'Balancing' for the top 1%

General Discussion
1

I wrote a thread directly in response to the PTR before, but now of course we have new information and this is more general and not necessarily as patch-specific (though the latest PTR patch is the clearest example of this problem in action). I’ve added this text to my previous thread but since I can’t actually bump that up and these boards move so fast, well, nobody’s going to see that. So here we go.

As seen in this other thread, Jeff Kaplan himself recently acknowledged both that:

  1. These recent balance changes are a direct response to and attempt to muscle out the GOATs composition and tactic.
  2. The majority of players never see, let alone enact, GOATs or any other top-play meta.

So, as far as I see, this is ‘the’ top guy at Overwatch fully acknowledging that the game is being rebalanced for the sake of the top 1% and ignoring, if not directly screwing over, the other 99% of players. Even if we’re extremely generous and say that everyone from Diamond up are all suddenly magically OWL-level players strictly running the one and only meta tactic, that’s still only 14% of all players for all of Diamond, Master, and Grandmaster combined. Let’s add on another 1% for Contenders and OWL combined, even though they combined actually make up less than 1%. That makes, if we’re being excessively generous, a total of 15% of the playerbase potentially running these top-level tactics.
That means 85% of people are not seeing that kind of gameplay. They’re not experiencing it. It’s not a factor in the game for 85% of people. That is a vast, vast majority. This isn’t some 55/45 split; 85% is a big majority.

… So why on Earth is that 85% being subjected to balance changes which are intended to force the other 15% to change tactics? Yes, we get it, you don’t want OWL streams to look boring by always having the same team composition running in every game. But if you make the game tedious for the public then who is going to want to watch a stream of the game in the first place? You may force that top 15% to change up their tactics but if the other 85% of people are having such a miserable time, who do you think is going to watch those streams? Who do you think is going to be buying loot boxes?

If 85% of people—and, again, we’re being extremely generous with these figures and giving ‘meta’ play a much larger percentage than it, in reality, likely has—aren’t suffering from GOATs then why subject that vastly greater majority to armour nerfs, double-dipping on Brigitte and D.Va nerfs, and strong Reaper buffs on top of already strong McCree buffs? It’s bad enough that McCree is going unaddressed as a solo-tank-murder and dominating every deathmatch mode; now it’s going to be Reaper & McCree 24/7. And you can say “well we can’t say that for sure, we need to see how it pans out”, but games like Overwatch have been around for enough decades now that we all know this is how things will go. We can run the numbers, we can see it on the PTR already; Reaper is excessively strong. Brigitte is excessively pointless. McCree is excessively strong. D.Va is now more use as a damage role than as a tank. Orisa and other armour-dependent characters are being slaughtered left, right, and center. And the majority public play will always gravitate to using whatever is the most blatantly strong, mindless option, such as picking Reaper, walking forward and holding down that primary fire. (Just as public play in CS revolves around the AWP, AK and Colt; in UT it was the Sniper Rifle which dominate public games; fighting games online are always dominated by whatever god-tier guest character is the most broken; etc)

TL;DR summary: Blizzard, or at least Jeff Kaplan, acknowledges that the vast majority of players do not experience the tedious ‘meta’ tactics. Yet that same vast majority is still made to live with heavy-handed ‘balance’ changes designed to force the meta to change for the tiny minority that use them.
Why?
What good reason is there, what logic is there, what is the excuse for making an overwhelming majority of players play with greatly imbalanced heroes, either being buffed to the heavens or nerfed into the dirt, just so a much smaller minority of players will be forced to change up their tactics?

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2

I said it a million times and i say it again:

Esports
Need
Their
Own
Balance
Changes
Divided
From
The
Game

Top500 and GM can have it tho, but below that theres no touch of Goats, Dive and others.

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lol no that’s stupid

that’d be like watching pros play a completely different game

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They do already.

90% of the players never experienced Goats in their game.

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THEY ALREADY DO with that stupid playing 3 patches back thing

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I suggested pro exclusive balance patches, but everyone was against it.

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With the introduction of OWL Overwatch has officially been ranked as an E-Sport by Blizzard. And as such it is ought to be balanced around the highest level of play. So don’t complain about their balance decisions. Instead complain about their decision to force this game into being an E-Sport in the first place.

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This argument is not only flawed but kinda ignorant .

  1. The game does NOT revolve around pro’s , in fact , pro’s have been complaining after the last dva nerf which was more than a year ago i believe , and only now we see a nerf.
  2. Most changes are due to the public (us mortals) having a concern with the hero + blizzard themselves acknowledging this for example :
    doomfist was played very little in the pro scene after his buff , but was crazily good on ladder. He then got nerfed to oblivion after an outcry from the community
    Another example is tracer , tracer was and still loved by pro’s as she has so much to offer as a dps.whilst being mechanically hard. Yet the community say tracer as OP, so blizzard nerf her , yes its a small one , but still.
  3. Pro’s undoubtedly have the best knowledge and skill , so why can’t we see their suggestions , just like you can raise yours?
    And i hate this 1% argument, the lgbtq++ community represent less than 1% in America , so why does Blizzard have to pull a publicity stunt to cater for the 1%, but you don’t like it when the pro’s have a say in the game? Kinda hypocritical.
    Yes i do agree with you that pro’s shoudnt have 100% say in terms of balance , but they should have at least an impact on the game
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And they said back in the first days, they dont want Esports out of OW. What they expected to happen?

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To be fair, the 2. most wanted hero to be nerfed was Tracer behind the freshly reworked Mercy when they asked the OWL players back when Season 1 had its Off-Season.

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Well, they marketed Overwatch as a casual game for a diverse playerbase. Once they sold their 40 million copies or whatever they did a bait’n’switch and yanked the carpet out from under the casual players by simply turning Overwatch into an e-sport. I believe that Overwatch is significantly worse for having an e-sport.

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My guess is that an Activision higher-up saw the figures of E-Sport which made his pupils turn into dollar signs. At which point they started selling league spots for >20.000.000$.

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I think it’s a bit more complicated than you make it out to be.

Fundamentally games need skill curves to survive long term. I don’t think there is a single long lasting game without huge amounts of depth or mechanical skill. Players need to have a sense of room to improve in order to stick around. A hero like Tracer or D.Va or Zenyatta can afford to dominate in the top ranks because they have huge skill curves, affect very few people and they only get nerfed when it really is established as causing an issue over a huge period of time.

However, if a meta like GOATS exist, then players looking to improve will realise that the route to improving (their motivation to continue playing), lies not in practice but by playing shallower and easier heroes. This affects a lot more than the top ranks.

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Overwatch is a competitive game. Of course they are balancing it for the top.

They tried to balance it for pros and casuals but that didn’t work so they finally decided to pick a side and that’s the competitive side luckily.

The worst thing that could happen is that they balance it for the plat and gold players on this forum or even consider their “balance” suggestions.

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“Luckily” because you’re hoping that soldier is coming back into the meta right?

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Remember when people on the forums were saying OWL would be good for all the regular players?

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THIS.

It is easy to have different patch streams. Put esports peeps on a different client that is connected to a different patch stream.

Balance main OW around its player base.

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Every other competitive title is balanced from the top. It’s how you keep a competitive title competitive.

If you are truly a casual player, I don’t see why it should matter. In fact, I’d even argue that for the silent majority of the casual player base, balance changes are nice and change things up.

There is a reason OW has over 40 million players and only about 2,000 are on the forums consistently.

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All competitive games arre balanced from top down.

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