It’s always a flux. You don’t balance in isolation.
We even have a perfect study case in hand: Bastion Ironclad buff. When it happened, Bastion became a must pick everywhere overnight because of how broken Ironclad was. Then the devs toned down Ironclad, and in the end Bastion was back into not a popular pick at high ranks, but he received a lot more playtime at the ranks where he is somewhat competitive.
What do you mean?
According to Overbuff (I know, but only source available), she sits at average 50% winrate at gold. She is pretty much balanced at this tier.
You don’t need to balance Widowmaker for the mid tier players. Those players being less consistent than high rank players already balance her out over time.
Now, she is at the bottom list in bronze, but then let me point back something I said earlier in this thread:
In the same vein, it’s also perfectly fine to create some heroes with the expectation they will be very hard to be played at low ranks, because of raw complexity (eg, Doomfist) or a higher skill floor.
Widowmaker never sounded like the kind of hero you would expect someone placed at bronze to pick and shine.
Nope, you completely missed the point. That’s not what I said.
Fair enough, but answer me this. I’m not looking at your profile, so I want you to take this as a hypothetical too. Let’s say you’re GM, how would you feel if the balance is catering towards the people who have more room to grow than you do?
The thing with balancing at high levels is that, they do it because it gives them a precise idea of who is good and bad. It allows them to see it via the players ability, since a good amount of GM players have either, mastered their character or know a good portion to use them effectively. Balancing should be around the best play, not flawed play.
Flawed grows into mastery
Mastery doesn’t downgrade to flawed.
This isn’t being elitist, it’s the truth and it’s that way in the world. The majority people who know better are usually handed the word over the people who don’t know as much. People who are better at something get to teach the others how to do it better.
Everyone grows, but balancing around 99% of the flawed gameplay is a mistake and would make the projection of balance inadequate and confusing.
Balancing around GM is holistically bad for the game
So, it is better to ballance the game around worse players? What’s the point of competing then? Okay, you went to gm with your plat-diamond ballanced heroes, now what? ruin games? go back to diamond? Hardstuck in masters? What a nice idea lul. The ammount of stupidity on this forum sometimes is beyond, and there are tons of likes from plat chat. YAY give us our sandbox! And fix smurf issue YAY! Give mercy 5 man res back! reeeee! Wdym get better? BIG NO
You get it wrong, only 1% is able to play around any balance, and capitalase on that, while others not trying hard enough: the point of competition is to be the best, not the rest. Nomatter what balance it would be, there would be noobs and gods in the game. But you cant make 2 different games with the same ladder, it doesn’t make any sense.
Balancing around GM would not be an issue if EVERY SINGLE HERO had a skill cap as high as Lucio or Genji. But the truth is every single hero wasn’t created equal and you have some heros who get significant value for minimal effort and those heroes make balancing the game much more difficult.
The effort to master (any given hero) to reward ratio is not equal and it is definitely not linear in a lot of cases.
And this is okay, let it be like that. Wanna rank up - put more effort. Wanna casually play? You are already in plat, what do you want? Play your reapper junkrat bastion symmetra forever here.
No problem, it is the exact response I was expecting. I still think your argument has that point since your rant was about how blizzard balanced/reworked symmetra around pro play instead of enjoyment while being oblivious to the core root of the problem, not being fun to play or play against. Be free to enlighten me about the actual point at any moment though.
I insist on nothing, I was being sarcastic, the game shouldn’t be balanced around plats and diamonds either, they don’t know how to play. Balancing Top-down has always been the norm because it’s what makes sense.
I think lower ranks are important, hence I feel the skill floor for all heroes (the minimum skill players need to operate a hero well) have to be defined in such a way that these heroes are playable at low ELOs.
It’s the skill ceiling for the heroes which have to be defined by GM considerations – there must be sufficient high-skill, high-return abilities for all heroes so that they have outplay potential at high ELOs.
So, I feel that there has to be balancing done both for low ELOs and high ELOs, the considerations are different, but it’s there. The ideal is that whatever teamp composition is played in OWL should be playable in low ELOs as well, so that OWL games have relevance to low ELO games. Without this, I don’t think OWL will be relevant for majority of the player base, which is a pity, because the player base is the richest source of potential audience and ratings for Overwatch, a potential that I feel Blizzard is not tapping well enough.
And balancing for the 1% has been what ruins the game again and again.
You’re balancing for this
h.t.t.p.s://i.imgur.com/4J6llcg.jpg
When the playerbase is this
h.t.t.p.s://i.imgur.com/q7knFsh.jpg
Is what’s messing the game up. We’re already meta locked into Reinhardt and Zarya, and the solution is the nerf Sigma and Orisa? The latter of which is already at the bottom? And you don’t think the playerbase is going to have a problem with that? You don’t think we’re just going to get end up locked in even more to Rein/Zar?
Not going to happen. Especially considering how the playerbase treated Tanks during goats.
The fact is, nobody wanted to tank. Which essentially meant that ladder was essentially self regulating.
Remember, during goats, people were still complaining about DPS comps.
If the tank was performing well enough, you weren’t getting a second tank. The DPS didn’t feel the need to switch. If you were a tank main on a main tank, you can expect to end up solo tanking for the entire match. If you had a main tank that synergized with a support and cleaning house, you DEFINITELY weren’t getting a second tank.
The general rule is that the playerbase uses the least number of tanks they can get away it.
OWL on the other hand, they go three tanks and three supports right off the bat. They abused the tanks, something that practically never happens on ladder.
These two mentalities are why Pros will never see eye to eye with casuals.
Before Moira was added, Genji and Tracer hard-countered the entire support role.
Widowmaker is hard-countered by barriers.
Overwatch has always had a system of counters/counterpicking where you can force an opponent to swap by running their natural counter (a hero with innate advantages vs. the hero they’re targeting).
For every hero, there is another one that counters them.
“Brigitte vs Tracer” was not the first example of a hard-counter matchup.
It’s just the first time that Tracer stopped being an exception to the rules.
We don’t play meta, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get impacted. If what you’re claiming is true, then these two should have been the same.
This was during double shield
h.t.t.p.s://i.imgur.com/ugilR01.jpg
Aside from the dive tanks, the tanks generally had good pick and win rates. You weren’t getting mirror matches and any tank combo can go up against another.
This is now
h.t.t.p.s://i.imgur.com/q7knFsh.jpg
Either you pick Reinhardt / Zarya or you’re going to get wrecked.
Does this look like the playerbase isn’t affected by metas?
I am a main tank, and there used to be a substantive community in these forums that I can relate to.
Nowadays, not a lot of players are proponents for tanks, and when they are, they are mostly flex players and not the tank mains whose threads I used to follow.
Blizzard has treated its tank community badly, there are substantially less of them in these forums, and I am not surprised if there are substantially less of them in Overwatch too.
BTW, as an observation. When Sigma went live, only comp had 2-2-2 and QP didn’t get role lock. Despite that, we didn’t get triple or double shield as people predicted. In fact, we ended up with more solo tank games because Sigma was powerful enough to solo even if he’s only used by a flex.
Would the same have happened to Comp? We can’t be sure. But what we can be sure of is that Goats was never a thing on ladder either. There just aren’t enough tank players in the game for it to matter. All that would likely happen is that Sigma would have replaced Orisa (They’d be choosing between Rein and Sigma instead of there being triple shields)
And Blizzard’s solution for this is to make the off-tank role attractive to dps, and I was one of the few who didn’t mind. All the tank mains have seen this a mile away – how a lot of off-tanks are just dps heroes with large health pools and mechanics which augments their shields/armor/health in some way, shape or form.
I don’t care about off-tanks, it’s the main tanks which Blizzard fundamentally changed, and the sum total of those changes created this mess where plenty of low level games are 2 off-tanks like Orisa + Sigma, coz everyone is so enamoured of shooting mechanics, the weakest aspect of Overwatch as a game.
If I wanted shoot people, I’d just AWP in CS:GO and Valorant, and I do, because shooting in those games are serious business, not like in Overwatch where it’s easy-peasy.
