You cannot say that Soldier and Genji are totally viable just because they have an above-average winrate.
You have to consider other things that matter. Look at their pickrates. Those heroes are only picked in situations, where people don’t care, where the match is in a state that is considered unlosable (Enemy team is tilted, enemy team has a leaver, your team needs just 1 tick to win…)
In such cases, the winrate statistic could be considered as biased, and thus is ineligible to justify balance. With that logic in mind, don’t take statistics out of context to justify your trash ideology on balance, it doesn’t work.
And due to your false justification on why Soldier and Genji are viable, this is the most untrue and laughable statement by a developer so far. Congratulations.
Please communicate with your OWL players. They’re the ones who play your game at the highest level you can imagine, 1000x better than your internal “playtests.” They might be able to help you out. A lot.
That is not the definition of niché. Being niché basically means a character should excel at one very specific thing. This is not a specialization, this is an “I don’t care” situation, because in that situation, nothing can go wrong.
He’s using the winrate numbers for Genji and Soldier to make a point about how their state of play is more complex than the dumpster fire the community seems to think it is; he doesn’t have to make a 9-point essay about where they fit against other characters for overall vs. in-role pick- and winrates or their popularity on a given map for his point to still be valid.
Except winrate statistics alone aren’t valid. Notice the word “alone.” If they want to balance with statistics, they should take all statistics under consideration, not just their “winrates.”
Again, he doesn’t have to use more than 1 example to make a valid point, especially when it’s a fairly clear-cut example.
The rest of his post was about explaining why and how they make the balance decisions they do and he provided one clean example of why community perception does not necessarily match reality.
Adding a bunch of other stats only muddies the example and makes it even more open to nitpicking.
I don’t know about Soldier, but Genji doesn’t have a niche. There’s no reason you would ever pick him as a specialist, and even if you were going to make one up to justify the pick, Doomfist would be ten times better for whatever you came up with.
You don’t know that it is actually out of context. The winrate they gave were very different than what was on overbuff, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the pickrate was different as well.
Soldier is literally the generalist dps.
If Soldier is ’ “niche” ', there’s an enormous problem, considering his entire thing is that he’s not supposed to be niche.