Let me first start off by saying Hero Pools would actually make my life easier. At the rank I’m at, when a hero is out of rotation, players of that hero will simply just not play for the majority of that week. Meanwhile, I’m okay with playing in any meta since I have an all-around foundation in every hero. After Role Queue was implemented, which cramped my gameplay severely, Hero Pools would finally let me to (for lack of a better term) flex.
That said, I feel it’s important to address a couple of points about the developer update…
Hero Pools demonstrate the exact problems as Hero Bans
Pools will stop a player from playing their best heroes. Many times in the game’s history, sometimes their best hero is indispensable to a disorganized team that is already a complete cointoss on getting a full and proper team comp – you couldn’t run a proper deathball/Grav Dragons without Rein or Zarya/Hanzo mains, and you couldn’t run a proper Dive without a Monkey/D.Va/Tracer/Genji main.
Without proper mains in their respective roles, a match almost always starts off with players trying the meta comp and then switching off to an off-meta comp with the justification that, if they’re going to be running an off-meta comp, at the very least they can do their best with the hero they have.
That ace in their sleeve, will now be gone at the discretion of RNG/developer choice. And that’s a bad thing that will hurt the health of the game. People enjoy being the reason that a sour game starts turning around, and on weeks where a hero is banned, they might not be able to do this anymore… this creates more salt, and more frustration. We know this, because we’ve experienced this exact thing before in 3v3 or 6v6 Elimination… not having access to your pocket pick is devastating and heartbreaking on the final round where you literally can’t do any more than you have… and when things seem lost, it brings out some of the worst in people – just like people enjoy being the reason that a sour game starts turning around, players also, when a sour game turns too sour to turn around, enjoy being the reason everything crash and burn.
This also echoes the struggle that flex players have had since announcing Role Queue, where players are disallowed from pulling out all of the stops to stall/win. Despite your personal feelings on stalling, it’s an integral part of the game that ultimately leads to some of the most tense, fun, fatiguing, frustrating, and surprise upsets the game has ever had. Part of this dies with Hero Pools, and some people will enjoy that it’ll be gone, but for me and players like me, we lose another tool in our arsenal to do all that we (legally) can to win.
I firmly believe that this change will be disliked after the first initial season.
Faith and Transparency
I’m being honest here, I don’t have faith in this.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been on the receiving end of nerfs and (in my opinion) negative changes way too many times…
Widow scope nerf, Widow bugfixes that took a year to address, Lucio’s wallride rework that still hasn’t been bugfixed, Ana taking over a year to rebalance, Soldier’s spread changes, Bastion rework, Symmetra rework, Mercy rework, D.Va health/armor change, Monkey buffs (I hate him so much), Brigitte nerfs/soft rework, Rein barrier nerfs, Orisa nerfs… The moment I start picking up a hero, something bad happens, and I’ll admit this is starting to sound like a persecution complex but it’s a really big coincidence…
But I’ve spoken out on many of these changes, even going so far as to suggest compromises and quality of life changes in spite of it all. It was implied that all of these changes (maybe not the reworks) were up for being reverted, and none of them were.
One of the ways this faith could be renewed is a public schedule for the experimental card. A roadmap. Some more public transparency so we aren’t left in the dark for months at a time.
Strongarming
One of the talking points in the developer update was including the community more.
The problem isn’t that we don’t necessarily get a say in balance. The problem is, no matter what we say, whichever route the dev team wants to go in is the route we’re stuck with. This isn’t an inclusion problem, this is an exclusion problem.
The majority of the time, we don’t get a say in ANYTHING after the fact. The reason PTR doesn’t get high player counts isn’t because of lack of rewards/progress, or long PTR durations, though those certainly don’t help it , the reason PTR is ineffective at playtersting is because, after the initial PTR launch, it was clear that you weren’t taking feedback into consideration.
PTR inevitably gets pushed onto Live – there are exceptions to this like the recent McCree HP buff on PTR, but the general impression is that it doesn’t matter what we say. The players that are most affected by a change do not get a chance to soften a nerf, or improve upon a buff to make it better. It’s not because they aren’t trying – believe me, they’ve tried. The feedback falls upon deaf ears – we don’t get to say if we don’t want a rework (even if the rework is better, and especially if the rework is worse).
This ties in closely with the fact that, in instances where the developers do try to meet the players halfway, as they have done with Lucio’s wallride speed boost rework, they don’t go far enough. The moment people feel as though they’ve recovered ANY amount of what they’ve lost, they start praising the developers work in droves, and the developers either don’t see any further feedback because they’re drowning in a sea of “thank you” comments, or flat out ignore it (and sometimes double down).
The experimental card will finally enable some open-door testing to the public, which is a step in the right direction. But this has to come with more flexibility and more strides towards continual improvement.
I’ve said this in other threads before, where devs like playing “mother knows best” and want to flex their muscles as developers, and everyone’s a critic/an armchair developer, but I really hope what Jeff described for the experimental card is true and that we will see more frequent changes with the community’s interest at heart.
Which, brings me to my next point.
Community feedback is flawed…
I dislike that the new developer update was released, and all of these new features that will be implemented, without refining the community feedback pipeline.
The devs have never implemented any refined way of gathering feedback, and even the post game “rate this match” survey was useless by their own admission that they flat out removed it.
Right now, the entirety of the community falls under a “bang pots the loudest” and downvote/flag everything you disagree with. This tribal, hivemindedness, sidesteps many issues and buries many good ideas and valid arguments.
I’m not going to say something as naive as ‘this should stop’, because the forums, Reddit, YouTube comments, and Facebook groups have made it abundantly clear that hot takes reign supreme.
But I am going to say that I’m disappointed that there’s still no singular channel available to us to give direct feedback. There are no surveys, no psychological twists, and no real way to read a pulse on the community.
The experimental card needs a refined feedback form. A survey, targeted towards that experimental change, with an open ended response section at the bottom. Get some more data about how players ACTUALLY feel, and just grin and bear the white noise that comes with it. Also, we can’t accuse the devs of being tonedeaf if they have the receipts and they can share the receipts with us to shape and mold our feedback.
Anyway, these are just some of my thoughts. Hero Pools isn’t the solution that I think people want it to be, and the upcoming changes are exciting, but I’m not sure they’ll impact much if some of the other concerns I have still continue.