Hot Take: Poor Balance Isn't The Problem

General Discussion
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The main problem is a poor gameplay experience, not necessarily an unbalanced one.

  1. When heroes are “BROKEN OP,” the actual “imbalance” is WAY overhyped. People in GM and OWL use heroes who are only maybe 2-3% better than the other ones because they are really trying to optimize, and substandard picks tend to win as often as the meta ones.

  2. The devs balance around Owl/GM, and that is such a vast minority of players that if the game is “imbalanced” there, most people likely won’t be affected by it. Since the goal has never been to balance around the modes with the most players, even if this magical “balance” is achieved in the spots that Blizzard is trying to balance around, it still won’t be balanced for the average player.

No, the real issue is gameplay.

D.va might be more “balanced” with a shorter DM, but she lost a lot of players when that change was made.

Doomfist might be more balanced with the uppercut recovery time nerf, but he’s much, much less responsive now.

Ball might be more balanced with all his changes, but he feels much less fun to play.

And so on, and so forth. Yes, some heroes are oppressive, but honestly, nerfing heroes so that they play worse does more to alienate players than it does to draw them in.

74 Likes
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Oh thank god finally someone said it.
This game is UNFUN NOW. We can NEVER get to perfect balance and nerfing heroes over and over to the point where they feel trash to play makes people quit.

Fighting with wet noodles isn’t fun.

I think the only exception to this is buffing hard CC. For example if you increased anas sleep dart duration to 7s or hack duration to 7s, Imagine that :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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Is it a hot take? Or is the hot take the other way around? :thinking:

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The long term off meta mains tried to warn everyone…

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You’re freakin right!

There’s many examples of how they make a hero less FUN and enjoyable to play, purely to balance them for OWL and stats

or to make them more “exciting to watch” for esports videos. Like removing a lot of Dva’s defensive capabilities and replacing them with another damage skill (micro missiles)

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I mean, how many people do you see asking to make heroes feel better to play vs the people asking for endless nerfs to specific heroes? (I’m sure you’re very aware about this one)

I’d actually say it’s a hot take considering this.

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Yeah, they make changes that are good for balance but bad for fun

There must be a middle ground if the game is to last and be looked upon positively. As it currently is, there are quite a few characters that are near that balanced state but just blow chunks to play as.

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cough sigma cough

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I think the general consensus is the game is in one of the most balanced states it’s ever been in, which is not synonymous with most fun state it’s ever been in. The people crying for nerfs are typically one tricks complaining about their counters, refuse to adapt their playstyle, or just want their hero to be a cakewalk and roll over everybody without a challenge.

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What a fan of a hero might call “worse” might be called “better” by the people who play with/against them. Ball and Doom, for example, are two heroes which people have complained about to no end since their introduction. They’ve had states where they’re fun as hell, no doubt, but that often came at the expense of the fun of the 6 people on the other team, not to mention how they can sometimes affect the fun of their own team mates.

Some heroes are just bad for this game. That’s not to say they’re bad designs or whatever, rather that in their most “fun” state, they’re a poor fit for the game we’re playing.

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And Mei, and Pharah, and Bastion, and Sombra, and Symmetra, etc etc etc

They can do better, but they’re too focused on the competitive end of balance

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This isn’t even a hot take for me – I think the game is pretty balanced. There’s things I like/dislike but I can’t think of any glaring problems.

Like, what hero do you feel is “must pick” or on the opposite spectrum “not pickable” ? For me, I can think of none.

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no they do not, this is a false narrative

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There’s some people here and there that are trying to get heroes to be changed to be more fun. Ususally they are met with countless people claiming that the character in question “is fine”. That ain’t the problem, but for some reason the “their fine” chorus never seems to understand that.

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I just want raidboss brig back.

Atleast as a seperate arcade mode

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Tell me, who were the goats nerfs for?

Goats was practically non existent on ladder, in fact, during the highest point of goats, ladder was still complaining about DPS comps. But the thing was, the things the pros abused were actually what made tanks viable solo.

Pros: Use the most powerful comp to win.

Ladder: Use the least number of tank your team can get away with.

The difference in mindset meant that unlike in OWL, on ladder, the more powerful the tank was, and the stronger the Tanks/Support synergy was, the less of them were in play. 1-4-1 was in fact, viable with a support main and a tank main. The devs even confirmed that goats was practically nonexistent on ladder.

But they nerfed tanks despite them not really being a problem. This fixed the goats problem in OWL, but on ladder where 2-2-2 was already more of the norm, the tank roster crashed, leaving Orisa the last tank standing, she went from bottom tank, to top, not because she was strong, but because she wasn’t part of goats to begin with.

Then there’s double shield.

At the time of double shield, we actually had more tank variety than the year after. The top two tanks on ladder were not Orisa/Sigma, that’s just among the 1%. No, the top tanks were Orisa and Reinhardt. Two tanks that had no synergy and tended to end up on opposing teams, one on defense, the other on attack. And being two completely different styles, you ended up with two different comps.

If you felt shields were still too much, there was already a solution to it. Flankers had always been in the game, it didn’t matter whether you had 900 shields or 9,000, the flankers can get around it. In fact, prior to Brig and Moira, Orisa was a troll pick as she kept dying with her shields still full. And during that “doubleshield”, these dive heroes were already in a bad spot for over a year and all it would have taken was to either buff the flankers or nerf the anti-flankers. Make the dive tanks viable and you’d have bunker, deathball and dive in direct competition with each other. It was the most obvious answer. Bunker and Deathball tanks were competing, and Dive tanks were the ones left out.

But dev’s instead nerfed bunker and we ended up with pretty much the entirety of ladder hardstuck on just two tanks (Reinhardt and Zarya) for the next year. Rather than putting the three main tanks (Reinhardt/Winston/Orisa) on equal footing, they instead nerfed Orisa in December. Likely because they didn’t want her in OWL, but that wasn’t enough and nerfed her again in January. Solidifying the Reinhard/Zarya ladder meta for the next year.

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Name a hero that hasn’t been complained against to no end.

BTW, Ball was totally under the radar for a solid year after his release, and hardly anyone complained. It was only when he was popular that he got complaints.

What ACTUALLY happens is that people just complain against whatever they see in their games a lot. So saying that it’s bad design because people complain isn’t great grounds.

They themselves have stated that this is their balance goal

You can argue that they fail at this, but this is clearly their goal. You should really fact-check before calling someone out on a false narrative.

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I agree. Launch Brig for example was absurdly op and needed to be toned down, but you can’t deny that she was super fun for the player playing her. Then they nerfed her to the point that her entire playstyle is different and almost no one plays her anymore. Yes she is more balanced overall, but balance doesn’t necessarily equate to fun.

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Well yeah, people generally don’t complain about things until they’re confronted with it often enough that they can’t ignore it. That doesn’t mean the problem isn’t there. If you’re sick, you’re sick, whether you’re thinking about it or not.

Anyway, that’s all beside the point I was trying to make: Sometimes a part of a thing can have a net negative effect on the whole, even if it has a positive effect in local instances. That is why the sorts of changes you talk about happen.

Ball’s CC, Mercy’s mass rez, Brig’s entire launch state; These are examples of things which had a net negative effect on the game for various reasons, even if they made the individual heroes more fun to play. So they were changed.

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Hack isnt hard CC and just reverting it back to 6s is enough :upside_down_face: