I’m interested in everyone’s opinions on whether or not hero winrates should be a balancing consideration and why. Not gonna debate but I may play devil’s advocate.
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hero pickrate in gm matters more than hero winrate in gm in my eyes.
Sym and dps doom had 58-60% winrates in gm whilst tracer and cree had 50-55% winrates.
And anyone who knows anything about hero strength would never claim that dps doom or sym were ever stronger than tracer or cree.
Hell rn ana and kiri have like 48-49/50% winrates with really high pickrates and both of them are really really strong heroes in gm.
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I think they should be taken into consideration for sure but that they aren’t the only thing that should be taken into consideration. The balance in this game is more complicated than that.
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Both matter, you can’t really ignore either.
For example, it’s pretty clear the cowboy is bad but his pickrates remained pretty high, while the winrate is very low. There are examples for both sides.
I’m also sure Dev’s database has unmirrored vs mirror statistic as well, and at what point in time do you pick a particular hero etc.
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Not really
- It’s not mathematically accurate
- Even if it was accurate, the devs should be minmaxing tierlists based on “Desirable to Play As”’ versus “Undedirable to Play Against.”
- That way there’s as much similarity as possible between “Play to Win” and “Play for Fun”
- And an overall incentive to focus on reducing Frustration.
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no
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I think it does matter, but like any statistic, it’s only useful when viewed in context, with all other factors taken into account, such as a hero being strong in a niche (sym on certain maps for example) but not strong the rest of the time. If a hero has a high winrate and pickrate they’re probably a problem, but if it’s a high winrate but a low pickrate then other factors need to be examined.
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Only in combination with the pickrate.
Because looking at the winrate with a hero who is e.g. in every game, of course makes no sense. Likewise with heroes that are played very little.
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Only matters as a confirmation to a high pickrate.
My perspective is that balancing well requires taking into account a wide range of information.
So that includes pickrates, winrates, drilling down and looking at those metrics on specific maps/sides, looking at how things like damage and heals compare across others in the same hero category, and so on.
Considering “paper” power matters, sure, and yeah, it makes sense to consider adjustments based on perceptions of “fun” vs “unfun” to a point (it’s a PvP game; it’s not reasonable to assume you can completely eliminate all frustrations for all players, at the very least because people dislike dying/losing in general). But that’s no reason to completely ignore win rates either.
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Cass has always been an odd one for me. In OW1, I thought he felt incredibly strong despite that he was always a bottom 5 hero in terms of WR. I began to wonder if his stats were skewed by players who don’t actually know how to play him, using him as a desperate counterswap against flyers and dive heroes. This would inflate his PR and deflate his WR.
Incidentally, I’m not entirely sure how accurate overbuff stats are at the moment either. I was looking at Illari’s trends recently and noticed that one day she had a 20% PR, which obviously is erroneous. And while looking at an individual player’s stats, I found that their S8 stats were just duplicating their S7 stats. Is this bug limited to individual players or is it also impacting s8 hero stats? 
We cite OB’s stats a lot here and in the past, they’ve been shown to be consistent with Blizzard’s a few times. But they’ve also bugged out many times. Maybe they’re only accurate like half the time. Who knows? 
Winrate on it’s own is a terrible metric to guage a Hero’s performance.
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Pretend for a moment that every character has roughly the same pick rates, but one wins 80% of their matches where the rest fluctuate between 40-52%, is the one OP wherever they have that win rate?
It should be a factor, but not the deciding factor.
Pick rates across the ranks
Win rates across the ranks
Map weight (are sniper friendly maps appearing more than flanker for example)
Team comps
Sombra for example isn’t getting much done against against a team consisting of (insert tank), Torb, Symmetra, Kiriko, and Moira.
Widow isn’t getting much done against Winston and Genji.
It is worth keeping in mind though that if a character has a high win rate, they probably also work well with more comps or have greater carry potential than others, so others would be higher as well.
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That was back when you still see his face popping up frequently on the top leaderboard, but not anymore now. He lacks range, grenade is just a less fun and weaker version of flashbang. Ow2 Cass is a straight downgrade from Ow1 Cass.
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Yeah I agree and actually assert that this is true balancing: maximizing player feelings of fun and fairness for the maximum number of players. The reworks are in line with this (at least that’s their intention).
However, most of the patches aren’t focused directly on true balance but rather tuning heroes in and out of the meta for variety, which still indirectly affects feelings of fun/fairness and may still be important to some extent.
It’s a datapoint, and information is valuable. That being said, it should not be the primary determinant of balance for a few reasons:
- Winrate can be impacted by niche status. In the obvious example of someone like Symmetra, people usually only play Symmetra in instances where she’s really good or if they’re a dedicated main. Otherwise, she isn’t used—hence, her WR is high despite a low PR. If you went by WR alone, you’d think she’s a very powerful hero
- Similar to the above, mirror matching can depress win rates because it forces the WR toward the average for that rank (or 50% if you look holistically at the ladder). This is why some heroes, such as Ana, don’t have apparently high winrates despite having very high PR
- Swapping complicates WR. If someone plays 25% of a match on one hero and 75% on another, how do you reasonably tease out a win rate from that? Now add in an extra hero, or two.
- The above issue becomes even more complicated when you start having to assess how swaps may have impacted a match. If I’m solidly losing a match then I swap to counter and consequently win, it would apparently look like both heroes I used won, when in reality one was losing before I changed off it. I have no idea if Blizzard tracks that info (I’m guessing not), but it does complicate WR data.
Of course this is all somewhat moot in absence of actual data from Blizzard (and how they calculate it), but I think it is helpful to try to tease out accurate winrates—and also swap-to and swap-from rates. How often to people switch off a given hero and to another? That, to me, would also be a strong indicator of hero power (or how many one tricks there are). Just as a starting point, this is the kind of data I’d like:
- Raw Pickrate → what percentage of teams have this hero show up at all?
- Weighted Pickrate → the same, but weighted by playtime (so if you only play 16% of a match on Hero A, it won’t count the same as Hero B who you used for 80% of the match)
- Raw Winrate → in matches where this hero was used period, what percentage were won?
- Weighted Winrate → same as weighted PR, basically a playtime weighted value
- Non-Swap Winrate → in matches where this hero is played without swapping, what is their WR?
- Non-mirrored Winrate → Weighted Winrate, with mirror matches removed from data pool
- Swap To Rate → in what percentage of matches do players swap from some other hero to this hero?
- Swap From Rate → in what percentage of matches do players swap off this hero?
That’s a lot of data, but I think it’s a more comprehensive look that gives a closer view than just running off WR alone
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No… it doesn’t matter.
Because too many thing can affect it. We’ve seen cass be literally HARD meta and people will still try to defend him because he had a below 50% winrate. It was simple, people swapped to cass A LOT in already lost games to try and bring it back because that is what cass is. A swap hero who is mainly used as a crutch.
Ana right now I’m pretty sure has a lower than 50% winrate… we all know ana is broken.
It’s just a terrible way to look at it. And if you ARE going to look at it, provide context as well. The thing people do and what blizzard clearly also does is go “well winrate low therefore hero bad!” while ignoring ANY piece of evidence that would say otherwise.
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Not on its own their way to many factors to just winrate alone for an Argument
That’s the thing though. The Devs have been focused on Balance. Or at least a simplified version of Balance, with tierlist adjustments.
But they haven’t been that focused on improving Counterplay.
But the Community doesn’t know enough terminology to ask the devs for the correct things.
They are basically asking for tierlist adjustments. Which is almost entirely Numeric.
When what they want is to remove the qualitative aspects of Counterplay that are too boring or frustrating. Which is Qualitative.
It matters when it matters and doesn’t when it doesn’t
