You just called them DPS with utility.
In other words, be stupid and engage enemy player, that has superior guns. Went through that phase in TF2 long time ago, not going to try again.
so u just want to sit behind
get good enough stats that no one of ur teammates dies without u really doing anything
and calling it balance 
u just made the impossible
I am still healing them. Or you consider only killing as doing anything? If so, then no wonder this game got so dull.
idk about that
I mean is it really hard to mouse 1 over people as moira ?
also being proactive doesn’t mean that u go in and feed
When other team tries to kill you yes.
Ima tell u a top tier secret Moira has fade
oh and also life steal that require her no aim at all
Sorry, not going to use it, have to stay and keep healing. Luckily, got enough experience with that.
okay let’s go back to the basics
give me a simple example of a dps hero that just kills u with easy while u playing properly around that pick ?
I don’t know such heroes, precisely because I always escape my death.
then what do u really want ?
I already told you - that my teammates didn’t have to die instead.
Well sorry we don’t have that
if the enemy team is better they should usually win
why low elo players have that mentality of “my team is just not doing anything at all and it’s not my fault it’s either my hero underperforming or my teammates being bad”
amazes me even more how some people could get offended if u call them low elo players more like u insulted them
it represents ur skill (well usually lol)
really nothing to take offend off
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Maybe it does, or they just don’t feel like grinding through games.
OP, I don’t agree with 100% of everything you say, but I definitely agree with your core message. Balancing for the top-most echelon has been disastrous. It’s pretty generous to even call it “balance” because it’s become abundantly clear that Blizzard really isn’t pursuing “balance” at all but instead pursuing watch value–that is, making the game entertaining to watch. This is where all the “a competitive game should only balance around the top players” arguments fall apart, because even if that were completely, 100%, unquestionably true (it’s not–see LoL reference early in the thread), Blizzard does not do this. They’re trying to engineer a spectacle, not a balanced and enjoyable game.
My main disagreement is with your assessment that the 99% is unimportant to Blizzard, and it’s more just an issue with the degree of relation there. I don’t think they’re unimportant, but they’re certainly second-class citizens when it comes to input and value on balancing. If Blizzard can make a balance change that impacts mid-to-low ranks without impacting high ranks too greatly, they do tend to do that. When the interests of the average player doesn’t impinge upon those of the upper GM/T500/OWL echelon, Blizzard is moderately attentive to the 99%. If there’s a conflict of interest, though, they pretty consistently side with the 1% playerbase–and, for the reasons you outline, that is a big problem.
There are a lot of pretty… bad counter-arguments, too. “Blizzard shouldn’t balance around people who don’t know how to play them game” is a pretty steaming hot take. Players in Diamond, for example, (which is the rank that I think should ideally be the focal point of balance) certainly know how to play the game. The worst Diamond player falls into the 85th percentile (give or take) of players. That’s a good player, it’s a talented player, and anyone who says otherwise is engaging in some inane gatekeeping. Even, realistically, people in Platinum and Gold know how to play the game. Saying otherwise is laughable. The reason they’re Plat and Gold isn’t due to a lack of knowledge (generally), it’s because of a failure of execution. Case and point, many OWL coaches are actually pretty average players because, even though their ability to execute upon their knowledge is weak, they still have the knowledge. Higher-ranked players are able to automate this and thus focus on other tasks that low-to-mid rank players have to still cognitively process, but that’s not a failure of knowledge.
Also the classic “every other competitive game does it” response is a good one. It’s objectively false. Not only does LoL not do it as discussed earlier in the thread, even some of the most legendary FPS games didn’t do it. Halo 2 didn’t even really conceive of the idea of balancing around any sort of competitive playlist, and Halo 3 and Reach each had a separate MLG playlist with its own set of special rules that didn’t apply to everyone else. Halo 4 and Halo 5 started to enforce the “everybody experiences MLG-style balancing” to varying degrees, and lo and behold, people really didn’t care for these games as much. The same is true to a degree in CoD, as well, and even in real life sports and games which adjust their rule-sets based on the relative skill of the players involved because they rightly recognize that the stipulations which create a fair and fun experience for one skill bracket don’t necessarily produce the same results for another skill bracket. The same is absolutely true in Overwatch.
Now, I do think giving every rank its own balancing rules would be too granular and jarring… but I think there are still solutions to that. If you’re insistent on a singular set of balancing rules, choosing a high midpoint (as OP eloquently put it) is ideal–a point that describes players who are skilled but who are also at a reasonably attainable level of skill for the average player. In my mind, this is Diamond rank–you have (roughly) the 85th through 95th percentile of players, you see the influences of meta but not the dictation of it, and it’s not completely out of the grasp of Joe Schmoe who just picked up the game last week and decided he wants to put some time into gitting gud without just sinking his whole life into the game. Alternatively, if you’re open to multiple rule sets, you start getting even more options–split balance for QP/Arcade and Comp, or split balance for below and above Master’s, or create a brand new playlist of OWL-style balance accessible either to all players or to only Master’s+ players, etc. There are a wealth of options. I’m personally not all this fussy at this stage, because any of them is better than what we currently have.
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THANK YOU! 20 characters
While I certainly see your point in this regard, I think you are also forgetting that the game very likely has substantially fewer players now than it did two or three years ago.
Since clustering of player SR is relative to the performance of all active players (and If I am incorrect about the data it uses to sample this please let me know), this argument presupposes that higher skilled players will continue to play while lower skilled players quit in greater numbers, and that the lower skill tier players who continue to play (and are improving as a result) are being dragged down by this deficit so that there is a kind of gradual inflation on skill rating.
I find this somewhat hard to believe, though I will admit that it is possible. However, it seems far more likely to be an even distribution of which skill level of players leave or stay.
Put simply: if there were 50 million players two years ago, and now there are half as many, unless there is an uneven distribution in who keeps playing and who leaves, any returning players who have not kept up with the advances in the game and any new players just joining do NOT fill in the top tier slots. They will fall towards the lower end of the range.
Which suggests a form of skill rating DEFLATION, not inflation.
I think you missed that I was deliberately citing an extreme example in order to establish the logic that leads back to the overall top-end balancing philosophy. It is an example of a bizarre and selfish decision that most anyone can see is going to make the game more difficult and less enjoyable for the person making this decision. You then take this extreme example, and by steps, lead it back to the more plausible, yet still incorrect, decisions made by lower skilled players.
The logical outcome of this argument is that it becomes almost impossible to determine the point at which the game itself is responsible for a player’s poor play experience and should be corrected through game changes, or whether the player simply needs to make more well-informed decisions.
When the player has gotten to the point that they are making strong decisions on a regular basis and the game still presents the same problem as before, that a certain ability is oppressive or a certain team composition has an unreasonably skewed pick/win percentage, NOW is when you can reasonably conclude that something must be done.
Balancing based on the experience of a majority of players as a static snapshot of skill ignores the fact that not everyone’s opinion has equal merit when examining a problem. It is a “fair-sounding” idea in theory, but it discounts the value of knowledge and expertise. Would you apply this logic to real life, as well? Do you think it is better to seek medical treatment based on what the majority of people think, or based on what highly trained experts think?
I do not mean to be argumentative for no reason. If nothing else I am trying to convey that painting the top-down approach as “skill based elitism” is presuming a bias that ignores the sound logical reasons why this approach is preferable.
Now, if there was a certain composition or hero that was oppressive to anyone but the 100 best players in the world and only professional players could beat it on a regular basis, it would be prudent not to ignore the experience of the rest of the playerbase. This would instead be the result of a required skill threshold to overcome a challenge that is far beyond what is reasonable for any competitive environment. It would be like playing basketball with a hoop that is only a millimetre wider in diameter than the ball. The resulting accuracy demands would be so extreme that only a tiny fraction of even the best players would ever be able to perform this task.
Were this true, I would readily agree with you that balancing around the top end is a very bad idea. However, the frustrations of lower skill tier players almost NEVER result from this sort of unreasonable challenge threshold in Overwatch.
I will never understand the logic of people complaining about trickle down balance. I can’t think of a single competitive game that doesn’t use trickle down balance.
Trickle down balance is fine. It’s industry standard.
Sometimes I think, that it’s done on purpose, as way to encourage players to climb. But not everyone is motivated by that. You are literally being told “climb to the top, and you will finally get good games”. But why would someone sentence themselves to lots and lots of unbalanced grind through ranks? And if you do make it, your reward is even more strict list of playable heroes, even higher stress from threat of losing your hard earned SR.
It’s my view, but you climb to get more chains and restrictions on yourself, and you are expected to welcome it as achievement.
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If we can use this logic for Widowmaker & assume that if the hero has a 50% winrate that they’re balanced in that rank then Brigitte & Symmetra are overpowered in nearly every rank, and I don’t think most low-mid rank players would agree with that. Pickrate matters too.
I agree. That’s what I’m saying. Heroes should be balanced around their maximum potential, (AKA, the best players) because it’s impossible to balance a hero where they are equally viable in every rank, due to differences in skill. It’s why Junkrat, Pharah & Reaper are known to dominate lower ranks while being irrelevant in higher ones. We can’t buff those heroes to be good in high ranks otherwise they’ll be even worse in low ranks. Top down balancing is the only way to do it if you want to reward skill
I’m in masters. Mercy is an off healer. Ask a gm player and they will tell you the same