It shouldn’t have ever happened in the first place. Reaper was never going to be the answer to Goats for a multitude of reasons and the Devs should have been able to see that and… y’know… not wreck low level games. Also they should have walked it back sooner than they did because it pretty quickly became obvious that it didn’t actually impact Goats at all, but did create a low rank meta of “Pocket the Reaper”.
I will admit that they’ve gotten a bit better at that. However… some of the most disasterous changes I can recall are when they gave Mercy invulnerability on Mass Resurrect and around Season 3 when they increased DVa’s movespeed while firing to 50% and gave her 100 more HP.
Those changes set both heroes off on a wild roller coaster of attempting to balance them that included a rework each and neither hero landed in a position that is even remotely acceptable. All that could have been avoided if they had just been like “Y’know what? We messed up, that wasn’t right.” Undo.
I mean, the Genji buff for starts. He was approximately average when he got that 4 pronged mega buff. He was not in a state that required that many buffs. They did it solely to see if they could get away with shoehorning him into the meta with a ridiculously large set of buffs he didn’t need.
They couldn’t get away with it so they walked some of those back.
See that’s the other thing. The Devs are trying to control the meta, but they are incredibly bad at actually doing it. How long did double shield keep going in spite of being in the Dev’s sights? How long did Goats rule the roost until they made it impossible?
And along the way, they’ve absolutely butchered countless heroes. At this rate they are going to kill their game solely because any hero that isn’t DPS is going to be nerfed to the point that playing them is an absolute slog.
Well there are a few characters that would be balanced for the top tier and completely broken the further you go down. You also need to factor in “is it fun to play as and against”. Fun is subjective but it is something that you need to design for in games.
Design and balance go hand in hand. Theoretically top down balance is fine if you have a well designed game.
Balancing around making your esport nobody watches fun to watch? Not so much
If they balanced around high ranks in ladder and OWL didn’t exist, maybe we’d feel like we were still playing Overwatch and not Overwatch’s delusional cousin who wants to just be an FPS when half the game screams “hey I’m not an FPS character what about me”
Yes I remember it but they nerfed it shortly after because of how oppressive it was at lower ranks. Even in high ranks Reaper was still just okay
Well at least to me he was obviously below average even in the best hands considering he kept half the buffs & is currently an average pick. I don’t think he could’ve possibly been average before any of the buffs & is still just as average now after the buffs. He must have been below average before (which he was in my opinion since Brigs release)
I wouldn’t go so far as to assume Blizz wanted to just throw him into the meta & make him overpowered considering they did walk back some of the buffs after it was clear that they were overboard.
You’re kinda assuming malicious intent on Blizz’s part, which I don’t think is true.
I think it’s hard to claim they’re bad at balancing considering I don’t hear better ideas. Not only that, but if Blizz sledgehammered double shield 6 months ago everyone would have been calling Sigma/Orisa trash like they are now now that they’ve been nerfed. I don’t exactly see that as a positive. They tried changing different things before directly targeting them because they don’t want players to see those heroes as trash. They try to take small steps hoping it will change the meta, because there’s been quite a few examples of players being slow to catch on to what’s actually good. Brigitte’s rework was considered trash by quite a few forum users, yet she was a top pick for quite awhile.
What do you think should have been done about double shield? You say that Blizzard is bad at balancing & let it rule for too long, so what should they have done to shift the meta without “butchering” Sigma & Orisa as people are claiming now? &How do you know that whatever suggestion you’re about to tell me actually would have worked?
I’m curious why you feel this way considering Goats was meta for so long including on ladder & was the opposite of an FPS. Double shield also wasn’t very FPS-y either… from what I remember Doom/Mei were the meta DPS for quite awhile, they aren’t very FPS-y either. Brig is definitely not very FPS-y, but she was meta for all of Goats & the 2nd half of Double shield. Triple tank years ago wasn’t very FPS-y at all. Most of the metas we’ve had aren’t FPS centric.
I don’t like DB or GOATS in all fairness, they’re cheesy and boring when Overwatch itself isn’t necessarily that bad. But when I think of a match that feels like Overwatch, I always imagine stuff like dive, Rein/Zarya, Rein/DVa, Orisa Hog, etc.
And only this patch feels super FPS-y, which I don’t find inherently bad but it’s not what a lot of people felt they signed up for when they got this game.
Imo Overwatch just has this very specific, unique feel where it’s FPS-y sometimes, brawly others, and you can kinda swap to whatever is needed. GOATS, double barrier and the current Hog meta all don’t give me that special OW feel
It’s not practical, it’s not based on any facts, it’s just my opinion. Seems like for the past year (at least) we’ve been straying farther and farther from what drew me to the game in the first place which just makes me kinda sad
Ok so… the first major mistake the Dev team have made time and time again is with the staggering amount of nerfs they’ve thrown at heroes. Humans have this fun little mental quirk where losing something feels roughly twice as bad as gaining something of equal value. It’s called Loss Aversion. For that reason, Devs should never ever go swinging the nerf bat around wildly. That’s not to say nerfs should never happen… but they should be done incredibly carefully and if possible should be done in a way that opens up player choice. Which is just about the exact opposite of how they’ve handled their nerf bat.
So… for the situation with double shield in particular… what should they have done? Buffed competitors or counters. Like… they could have given Reinhardt his 2k barrier back. Or… in theory, a close knit bunker should be weak to AoE damage. Especially stuff that can go over or around their barriers. Maybe try giving Junkrat and Pharah more range on their splash damage.
The second one is a more macro level meta problem the Devs have. They have 2 metas. One where the players stack defense on top of defense to resist and outlast anything the enemy throws at you and can’t get you off the point (Turtle Meta). The second is where you put together the strongest, burstiest cohesive team you can and just overwhelm your enemies with damage so you can take the point for free after they’re dead (Murder Meta). What does that mean? Well it means that one or the other meta is always going to be stronger and have a strongest composition. Whether that’s Goats or Double Shield or Grav Dragons or Double Sniper or Dive… there is going to be one singular dominant team composition until the Devs show up with their balancing tools. After which… it merely shifts. Sometimes it doesn’t even shift… sometimes the composition just looks different. Like Goats → Double Shield was moving from one Turtle Comp to another.
How do you fix that? Well… one of two ways. First you could go the LoL route where the Devs decide on a particular meta and work to fit every hero into it. I’m not a fan of that, but OW could go that way. Also this seems to be the way they are going especially after the comments of making all the tanks more like Roadhog. Problem is that that particular way lies both a TON of community backlash because of Loss Aversion and a whole bunch of very VERY well established competitors.
Second option would require a 3rd meta to have some Rock → Paper → Scissors action going on. What could that meta be? Well… we actually had it at one point. I’ve nicknamed it the Phoenix Meta. A meta based around neither dealing nor surviving damage, but recovering from damage. Moth Meta was that in spades. Problem with it was that Mercy was literally carrying the whole meta on her back because nobody else who’s viable has ever had Phoenix like abilities (poor Symm). In theory… Turtle comp can outlast Phoenix comp, which recovers from Murder Comp, which explodes Turtle comp. Which is the most effective tactic available or… META? Well… each comp has a strength and a weakness so in theory… there isn’t one.
Will that ever happen? Probably not. Partially because of short sightedness on the part of the Devs and partially because I’m pretty sure the community would Riot if Resurrect was even a little bit meta again.
it’s a different scenario. with genji, they buff him, he’s too strong and then they nerf him. with orisa sigma, they introduce a new character, role lock, and a new form of playing the game via orisa sig double shield. it’s a lot harder to balance than just to revert a buff. the reason it took them so long is because they tried to slowly kill the meta with continuous nerfs to orisa and sigma so people won’t whine about blizzard killing them. at the end of the day though, a sledgehammer seems to be the only way to kill an oppressive meta in OW, so it took them a long time to nerf double shield because it was a new character, role lock and a new playstyle, in contrast to just reverting some buffs. but that’s just my take on it.
i don’t think that the devs nerfing too much is a problem, because that’s one of the games biggest problems right now. powercreep. if you buff shields, you have to buff damage, so you have to buff shields and defensive utilities, so you have to buff damage again, and everything ends up one-shotting everything else. that’s the case with roadhog right now. because the devs buffed more than nerfed, they also had to buff roadhog in order to keep up. now, the second you remove the shields, roadhog shreds everything. if the devs listen to some people in the community, they might buff shields again, which would force them to buff damage. it creates this deathmatch kind of game where it’s just about one-shotting the enemy before they can one-shot you, which can create metas like double sniper where one shot determines the entire fight.
Depends on what you care the most about. If you care the most about OWL, E-Sports and the 1% then sure, balance the game around the pros.
If you however care about the rest of the community then you balance around the mid level gaming experience. This to ensure that most people who play the game, has an enjoyable experience.
When you balance around the 1% and towards E-Sports then you get, well, Overwatch to be honest. A sorry excuse of a game that had some promises.
Nobody cares about sym. In owl and especially high rated ranked genji is terrible. He was such an issue in the low to mid tiers that nerfs were brought to him that were better for the bottom
I see that but the meta spanned more than 10 months. It shouldn’t be that hard to do it. It took more than like 20 patches to fix an evident problem that they had tons of good feedback on. Idk
Because it’s a game, it’s not professional football. You balance out from what is fun for most people to play. If you care about your game as a game. If however you care about it as a sport then state so, so the casual players can find their fun somewhere else.