That’s a good idea, so don’t even waste your time, they are not going to do that
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This is my point. The game cannot be balanced to make everything on a level playing field without homogenising every heroes kit into doing the exact same thing. So why wouldn’t the best option be to allow players to selectively remove characters they don’t particularly find fun to play against ? Pharah players hate widow because they instantly die to her. They ban widow. Ashe is still a problem but they don’t hate ashe AS MUCH because ashe can’t oneshot so the pharah gets some slack and breathing room in the air. There’s counterplay on both sides, it just makes the game less frustrating.
Because Ashe and Widow aren’t the same and no hero is the same. All you have done is made it to where people have the option to REMOVE their hard counter entirely and stop people who want to play their character entirely.
“OH? [X] is banned, so now I can play this.”
“Haha, they didn’t ban [X] so I can easily play this.”
and you can’t balance that way, because power gap will be marginally larger. What if people complain you can’t pick Widow to deal with people better because Ashe can’t do what Widow does? Well, we buff Ashe.
Suddenly, oh no, Ashe is buffed.
Adding banning just creates a whole new balance headache, ESPECIALLY for tanks because, like I mentioned before, tanks are also heavy rock/paper/scissors. If you ban the tank’s hard-counter take, that means THAT tank can play without switching the whole game. Which is dangerous and bad.
Unless we reformat the game to where you don’t need to switch and everyone is equally viable and we come back to my problem: You remove the core principle of Overwatch.
What ever happened with Jayne’s research on bans and how they actually go?
I remember this topic came up years ago and Jayne was looking into it by hosting unofficial tournaments where the teams would select heroes to ban per round.
I actually think bans help out to know what areas to balance really. Having collected data of it can easily help figure out trends that are going on whether it’s a hero being overall OP or certain heroes being niche picks because of certain maps.
How would you suggest the game is balanced then ?
EDIT: I know that question is stupidly broad LMAO sorry. But it’s just that I personally don’t think the constant cycle of buffs and nerfs work since the game is never fair and certain characters always get the short end of the stick presumably because their kits are too annoying to be meta for longer than 2 weeks (sym, junk, doomfist, torb, bastion just to name the obvious few)
Essentially what it came down to is that it was the most beneficial to REALLY good competitive players. Doesn’t exactly translate the same way Top to Bottom, though.
The game is balance around TTK and Counterpicking. Like I said, it’s all about countering and all heroes are situationally viable. The whole point is if hero is played and is good, you switch. You don’t switch if you don’t need to or are doing well with what you’re playing. You switch when something new in the map or enemy team composition calls for it.
Balancing in the game in patches occur when a particular hero is WAY too strong or WAY too weak to deal with counters. Not to make characters more or less annoying.
No cause then people would ban their op battle pass character lol
no just no, you want 10 bans for 35 heroes while lol has 12 bans for 162 champions
actually please ban kirkio your right
Right but I don’t think that’s possible in practice without serious fundamental changes to certain heroes.
Heroes that have nigh universally viable kits like tracer and kiriko will always just be a cut above the rest compared to characters that have kits that can’t even perform close to them even in their niche.
Unless you remove tracers extreme consistency and safety with her blinks and recall she will always be universally better than a character like sym. And if you start to mess with tracers blinks and recall to the point where they’re reworked, is tracer even tracer anymore?
Almost every meta always defaults to tracer simply because she is almost always consistently the most meta resistant character in Overwatch. The only meta where she truly struggled was goats. There’s no balance outside of reworking her blinks and recall that will change that.
Your idea sounds nice in theory but in practice it will require serious amounts of reworks, more than I think people will be happy with.
this was back in 2019 so when it was a very different game form now secondly one tournament don’t mean anything because in this meta 3 heroes would be ban list and then a new meta would emerge
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This isn’t my idea, this is how Overwatch has been holding their game since 2016.
You say some characters are all around better than others but list an anti-shield defensive hero to a flanker. They absolutely are two different roles and function differently. You don’t flank with Symmetra. That’s not what she is designed to do.
And that’s my point, all heroes aren’t suppose to be “better” or “worse” down a spectrum but what their purpose is. That’s how the countering system works and that’s what you balance off of.
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I understand, I was answering what the user was asking for is all and just making a statement on how the results came. This specifically can’t reflect accurately todays overwatch.
For the record, thank you for clarifying.
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Let me add some clarification as well. It seems most people want a ban system to fix when Blizzard doesn’t nerf/buff a hero that needs it.
A ban system is a temporary bandaid at best and a new unsolvable meta headache at worst.
Yeah and it worked in 2016 because nobody knew what the hell was going on, what was strong or even how to play the game. But as is typical with any pvp game of this sort, as the playerbase matured, metas developed. Then the game started to die. This reached its almighty breaking point with brig and goats. There was no “situational viability” that you speak of, people just ran goats and won.
A character like sym could never have existed in goats even on her best maps or whatever, her kit was just incapable of doing anything consistently against that much sustain. Lucio aura + brig inspire + moira m1&orb will completely nullify all of symmetras damage, and that’s not even taking into account the sheer tank barrier and armour hp you had to burn through before you could even start dealing any actual damage to the heroes.
The idea of heroes “fulfilling a niche” means nothing when you don’t have a team around you that’s willing to help you fulfill said niche. Literally the only time that sym did that was during double shield and the devs swiftly nerfed her beam damage in response.
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No, that’s not what I’m saying. While it is true that they do sometimes ignore balance problems. My point is that this game has unsolvable balance problems. Or moreso that solving a balance problem makes 50 other cascading balance problems arise.
would it be only in comp and if so it will just move the meta and people will complain about that hero and it will keep going saying all heroes are op like they already are.
also how many bans
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Yup. They tried this, and it was really really awful. Don’t see them trying it again.
This is true~
Over time, people learned the game and things began to change and changes had to be made with other changes like any other game.
In 2016 people played meta comps and then this changed with the 2-2-2 system.
New things were brought out from this and all. OVerwatch didn’t hit it’s peak until 2018 and it was massive. Now, there is always an upset that happens.
When Brig was introduced everyone hated it.
Same when Doomfist was released. Same with most new characters and they have to adjust those to make sure they are not dominating ridiculously. This is also something reflected in high elo since you have to play these when they are around a season.
It is the same now when JQ, Kiriko, Sojourn are introduced.
So why did Overwatch lose popularity?
A different issue than the fix we have now and that’s because the updates were becoming slow and nonexistent. People hated Double Shield, but people mostly hated it because they had to deal with it for a year. Than they buffed Sym to deal with it, not a good idea, and nerfed shields but forgot to nerf Sym. So then they nerfed Sym. It goes on.
Now, these don’t feel bad when you are regularly doing updates when things aren’t balance which will naturally happen when new heroes get introduced. Only difference is if we get another Doomfist v.1 era, he will get hotfixed in a week. Only reason they didn’t before is code wise they were incapable of doing fast patches and now they can and we have been able to witness it before they went on Winter vacation.
These problems are DEFINITELY fixable and you have seen in the forums people have said how to. Atleast, the very obvious ones. The good fixes are actually stating what about a character’s kit is strong and needs changes. The bad ones are “ hero needs to be removed from the game”.
Not sure. Personally, I only like the idea of a ban system in comp and only in comp to, theoretically, force changing away from meta. So people aren’t heavily picking only Hog for example. but the only reason I think it would fair better in high elo is because people are more likely to be better at more than a handful of characters. One thing banning endangers is onetricks and I don’t have anything against people that one trick. Especially if they are low elo or quickplay one tricking and playing casually. I would only think this would be great once Supports and tanks get a liiiiittle more characters. Even then, not sure how I feel about ANY tank being bannable since it is no longer a duo role. and support is even more worrisome because they already have the least amount of playable heroes and some supports are either pick or lose.
Even then, not sure how I feel on the idea and kinda don’t like the idea of bans even in comp. 