back before we even had the term 'live service'. TORtanic is the one that immediately comes to mind for me, the one people made such a big deal out of that they had to come up with a funny name for it. Anyone remember that?
This is a really good point, I've definitely felt this way over the years.