First, it’s important to understand a distinction:
A soft counter is where one character/side has a strategic advantage over the enemy character/side because of what they pick (I.E. picking winston/ball into widow). These are fine, in my opinion.
A hard counter is where one character makes another character so ineffective that they are essentially forced to switch off (I.E. Sombra into Ball or doomfist).
As a note, I don’t want to focus on what interactions are or are not hard counters, I want to talk about the concept as a whole and whether this is healthy behavior for the game.
Here’s the issues with hard countering.
-First off, there are heroes that aren’t able to be countered, period. They can be outplayed, but not hard-countered. This is people like Zarya, Ana, or Ashe. Their kits are too general-use to be countered, but they still counter other people.
This is, bluntly put, unfair. If we wanted to balance around the presence of hard-counters, these characters would NEED to be weaker or else it would be silly for them to be able to completely avoid getting countered. But that also brings a huge slew of problems.
-Second, the issue of “must-picks” rather than “should picks”. Countering inherently creates a must-pick scenario in many cases, especially at higher ranks. This is particularly bad when you’ve got a counter pick to a dominant strategy. Brig, for example, was created as a counter pick to dive DPS (like tracer). So let’s say she’s “the” tracer counter. If the enemy DPS has a good tracer, then you pretty much MUST pick brig because that’s how you deal with tracer.
If this is a hard counter, now Tracer has to swap off because hard counter = this character is now invalid. So let’s say the DPS swaps onto Widow. Well now we need someone to dive the widow, so the tanks have to switch to dive to deal with it, so the DPS now has to switch off of widow and onto something that kills dive, and then the tanks have to switch…
It’s not as bad as all that because most of those interactions were “soft”. But does that sound “fun”? Switching constantly because if you don’t, your hero pick becomes invalid because of their hero pick?
It’s not “strategy” at that point, it’s just pure “XXXX is a problem, so I’ll pick a hero that makes it so XXXX cannot play their hero”.
-Third, this mentality polarizes matches.
The matches bit is a pretty obvious thing. If you’ve got a player who is being hard countered and they refuse to switch, the game is going to be far worse than if it was just a soft-counter. Even without that, though, in the smaller tank/support queue, if you have 2-3 characters being hard-countered, that leaves you with 3-4 options. It’s unlikely that players are good at every single hero in their queue, so the hard-counter interactions have a sort of randomizing effect where you do well only because people aren’t countering the picks you’re actually good at, and if you do poorly, it’s because you’re backed into a corner and forced to play someone you’re not good at.
Equally, some characters’ primary strength could also lie in the fact that they hard-counter certain things. So maybe you pop off 2 games in a row and think you’re a great player, but the real issue was that you were lucky enough to have your main hard counter the other team. Then the next two games you do poorly, not because you were countered, but because you weren’t countering something on the enemy team.
I think that’s enough to get started on, though I could keep going on issues with this promoting toxicity, creating stagnant metas, making certain characters too feast-or-famine, etc. At the end of the day, hard countering is not a good thing.
Note: This is in no way, shape, or form, an advocacy for being a OTP. People should play things that work well with their team and work well against the enemy team. Completely invalidating picks, on the other hand, is a problem.
