In the AMA they asked about providing stats and about the accuracy of overbuff. The response was something like
- yes, overbuff is reasonably accurate
- we don’t want to provide stats because they can be misused or misinterpreted
But Blizz, if you don’t provide the actual stats we will keep referencing overbuff as it is all we have. We will have discussions based on those stats. Discussions will be derailed by people arguing about the accuracy of OB whenever the stats there don’t agree with their opinion.
How could it possibly be worse for you to provide accurate stats, only those already provided by OB? It can only improve discussions and not have half of more of the posts claiming OB is inaccurate and a bunch of them pointing out quotes that devs have said they are reasonable?
How Blizz, could it not make discussions better to have the actual stats from you? And then, if you cared at all about your players, you would go beyond what OB provides and give us more internal stats - like winrate/pickrate per map for example, or winrate on defense vs. attack and so on.
I imagine you have a large number of people playing your game that also love looking at stats about that game.
You have a huge missed opportunity for player engagement here, as well as showing that you actually care about your players and giving them what they need/want.
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The major reason not stated was simply there is no financial benefit to Blizzard to make these offerings. Its very difficult to justify to say lets go and spend several thousand dollars in a project to share details on a larger scale. What return on investment does blizzard get on this? It would not surprise me this would be a relatively large scale effort with all people’s involved. Backend and frontend development. Another system to have to maintain long term. It is not a set and forget sort of thing. It’ll have to be maintained as new adjustments get made such as heroes being added.
What guarantee is there that most players ever give to cahoots about stats? Half the time you run into people saying not to care about stats. Just keep playing the game and fix bad habits. Its important to some, but not everyone. Its not easy to say, by having this feature we will garner 5% more market share to justify a return in 2% increased cosmetic skin sales to see a 2 year return on making the development effort on this.
The clout was already stated, but the upper management financial decision as well is simply doesnt’ make sense to take the time to do it.
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Given that we have Overbuff and that it is reasonably accurate, why do we even need official stats? What would these official stats tell us that Overbuff doesn’t tell us already?
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Improved trust. Most people discredit what overbuff can represent. Certain things about it are relatively untrustworthy, but teh general things I’d say are much more full prove is looking at say all of comp, QP, on console or PC, then looking at data within the last month.
Seeing stats across 3-6month window is worthless. The last month is more accurate to remove prior stats. A month is long enough to have gained enough data points to get a semi accurate picture.
The things one should not look into are daily stats or possibly GM or bronze level stats only. The player pool is so damn small at these ends that its not insanely accurate. Something like silver/diamond/master would be much more higher population to get into the several thousand data points or higher to have a higher confidence that the variation is not too drastic.
Even Blizzard does the same thing when they frequently say Master+. GM is such a small portion of players that the extra several percent of players in Master is more realistic.
They would stop every topic that quotes OB stats going off the rails and becoming an argument about OB rather than about the actual topic.
They could also enhance the stats as I suggested and add a lot more. Once they had some stats available it should be easy to add more.
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True, but now we have an official statement saying that Overbuff is decently accurate, that achieves pretty much the same thing, no?
It’ll get lost in the quagmire eventually, but some people will remember.
Why not partnership with Overbuff? Give them all the info, and let them do the actual hard work.
And good publicity from transparency gets people playing and buying, so it’s simply a long term thing instead of short terminism.
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Cuz trade secrets 
control the data, control the narrative. Never show your hand when you don’t have to.
Yes it sux, but that’s PR-101.
Blizzard’s offering would hopefully be a bit more reliable. When I say “reliable”, I don’t mean in terms of accuracy, I mean in terms of bugs. Throughout all of OW1, OB had a bug that massively inflated Mei’s damage done stat, putting her at something daft like 40k damage per 10m. Recently with the mid-season patch there’s been some funkiness too, like Hog being attributed a 60% win rate in GM (!!) on the general tank page, but only a ~51% win rate on his own specific page when filtered for GM.
Better features and UI would be cool, too. OB does not play nicely with the Way Back Machine™, so if you want to look at a snapshot in time… well, I hope you took screenshots of that period yourself. The only thing the ‘Machine™ will let you look at is all ranks, which is of limited use. Having the various seasons preserved in amber - maybe even each half-season! - would be really neat to a big ol’ nerd like me. 
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They don’t even look at these forums and they do not care.
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Not only can stats be misinterpreted, they can be used to figure out hidden processes the devs have or to attack the devs directly for any little thing.
I wouldnt release them either.
The problem with OB is that people use the information on there to claim whatever they want…which would be no different with actual stats
However, In the same comment about how it’s generally close (quite different from accurate btw) he cautions how context is needed and how stats do not tell the whole story
This after also mentioning earlier how community perception (based in part on OB) can often be quite different from reality
Like it’s nice that the info is more dependable than people thought….but it’s still incomplete and very often misused….which are not things you want the state of the game to be based off of (what it’s used for)
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It’s also the fastest way to lose audience trust
It’s perfect because we can pick and choose what we believe from Overbuff depending on whether it helps our argument.
I love their stance and it’s the same answer I think we got years ago
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They won’t give full map and rank specific stats because it would destroy the illusion that the game is even close to being balanced.
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“Ana is an interesting hero, and one of the most played in the entire game.”
How does that justify a buff? DUMB
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Its close enough to do that, its ok to be 1% off. dont worry about people who dont get it or want to go by that. Even if it were perfect they would just come up with something else to argue their narrative
What illusion? That moira is good in bronze and widow is good in GM? That sym barely sees playtime and historically only ever had a high winrate because of specific control maps? These aren’t a secret