I see this a lot and this week was in such a spot. Had someone trying to tell me no one plays Tracer below Masters, and I can assure you they most certainly do. I see Tracer on average in Silver/Gold/Plat about every fourth game. OB would have you believe she is hardly played at all. I think some folks can’t quite grasp how the pick rates actually look in game… anecdotal which I would prefer to call “first hand” experience vs. Overbuff (which I think people are too quick to dismiss).
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Because anecdote is one and stats are many. Stats are like looking at the common factors of thousands of anecdotes. Why does your one anecdote beat many?
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I think the problem is in how people interpret the stats; see my post just above yours…
That’s not how stats work. If stats tell you that one out of 10 people has cancer, you can’t just gather the first 10 people you see on the street and tell them one of them has cancer nor can you assume more people have it in general if it turns out that 4 of them have it. There is no reason to think that those 1 in 4 games you see tracer in isn’t accounted in existing stats.
Without stats there is no “left field”. And yes people do claim that bastion is in every game in lower ranks.
Most of the time, people only quote Overbuff when they themselves don’t get to experience it first hand. People love to talk about Metas when they still barely understand and run it themselves.
Take Moira and Ana for example, forum loves to quote Overbuff to show good Ana is compared to Moira. Often time they will dismiss the fact that Ana in low ranks will be incapable of healing small targets, will not call out sleep dart or bionade, more often than not will be a liability once get dove ect. If i play in plat or below, I would rather my healers play Mercy or Moira instead of Ana to be honest.
Of course, it’s just my anecdotal experience.
That is… kind of my point…
Agree 100%.
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I’m assuming Overbuff stats are for 4000+ SR too which makes them even more invalid for the vast majority of forum users here.
But I technically don’t even know what that site is so maybe someone will enlighten me.
Because something something statistics. You as a player are a sample size of 1 and multiple observations done by you aren’t independent (because you yourself are recurring in every observation). Meanwhile Overbuff is a sample of 1000s to 100 000s.
Sure, Overbuff isn’t all that statistically reliable either due to the non-random distribution of private profile players, but it’s miles better than a single data point nonetheless.
Overbuff is a (third party) site which essentially pools all data from all Overwatch players their profiles (who have it public) and presents the results graphically. The main reason it’s used is for the graphs displaying average win- and pickrates in a certain timeframe (last week, last month, last 3 months, last 6 months) and rank (all or each rank separately). But it can also be used to look at more specific stat distributions per hero like average accuracy, eliminations, deaths or how win- and pickrates per hero change through time. It can also be used to look at the stats of singular players (including yourself if you have a public profile), but that’s a minor part (since you can do that in-game anyway).
So no, it’s not only relevant to high rank players.
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I don’t remember exactly when, but one of the designers, maybe it was Josh Nash or Jeff Kaplan I forget, but they said that their internal stats didn’t reflect what the community was saying on the forums/citing from Overbuff. It was something about Genjis, Meis & Soldiers pickrates/winrates IIRC.
I wouldn’t say 1 or a few obvious trolls is enough to say “all the time”. Maybe we see different posts, but most anecdotal evidence isn’t extreme like what you’re referring to.
I guess you see those obviously false extreme posts more often than I do. Most anecdotal evidence I see is more realistic, and I just ignore those posts that clearly aren’t true. I’m not talking about clearly biased/fake anecdotal posts, I’m talking about ones within the realm of reality.
Huh? I specifically remember Blizz coming out and saying the opposite, that their internal stats do not match what we see
Overbuff is the most accurate source of data we have. Is it’s percentages 100% accurate? No. But it does hold a large enough sample size to paint the picture of what’s going on in overwatch even with private profiles. It’s valid enough that you can’t dismiss it as nothing. While personal events should still be taken into account. I’m trusting overbuff to be the biggest part I’m considering. Players experinces vary, confirmation bias exist, and randoms can easily make scenarios up to push a motive of nerfing a hero they don’t like or buffing heroes they do.
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But the few times they did release numbers, it matched overbuff. Let me see if i can find one.
EDIT:
Mar 5 2018
h.t.t.p.s://www.invenglobal.com/articles/4447/jeff-kaplan-revealed-the-new-seasons-most-played-heroes
There’s no March 5 in the archive but there is a Feb 20 2018
h.t.t.p.s://web.archive.org/web/20180220010533/h.t.t.p.s://www.overbuff.com/heroes
And an April 5 2018
h.t.t.p.s://web.archive.org/web/20180405190038/h.t.t.p.s://www.overbuff.com/heroes
You’re not going to get exact numbers of course, since they’re not working off the exact same dataset. But Overbuff tends to be within the same ballpark, like Moira, D.va and Mercy being the top three, with the others following suit.
Right now these are the tank rankings on Overbuff.
h.t.t.p.s://i.imgur.com/B3AA4wp.jpg
It’s certainly possible that Roadhog, Sigma and Hammond are on a different order on blizzards native stats. But how far off do you suppose it would be to say that Reinhardt and Zarya are the top tanks over there as well?
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Yeah but what does it even tell you about the game?
The 2 chief things (there’s more stuff on there but the 2 that we REALLY care about) are such generalized stats that it really borders on useless…
X is picked more often than Y globally…ok…though that might be for a lot of reasons…doesn’t necessarily mean it’s strictly cause better…hell sometimes it’s in spite of better win rate
Or
X wins more often than Y (Usually the differences across the board aren’t even that big)…even then the non meta stuff usually still does well or comparably
Or
a combination of the 2 which can indicate a stronger or weaker relationship because it’s not like they don’t impact each other…but it’s still not a direct explanation for either
But beyond that? It doesn’t tell you when, why, where, how?
So what do we end up with? Usually it’s sweeping statements about how X or Y is in NEED of buffs/nerfs when the data doesn’t necessarily say ANY of that…but you bet your bleep people will try to bend those numbers in their favor because thats like all the ammunition they have
So it’s not that OB isn’t giving you information about the game or even that it’s not accurate…it’s that what’s actually on there is VERY meh
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At that point it’s more about learning to interpret stats than it is a issue with overbuff.
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I mean misinterpretation of the info is bad on its own…but beyond that it’s value is not all that great to begin with because of how generalized the info is
Because overbuff considered the experience of at least ten people from an objective viewer. So your experience vers twelve is being compared. Who is the outlier? Because if your experience doesn’t line up, it means it doesn’t represent the whole. 100 people even out. One only had itself to compare to.
It’s really not though. Pickrates, winrates, damage done vs eliminations, healing tells you a lot about how the games behaving throughout all the ranks. And it’s margin of error should be close enough to form thoughts around. When we have balance changes. The data over the following weeks reflect it, heroes are where would think they would be based on how they play. Heroes like sym and torb and widow are great examples of this. I’ve been following it for years and it reflects information pretty well and was held up to trends that blizzard has shared time to time
And that’s the point, while OB lacks the resolution of stats Blizz has (it never can), its good enough for most general discussions until you get into very fine questions.
Not if you ask some people. As overbuff has 1/1000 of the total data. Their numbers are extremely off. Yes many praise them as gospel. However everyone should take their data with a grain of salt.
What’s better? Learn to play the game properly and improve yourself. Or learn statistics and join the often time meaningless debate where you will never gonna change yours or someone else opinion
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They only tell so much…I just wrote this elsewhere so I may as well put here…(for GM this month)
Mccree:
P% 6.5, W% 53.5, K/D 2.8, E 24.6, Dmg 15.8
Ashe:
2.3, 53.6, 2.7, 24.3, 17.9
Soldier:
0.45, 54.4, 3.1, 23.9, 15.9
One of those 3 is considered garbage…
It doesn’t say anything about how they got those numbers, who they were playing against or with, I have to imagine those numbers probably vary wildly from one map to another or even point to another…
Again just generalized information…the numbers aren’t good enough to actually explain the game (or people are just crazy)
Going back to the topic at hand…the anecdotal stuff would probably tell you more than the stats (especially in this case)
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