To put it bluntly, most of the time when the Overwatch community says something takes no “skill”, they are talking about mechanical skill. The reality is, all heroes take skill whether you’d like to admit it or not. Those skills may be different types and in different amounts of abundance per hero, but EVERY hero takes skill. It just may not be YOUR definition of skill, which is subjective and biased, not a fact.
In addition to this, when a hero isn’t considered “fun to play against”, that statement is also subjective. What isn’t fun for you may be fun for someone else. Meaning it is an OPINION. Once again, not a fact.
What you think as a player is not what everyone else thinks. Don’t label your opinions as the opinions, or worse, facts of the community. You are one player, you do not get to speak for everyone, only with everyone, as equals.
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all heroes take, positioning, game sense, and mechanics.
heroes that take low mechanics are thus “low skill” heroes for taking less skill than others.
it’s not hard to understand
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Some people play the wrong game. There are a lot of other games in which players have more or less the same kit (Quake, CS, etc…).
This is a 6v6 team game not an 1v1 one. The fact that both teams can pick the same composition serves as a basic balance mechanism in the game.
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But why is mechanics more important than any other skill here? There is still bias in your statement. No one skill is more important than any other, it depends on the hero and the situation.
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nope, no single skill is more important, but as i said every hero takes all 3 skills some take less of 1 skill skill. 3-3 is higher then 2-3 bud.
What you have just said, is an opinion. It is a statement of your personal viewpoint. It is not a fact that applies to everything, nor does everyone agree with it. By saying “no single skill is more important”, you have essentially claimed your view as a fact.
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Yea every hero takes skill. But some take more than others. Every hero requires good positioning and game sense, that’s universal regardless of which hero you’re using. Game sense and good positioning can carry you to Plat on pretty much any character.
But saying a character like Brig takes more or the same skill as a hero like Tracer or Genji is ludicrous. It’s becomes a question of, Effort/Skill vs Reward. There’ a wide range of characters for the wide skill range of the player base, you need lower skill floor characters for the lower ranked players just like you need higher skilled characters for the top end. The issue comes up when a character of low skill is of far more value than a character of high skill. The ratio should always be: High Skill/Risk= High Reward, Low Skill/Risk= Low Reward, that’s why people have issues with characters like Brig or Junk when he was OP. With Brig and Junk at their best you don’t really need good positioning, game sense or mechanical skill, Junk could just spam from far back on the map (literally around corners sometimes) and do a tonne of damage, Brig has self heals and a tonne of HP not to mention stuns. Compare the value of Brig to say the value of a Tracer. A person learning Tracer will have to sink 30+ hours into her to even start getting good with her, whereas you can pick up brig and literally be good with her in hours and add far more value to your team for doing so.
So yea, people basically get annoyed when characters don’t follow the High Skill/Risk= High Reward, Low Skill/Risk= Low Reward ratios, and that’s normally what they’re meaning when they say a character takes ‘no skill’, they’re basically saying a character takes far less effort for the amount of value they provide compared to a character that takes far greater skill yet provides far less value.
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Some heros are significantly easier to learn, they require less skills. This is a fact. However, difficult to leran heros (like genji) become easier to play after learning certain things as reflexes, a lot of things become second nature. After that most of the player’s attention is focused mostly on higher level decision making. The rest is literally executed by one’s hands.
I play more complex heros because I enjoy the challenge and learning/playing simpler heros is boring for me. But I don’t expect easier-to-play heros to be less powerful when used to their full potential. And of course those who play easier heros reach the full potential much faster.
This is a 6v6 game not an 1v1 one. Heros don’t have to be balanced in 1v1. Some heros are actually counters of some others by design (countering with in-game switch: rock-paper-scissors). 1v1 imbalance is a basic building block of this game.
Let’s say that both teams have the same composition and both teams have genji and Brigitte. The enemy Brigitte can be killed by the rest of the team while you as genji are doing your job on the rest of the enemy team. It’s a matter of team coordination and positioning to avoid enemies that hard counter you. The problem is that a lot of people have 1v1 mentality while this is a 6v6 team game with in-game hero switch and countering.
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Yes, but that is still a mentality that we as the community approach the game with and assume everyone agrees with. I am not trying to convince anyone that their view is incorrect, because no view is correct. The community spends so much time yelling at each other because some people assume that there is a right or wrong way to look at skill. There isn’t. You have your opinion, I have mine, and that is fine, but in no way should we ever take anything in this skill argument as fact. Everything on these forums is biased and we aren’t being fair to all opinions. Some people may not care that certain heroes take little effort to get value out of and some may even say that they take far more effort than you think. None of it matters as long as people keep assuming there is a right and wrong.
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Sorry mate but when it come’s to balancing a game it absolutely necessary. I work in game design, I know how important community feedback is regarding the balance of a game. The community may not be qualified designers, but when the majority of a community agrees that a hero is too strong, you can probably bet they’re right.
People don’t want to feel ‘cheated’ when they die in a game. This is why people hate being killed by characters like Brig, or Doom, or Junk (pre nerf) etc. Because they know that when they get head shot by a Widow from half a map away, that shot wasn’t a ‘fluke’ hours of practise went into that shot. When a character slowly bludgeons you to death, not even needing to aim, but also self heals making it near impossible to kill her, then stuns you when you even think of escaping, people know the same amount of practise wasn’t put into that, so they feel cheated.
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Gonna get into my personal take on this here, so take it however you like:
I get it, I’m in the minority here, but when the minority are people who love and play this game to death and still get ignored, it bothers me. I fall on the exact opposite end of the spectrum here when it comes to what annoys me in Overwatch. I think Brig, Pre-nerf Junk, and Doom are all fine. I want the game to be that way. Widow headshots are the most annoying thing on the planet to me because some of us, no matter how hard we try, will never have good aim and that’s doesn’t feel fun to play against. So what about my vote? Do I not get a say? Do I have to abandon my favorite game because people who think the exact opposite of me have the most influence? What would you have me do when the game I love is being changed in the opposite direction of what I find fun about the game?
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Ok, this is where you are right and wrong. Every character needs skill and awareness. However, there is differing degrees.
The widowmaker doesn’t have to worry about a Reinhart charging her at any moment if she is positioned correctly. This instantly requires less awareness then the say mccree who has to sit in the middle of the team that has to worry about flankers just like the widow, AND has to worry about the ground tank pressure. Likewise, the widow doesn’t wordy about her cooldown management as much as say, Doomfist… She has some cooldown management such as her hook and it being up to avoid flankers or dive… but it isn’t a high priority for a widow to be “skilled”
She is balanced off by the fact that her mechanical aim has to be pinpoint and precise to get value. Other characters have other ways of still having value with other “skills” such as ability management, player awareness, etc. Widow is all or nothing.
Does that mean widow is higher skilled? To some people. That is what the Op is talking about. It is an opinion.
Some people might take position and game awareness as the highest qualities in a character… and say that Mercy is the most skilled character… because arguable no other player requires as big of a positional and game awareness to get the value out of her kit as Mercy
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Listen dude I feel you on that point. Sometimes the heroes you don’t want changed are the exact heroes that get changes that make them unfun for you. I actually play Doom as a main hero, I also play Pharah too, so characters like Brig have never been an issue for me to deal with. But that doesn’t mean I can’t understand where the community is coming from when they say those characters are a nightmare to deal with, it comes down to personal experience with dealing with those characters. But when the majority of a community comes to the conclusion that a hero is OP, they’re probably not far off the mark. You still have a voice in the situation, and I recommend you use it especially if you disagree with the changes, that’s always commendable. But when it comes down to it, it is a ‘community’ game, so the voice of the majority will almost always win out, usually with good reason.
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This is a 6v6 team game. Someone has to take care of widow but it doesn’t have to be you. Many heros that are good against widow are no-aim.
I’ll agree with you on the “majority usually wins” thing (for good or for ill), but I still fail to see the “for good reason” part. So many times a majority has made a biased decision that harms a game in the long run and I don’t want that to happen to Overwatch one day. This game has a lot of passionate fans behind it, but being the cynic I am, I don’t trust them to do what’s best for the game. I don’t think I ever will.
The community and the devs have to work together, but right now, all I see is the community making demands and the devs caving. I could be dead wrong on what’s actually going on behind the scenes, but I’d like a firm and public “no” on hot-button community issue to show that there is some backbone there. I love Jeff and all the people on the Overwatch team, but this community of ours has a lot of power and opinions that don’t respect what others love about the game. That worries me.
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Yea unfortunately Blizz kind of have to cave to player demands for good or for worse though, especially when its the majority. The players are the thing that actually keeps the game moving, so it’s just plain smart business to keep the majority happy (for good or for worse).
Personally I agree that Blizz should show a little more backbone regarding certain things. I think a lot of issues in OW can be overcome if the player base was forced to adapt as opposed to demanding changes to something they’ve never encountered before. At the same time though, it’s the players that spend the majority of time actually ‘in game’ experiencing it, a lot of players have as good if not a better understanding of how the game is balanced, especially at the top ends of play, so it’d be stupid for devs not to listen to them.
From personal experience of actually being a dev working in the industry on a game that has a HUGE player base. It’s just straight up damn hard to balance a game the not only has a character caste with hugely varying skill sets, but also a huge player base of varying skill and also a professional scene. Keeping everyone happy just isn’t an option, someone is always going to be upsets regarding decisions made about a character that resonates with them.
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Then why even have low skill characters? If they’re worse than the high skill characters why would anyone play them? Having half the roster as training wheels is terrible game design.
It’s actually good design. Not everyone has the skill sets to operate high skill characters. The majority of the player base is actually made up of players in Gold ranks and below (we’re talking about millions of people here), it totally makes sense to have characters designed to perform well in those skill tiers.
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Why waste the resources designing em? If for example Mercy is strictly worse than Anna always why even make Mercy? It makes no sense. When would people just shed these “low skill” ie training wheels heroes as you would want them. The game is best with a wide variety being successful catering to various different strengths. Having easy but worse ones would fix nothing.
That seems kind of rude to the people who love playing those heroes don’t you think? What about them?