What am I talking about?
I’ll keep this short and sweet, and directly to the point so you don’t have to sift through here to agree or disagree with something.
Basically, as Blizzard adds more heroes, the game gets more saturated with different possibilities, and those possibilities grow at a rate larger than O(NlogN). As such, mathematically speaking, the game gets significantly harder to balance under many conditions of freedom because there are subtle interactions that cannot be efficiently accounted for by their team.
As such, they have 2 options as developers pushing out balance patches- remove heroes to make the sheer number of interactions more manageable, or indirectly remove interactions of combinations of heroes so that fewer needs to be accounted for in balance.
Obviously, they’re not going to remove their heroes, so they opted in for the latter. They’ve actually done this twice. While I’m sure all of you are familiar with the unique-hero-pick change to 2/2/2, there was actually something before unique-hero-pick, which was free-pick, where any # of the same hero on the team was okay. This was the system for beta, AND even a good while after release. I remember the system actually kind of fondly, as it allowed for many ridiculous combinations. Anyway, the developers realized that accounting for 1-bastion-a-team was waaay easier to balance than having to account for 3-bastions-a-team combining with 3-mercys-a-team or any weird combination of heroes like that… if you think about the mathematics of it, the balance developers cut down their workload to a small fraction of what it was. I invite you to to consider the numbers of how much work they saved, but will not do a computation here myself mainly because the number of heroes and number of abilities in-game changed multiple times over the process, and it’s not necessary to convey the ultimate point here.
Anyway, so the devs keep adding more heroes, and as a result need to keep cutting down their balance workload. 2/2/2 made it so that even fewer combinations of heroes need to be considered, paving the way for more heroes to come with fewer overpowered combinations. However, just like free-pick reached its capacity in a matter of months, and unique-hero-pick reached its capacity in a matter of years (aided by a half-coincidental 2/2/2 role meta at the time, so it took out lots of bad combinations while preserving lots of meta and strong ones), it is my statement that every design here has a carrying capacity, and 2/2/2 will reach it’s capacity at some point and give way to 1/1/2/1/1, 1-Maintank, 1-offtank, 2-DPS, 1-mainhealer, 1-offhealer, because at that point there will be so many heroes released that it will be necessary to maintain the fun interactions.
And then they’ll release Overwatch Classic, and we’ll all play the day away.