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.
no they do not, this is a false narrative
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.
I just want raidboss brig back.
Atleast as a seperate arcade mode
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hack isnt hard CC and just reverting it back to 6s is enough 
poor balance can be intereting but not when the weapons are weaker than water
Not entirely true. People complained about having a ball on their team “throwing” for the longest time. Much like the same complaints when they have a sym/torb/bastion on their team. It wasn’t until every other tank option got nerfed into the ground that ball became seen and accepted as the least bad tank, and then subsequently nerfed because he’s not allowed to be the best tank.
The issue is, ANYTHING that becomes the most popular gets complaints. Take McCree, who is the latest target of the forums. Or Genji, when he got his buffs and became super popular. Or Zarya, whenever she ends up meta.
You honestly can’t name a single hero that doesn’t get blasted on the forums for being popular. The entire tank roster, certainly, does. So people saying “Ball is unhealthy because people complain about him” isn’t good logic. People complain about ANYTHING that is popular.
Even your example shows flaws. Mass Rez was never really an issue until Mercy was given immortality frames on it, at which point, she got super popular again (surprise surprise).
You can call anything problematic. Saying it has a net negative because people don’t like playing against it is faulty; people hate playing against anything that kills/disables them. And trust me, whatever is FOTM is going to be complained against as OP, unfun, toxic, etc.
hotter take…the balance has never been that poor:
A) it has limits on what it can be
B) cant please anyone anyway
C) people are so indoctrined into “meta or lose” that even if it was “great” it would still seem terrible anyway
I’ll agree with you, aside from a few specific hero releases which were incredibly OP at the time of release =)
Other than that, though, yeah, balance has never really been the issue. The pursuit of great balance has killed gameplay and that’s the real problem.
As I said, people complain about problems that are in their face. If they complain about every hero they’re frequently seeing, then the fact that heroes are fun/unfun is just a symptom of the problem, not the root.
Lucio has been popular basically forever and I rarely see complaints about him.
Firstly, that’s not what I said. Secondly: People play games for fun. If enough people have their fun negatively impacted strongly enough by a particular thing, that thing is arguably unhealthy for the game.
That’s debatable. The issue was never that Mercy was able to mass rez and get away with it, it was the effect that such an ability had on the game. Mercy players were just hiding, not healing/boosting anyone so they wouldn’t be located. They’d let their whole team die with the hope that the team had killed one or two enemies, so that when they came in for the glory rez their team would have the numbers advantage. There’s many problems with this scenario which were resolved by removing mass rez and all it cost was the ire of Mercy players. Not even all Mercy players, either, just the ones who abused rez cheesing.
Brig was even worse. She was undeniably busted at launch. She singlehandedly ruined the game for flankers AND tanks (remember when she could bash through shields? lol). She was legitimately killing the game as a whole (some would argue that she succeeded) and absolutely HAD to be changed, regardless of how fun she was.
Obviously I’m using extreme examples here, but that’s just to drive the point home. Some features, while fun for a few, are decidedly unfun for many. They need to be changed. If the result is then unfun for the few, then that suggests that either the change was the wrong one or that the real problem lies elsewhere.
People hate being killed in this game because the effects of getting killed (even if it happens to a teammate) are so prominent. I’ve played few games which punish death as hard as this one does. Even Diablo 3’s hardcore mode, where you literally lose more the longer you’ve played, feels less punishing to die in than this game, no joke.
Because of this, people’s frustration with cheesy deaths is amplified. THIS is the problem. It’s not that “problematic” heroes get nerfed to be unfun, it’s that problematic heroes exacerbate the deeply embedded design problems the game has under the surface.
I actually think that making them all fun to play in their own way is one of the game’s biggest strengths. The devs have done a great job here.
But by buffing doom, you’re ruining the fun of the 6 people on the enemy team
I get your point, but some heroes are better off not being buffed
The more CC a character has, the harder it is to buff them.
Exactly. The more you buff heroes with unpopular mechanics like CC, burst damage, or so on, you will overall have less fun than more
Overwatch is a Competitive game, which therefore automatically means that balance is valued more than fun.
And that’s really the correct way to go. Casual players won’t really bother as long as the pay styles they love are the same and the game still feels good to play. However, a tiny numerical change can cause havoc in Competitive environments, not vice - versa.
Hence why this is the devs’ priority. That and they also have the probably billion - dollar investment that is OWL to sustain.
Also, you realize that, in casual games, the fun of the majority of the player base plays the biggest role? This means that oppressive heroes (which are by definition frustrating to play against) and even frustrating heroes that aren’t statistically dominant would also be addressed via nerfs or reworks if the game were to be balanced casually. It would always be the players of a hero VS everyone else and needless to say who would rightfully win…
I don’t really get why this has so many likes. The OP doesn’t really give us an actual alternative and just states a rather obvious thing. Balance is very finite right now and variety has been through the roof for over a year now. Balance hasn’t been a big issue in a very long time and the latest hit-scan nerfs solidified that state by bringing this type of DPS to where the rest of the DPS are, ignoring Tracer
But what’s the actual problem is also really obvious. The matchmaking is going haywire thanks to the game being so dead and there’s an abundance of alt accounts/smurfs because lots of them are dedicated high tiered veteran players which means that their segment in the playerbase has grown relatively when other segments of players have ended up quitting the game. There’s also a content drought in the game and some minor systematic flaws like Paris/HLC still being in QP pools and devastating players’ experiences there, endos are still irrelevant, automated reports are going haywire and stuff like that
But most of all the 2 biggest issues in the game right now are: Handicapped matchmaking making games unenjoyable before the games even start as the teams with highly varying players in it will have a miserable time regardless due to various reasons explained in all of the matchmaking related topics; and player behavior being worse than it ever has so that when you finally get that rare game where both teams are actually equal and there isn’t a massive difference between the best and the worst player in the match, the match ends up still being extremely skewed up because of heinous and bad player behavior where players don’t play the game properly for a win and instead tunnel vision forward as if they’re merely farming games for border xp or something dumb like that. Not to mention if you bump into alt accounts which also tend to engage way more in heinous behavior
When you combine those 2 issues it’s really hard for the players to find an even game with even teams where everyone plays properly for a win, even in competitive. And when you note that this is the pre-requisite for players to consistently enjoy the gameplay, is it any wonder that players tend to have a really bad time playing the game nowadays?