The OW dev team tried for years to balance the game to get rid of the oppressive meta feeling, they failed so badly. They have given up now, and have resorted to banning heroes at random to force variety and nerfing the meta aggressively. it’s the biggest admission ever that they don’t know how to balance the game.
It sounds bad for competitive players, but it is even worse for professional players because every time the professional players practice hard to find the new meta, the meta they find will be nerfed for simply being a good strategy. The game is now actively discouraging practice. If you find a good strategy through hard work, it means Kaplan will “aggressively” nerf your specific strategy. Developers here seem to consistently hold the wrong balance philosophy for the game, and every “balance” change flips OW from one oppressive meta to a completely different oppressive meta.
So what’s the real reason the game cannot escape oppressive metas? The reason is the core lack-of-depth. Cooldowns are the most linear form of resource management possible, in addition to this the game lacks any form of loadouts. The game does not have nearly enough heroes to replace the variety of loadouts. Each ability is strict on its use, and if players find techniques that make unintended use of an ability that tech is removed from the game for example Mercy slinging. All of this results in Heroes which have a definitive correct way of playing with few unexpected strategies or synergies.
If you want a clear-cut example of what I’m talking about, look at Zarya. Her two basic abilities are literally the same ability but with different targets. Imagine how much more depth Zarya could have if she could store her two bubbles to be placed on any target, meaning she could choose to use both on her teammates, or both on herself, with the one exception being that you can’t place a bubble on the same target who has recently had a bubble within 4 seconds. So many new strategic decisions would be made to play Zarya, you may decide to shield both of your teammates caught in an ult but it leaves yourself vulnerable, something not possible before.
Overwatch intentionally stifling complexity and Hero creativity is what actually causes the stale meta. This is all the way down to the core gameplay, which is why the entire game needs to be changed to abolish stale metas, and I’m not talking hero pools. Overwatch can’t shake stale metas because the game was designed from the beginning to encourage stale metas. You might want to say your Hero has depth because everyone wants to be proud of themselves, but you know your Hero has potential that is locked away behind linear design. This limited depth is also probably a huge contributor to why Damage heroes are more popular, Damage heroes more often have dynamic abilities that have many different combinations. Whereas Tanks and Support are often more linear. Reinhardts use flame strike the same way every time, there are no interesting variants of the flame strike. You get my point now.
Adding Hero Pools is Blizzard essentially saying “We can’t balance the game! Please help us!” While players like me are just going to walk away from the game for good.
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Hoping this culls a good portion of the community. So many people should not be playing this game. Good riddance.
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Lol they don’t have a good portion of the community that can leave. They have such a small community now and these last few changes are them struggling to regain a player base. They are literally hoarding content for the second game when they should not. They broke from their original model and are slowly adding more restrictions to make up for their inability to balance the game.
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Citation needed.
Always boggles my mind when people can form such specific and strong opinions based on…no factual information.
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It doesn’t need a citation since most of it is seeing how the game has changed in a way where their original model for the game is no longer relevant in the current state of it. You just don’t have an answer is all so your asking to cite sources when all you need to do is pay attention to the community.
The game is a joke on all fronts. Twitch/YouTube/esports/casual/events.
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“The answer is obvious, i don’t need to prove my point because you’re dumb”
I am constantly amazed at the ability of the human mind to convince itself it’s correct without any proof whatsoever. Simply wanting to believe a thing makes it true.
Spoiler alert: If you can’t easily support your opinion, it’s a bad opinion
So can you cite your reasoning for people needing to be culled from this game? And I am gonna need studies from a respected source. Also it will need to withstand ridiculing from a court of peers.
If I can’t support my opinion then why are you not able to challenge it?
Any one who has played this game since 2016 has seen a steep decline in hero design/bare bone events/ bugs that go unfixed for months/seeing the same people in queues over and over from all ranks not just a thing that is common for high tier game play/ many people quitting on the content creator side on both YouTube and twitch. No it’s not them getting tired of the game it’s the way it was handled driving them away even though many have tried to return and they still leave for how bad it is.
You wanna challenge that? It’s pretty easy to find those sources.
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If you have to get this defensive without ever actually supporting your argument, it’s a bad argument.
You have a bad, uninformed opinion, it happens to all of us. Narrative bias is a powerful drug.
There is nothing for me to disprove. You haven’t actually provided an argument, you just reacted poorly to someone asking what your opinion was based on, factually.
Not everyone likes being challenged. That may be why competitive gaming frustrates you so much.
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Yes, but no. It’s because everyone wants them to nerf the meta, thus hurting the balance of the hero. It’s mostly meta that is at fault here and the constant calls to nerf it.
Did I mention its our fault?
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It’s 100% our fault, we’re awful.
Citation: These forums.
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Indeed. The problem children they never wanted.
So you can’t dispute the fact that this community is getting smaller and has been. But you don’t have to support your reasoning on why the community needs to be culled?
So you just like cherry picking what you want I see.
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This is my favorite logical fallacy.
You present the opinion and can’t defend it, so i have to prove it wrong to challenge it.
Mental gymnastics game is strong.
This is literally my point: You cannot prove the size of the community one way or the other, so having such a strong opinion that it’s small/shrinking/dying is nothing but narrative.
I didn’t say it was big or small. I said you can’t prove it. And you can’t. This isn’t hard.
If your reaction to someone asking you what you’re basing your opinion on sends you into a frothing rage, that should be a red flag.
Any uninformed opinion is exclusively a bad opinion.
Believing a thing because you want it to be true without any basis in fact is the height of ignorance.
Yeah, but in personal belief. Like.“I like cats more than dogs” kind of.opinion.is what I.mean.
“I like murder more than the law” its whatever.
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Ah yes, the good ol’ days of 3 winson 3 tracer comps. So much freedom, so much variety.
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It’s not my fault blizz is bad af at balance. But it is funny that the thing that was a big selling point of the game was swapping on the fly and countering a hero or a comp and now it’s slowly turning into committing to one hero a game.
This is to help with balance. They’ll be able to balance heroes outside of Meta and truly tell if they’re actually OP or its just a strat that really works well with the hero. That way.nerfs don’t effect the platform as a whole since meta mainly happens high tier.
It could bring more players if it goes well.
The problem with new players is a lot of them are in lobbies with Smurf’s that pretty much destroy any sort of fun they may have and they don’t really get a chance to learn how the game works.
The new hero pool they have coming is a nice step but at the same time the fact they are trying to isolate certain hero’s from comp for a period is not really hopeful in terms of balance if that’s their only defense to forcing a change in meta is to literally force people to play other hero’s for a week.
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