Here is a bit of miss conception, tracer was only “OP” at the highest ranks. from diamond and below she was performing on par, or well below most other heroes in the game.
Brig was made to counter dive as a whole, as her kit had a lot more uses against dive tanks then she specifically did with tracer. And keep in mind their was a very large number of players complaining about dive back then, many were casual players that were playing a much slower rien comps that dive kind of exploited.
Also outside of goats specifically she actually had many weaknesses to snipers/pharah/ even junk rant because she couldn’t tilt her barrier up to block an air born tire. Not to mention doomfist one punching his way past her defense’s.
Goats specifically was the issue their that broke the camels back, as up to then it was possiple to do a full dive onto brig to kill her. Then play dive normally on a comp that was otherwise weak to it.
It was honestly an issue with the format specifically that allowed brig to be extremely OP, as she was actually rather weak in role lock till she was reworked to be more like a normal hero.
And this is why you don’t design heroes in a way that gives an edge only when played in top rank. Seems like they are repeating the same mistakes with Sojorun and Kiriko designs.
What logic is that? Tracer is op in general, doesn’t matter what rank you are in. Heroes full potential matters. You don’t balance for low ranks as they don’t know the game even.
Eh I wouldn’t really expect this, as a the ten dollar buy in isn’t exactly a hug hurdle to get over. Even if the hero is underpowered, people will be buying into it regardless. Unless that becomes a common trend.
That and they made it point to not have them in comp for a few weeks, and have that hero still be accessible for free during and after that season.
Not to say their won’t be balance issues, but as it stands their going to sell passes regardless from fomo alone. Making them really OP would just be anger people that weren’t going to buy it in the first place. Even then most people don’t even play the DLC heroes, like bapt/moria/orisa/hammon/ and echo are some of the least played heroes in the game. With the only major exception being Ana the first released hero.
A hero with a low health pull that has to maintain a close range to do consistent levels of damage/pick rate as other dps. That relies on their ability to dodge incoming fire. While dealing with a high spread/short fall-off range weapon.
Ya no the plat and below crowd are not exactly performing well with her. You can even see that in Overbuff if you don’t believe me.
Like don’t let the pro’s fool you, people are not tracking players with robot like precision. Most Tracer players are doing sub 100dps, with peeks of actually getting close enough to do that 240 (now 200 in OW2) being rare to how easy it is to be clipped by most mid/close range damage tools. Which they wouldn’t have the game sense to actually be aware off, as most DPS tunnel vision hard.
He is/was the lead hero designer, he had final say in how tools should be implemented. Ya he isn’t the coder/artist/writer that builds them. But he is the one that sculpts how they played, with those under him working around his philosophy. As in the same structure you see in basically any business, especially those in the movie/video game space.
That is more of a pipeline issue, of teams not communicating efficiently for faster changes.
That would be more on the person that would control how the workflow across the entire team is done & I think Jeff was the one in that position, and now it’s Aaron in that position.
Ahahah ya the execs arn’t their changing how fast hanzo’s arrows are moving. And the game director is more so the head manager keeping the team under a consistent vision.
So yes he can veto something like a saying no to a magic wizard that time traveled from the middle ages from being added to the game. But the moment you are splitting the responsibility between a lead and a balance/design team, is the moment the games director role in that position to be very minimum when it comes to the specifics.
As the game director has their hands in almost all aspects of the games development, more so then someone that focuses heavily on any one aspect. Basically he is the DM in a DND game, were as everyone else are the players actually shaping and changing how the experience plays out. At least for a project this big.
something like Hollow knight had a lot more focus on the decisions of the games director. As like their were primarily just two people working on it. So in that case ya all of it’s balance/gameplay and more would be their responsibility.
But overwatch’s game designer is not exactly getting in the nitty gritty of how certian heroes are being balanced. That was Geoff role.
The issue with tank balance, was that they were originally designed to be a lot more powerful individually. However their combo’s like d.va wiston/ orisa/sigma/ even ball/hog for a hot moment their. Were simply to strong when working together.
it created comps that locked many other options from playing, and kept the game stuck in said space without a lot of variation.
That aspect of d.va at that time had to be removed simply because she was simply to good in her combo. They did like that bully aspect of game play. So they made a hero around that, but simply put D.va couldn’t be The bully/the D.M. peeler/ and the dive partner.
As even tho by herself it was fine, in combination with winston’s bubble and mobility she was really broken. As the two locked out and counter play for the indivudal heroes would have had otherwise.
he wanted to preserve that bully playstyle, so he made an entire hero around it more or less. i
Thank you OP, finally someone here with some sense.
Like I said in another thread, in case people didn’t think about this, whatever bad things you feel that he was responsible for, he was also responsible for the good, and is the reason you played the game after all this time.
I never thought balance was the most pressing issue that Overwatch had at any given time. Despite that, 99.9% of the post-release changes for Overwatch have been balanced changes.
why exactly?
it was pretty clear they gonna turn ow1 into a cod clown… they gonna install fomos and grindy battlepasses… direction of new heroes is also clear… all roles should feel dps like, means dmg and low healing/low tanking abilities.
For starters all multiplayer games go through changes like this, LOL, WOW, Halo, and quite literally every fighting game character that has appeared in more then one game.
You were going to see changes like regardless of who was in charge.
I mean she isn’t really, you can still trap tanks behind walls/tripple freeze via primary+ult+headshot+freeze again towards end of ult.
especially now with all the hogs running around. you can get a lot done. She isn’t OP at the moment, and you either have to get good with the ult fire to ping Pharah or know when the swap. But like she decent at the moment.
M8 all they did was remove the boring poke phase of the fight, were you were just burning defensive tools for the first quarter of the team engagement. like everything pass the poke phase in OW1 is more or less the same in OW2. Minus the changes to stuns.
With the added benefit of them redistributing the power that was in the second tank, back into the individual kits of supports and the one tank that is in game at the moment.
While a lot of dps got nerfs, to keep them in line.
Like TTK for a 1v1 has slowed for the most part. Their is just no longer an opening stall before the fight really began.
It’s still pretty much as far from COD as you can get, without changing genre.
Goodman is as responsible for Overwatch creation as he is for its destruction.
His departure only means his job as dev is done as OW2 nears release and becomes a full live service. Goodman utterly failed at that and never managed Overwatch well.
Well, lets keep it in perspective - he oversaw character balance and design, but he did not hand-craft every character, far from it. Genji for instance is not his creation directly, and many characters were not.
I don’t wanna say that there isn’t any validity to what you’re saying. But from my own personal experience everyone that left OW, inside of my group of friends anyway, left because Blizzard abandoned OW1.
Now when I ask them if they’ll return for OW2, they merely hint at the possibility. But I do wonder if their mindset would’ve changed had the devs just kept supporting the original Overwatch, instead of putting it in maintenance mode.