Blizzard need to stop substituting Banning problem heroes every week or so and actually balance them. If Mcree is such an issue that he needs banned every other week, then putting the issue on the shelf isn’t going to help. I get the idea is to make the meta fluctuate, but aiming for better balance with regular balance updates (that were once promised…) is a far better way to go than arbitrarily deciding who is and isn’t playable. Especially in a game so heavily build around hero counters like overwatch.
Worst of all is how they choose to do this sort of thing in competitive. If the game is truly a
then banning certain heroes to evaluate stats should not be done in the main competitive game mode, instead relagate it to its own mode or even the dedicated ‘experimental mode.’ You can’t have it both ways.
Counterpoint: It’s basically impossible at this point to balance 32 heroes evenly across the board so that every single one is viable in any given situation. Balance in a game like Overwatch is just not feasible. Bronze players will flock to junkrat and moira while GM will love widow and rein. The most you can hope to achieve is to shift the meta around. This is far easier to through hero pools rather than buff/nerf a set of characters each week and better for the playerbase since they don’t have to keep relearning how much damage their hero is outputting every time they boot up the game.
I’d say the problem isn’t even the current balance, it’s Blizzard’s attempt (or lack therof) to even attempt balancing instead of “shaking up the meta.” They need to learn metas are made by players, not enforced by devs.
Honestly, the aim should be a “Why not both?” Balance does need to be addressed, and it needs to be acknowledged as on ongoing process rather than a “get to the goal and done” thing. That said…
Different skill levels will be able to squeeze more or less value out of different heroes. As much is to be expected. Thus the goal should be that in the long-term, all heroes see some pick percentage within a reasonable variation. The balancing point should be whatever the midpoint is, which I’m told is gold.
The reason for this is that you need to make the game balanced for the broadest set of players as possible. Lower-skill players will generally use whatever is fun as long as it’s semi-viable, higher-skill heroes will squeeze every last drop out of whatever hero has the smallest margin of being better than the rest. So balancing for either category is going to be a fruitless venture.
But if most players find that most heroes have some use and are fun, well then, there you go. That’s how you develop a video game.
That said, the high-ends, as stated previously, will generally flock to whatever enables them to win, regardless of balance. To make sure their gameplay doesn’t get stale, hero ban rotations make sense. Whether you want to draw a line at Platinum, Diamond, or masters, well, you can have a valid opinion on that. But it really doesn’t make sense for lower ranks who often can’t get the same value out of the “meta” heroes.
The programming problem with that, however, is if you’re at a rank where a hero is banned, and playing in a group where the range includes those who don’t get effected by the bans (let’s say, very low diamond and very high plat), then what happens? Do you get put into a match where you can’t play [banned hero] but others can? Or do you partition everybody so you cannot actually play with mixed company? That means (in this example) very low diamond will be forced to only play against people diamond and above, while other people have the luxury of mixed bags of people in a range close to their rank.
In conclusion: it is impossible to perfectly balance all the heroes. Hero bans should be a solution to the different problem of stale matches, not a solution to balancing. However hero bans create their own can of worms that may never have adequate solutions unto themselves.
Echo being banned the week after her release
Mcree being banned every other week
And let’s not forget: hero bans now being (somewhat) based off pickrate.
Kaplain can say whatever he likes, doesnt make it true
No denying that; I just state the observation. I recall Kaplan asking us “what do we want” and in my mind, I’m asking him “forget what we want, do you even know what you want?”
I agree. The devs think that every patch is a solution to the game’s problems but fail to realise the impossibility of that. Overwatch is marketed as a liberating game where players are free to create compositions and counter compositions with the tools on hand (the heroes). It doesn’t feel as liberating to me when some of the most important tools are regularly banned from play. Furthermore, it is mind numbingly idiotic that some heroes get banned more often than others, especially the most played ones.
I feel Blizzard is too controlling, the fact is that variation of the compostitions are very much there and will never leave. Incentivise change, but for the love of god don’t force it.