I’ve seen many instances of the Anecdotal Falacy on the Forums. Even I think I used it in some instances. It’s the falacy where people take their own personal experiances and use their narrow scope of reality as evidence regarding the masses.
I see it most when a person talks about how a character is weak. Sometimes, it’s based on only their own experiances, but other times it reflects the community’s experiace too. What then happens is some person would say that since they are having a good time with said hero, they’re actually balanced and you need to ‘git good.’
Maybe you have a blast playing Doomfist, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else is. The best metric for determining a hero’s prominence in a videogame is by weighing the opinions of the masses, since game balance revolves around what people want to play.
If you see a person using the Anecdotal Falacy, call them out for it. This may be a Hell Hole where people, myself included, come to vent their anger by lashing out at each other and Blizzard as a whole, but let’s make our rage more logically sound.
Is this a Doomfist whine thread? Odd example especially since character is actually doing fine and needs a rework instead of any buff of any kind. His prominence and popularity in casual and even in t500 of comp not only shows people generally like playing him but also that he’s fine balance-wise if not a bit on the strong side.
If the masses are to be believed, Bastion is God-tier, as is Moira, Pharah is untouchable and Mercy might as well be invincible with lightspeed maneuverability.
These are, technically, the feedback Blizzard is actually looking for in proposing future adjustments.
Yep. And they’re going to give anecdotal opinions about it.
Nope. That doesn’t work.
Given that opinions are subjective, and you reject anecdotes, you’re kinda putting yourself in a box here.
Knowing and understanding what a fallacy is, is good. But don’t think that every argument that uses these kinds of fallacies is a bad argument.
If everyone’s subjective, anecdotal opinion is that Supports are too strong, there may be some truth there. The question then, is to find out why. Healing hasn’t gone up, but a lot of players are coming to the same conclusions that there is “something” about Supports that feels wrong or overpowering somehow.
