She’s counterable, except it takes like half your team swapping to even have a remote chance at dealing with her which is very far from healthy at all tbh. There’s a reason most OW1 metas were specifically anti-sniper, only for her to show up in some dive teams anyway due to certain maps favoring her so hard.
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Mirror matches are not balanced, and a couple of flankers that are not viable after a certain point (or in the case of Tracer, overpowered by design) or without coordinated teams (Sombra) are not enough.
Remember when Symmetra was able to block a Widow’s sightline with her deployable shield? Remember when Torbjorn and Sym would severely reduce the impact of oneshots in the game?
So… yeah.
The issue is that the game’s design and balance has been determined for years by wanting to make OWL play as many snipers and flankers as possible.
Yes, a silver Widow isnt an issue. But silver players still feel the impact of balance made around Widow. Best example are the plethora of tank/support/non-hitscan DPS nerfs that plagued OW during and after GOATS, a meta of the 1% made exclusively around countering Widowmaker, and how said nerfs destroyed the usability of several heroes below GM.
GM/t500/OWL dont exist in a vacuum, sadly. Decisions made around their performance end up affecting everyone.
If they could allow us to vote for our damn maps we get to play- then this could be a viable solution.
I wouldn’t be surprised when the sniper friendly maps are voted for the least though.
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If anything I’d argue that with Cash Shops and BattlePasses and PVE sales being how this game makes money.
GM/t500/OWL are actually a lot less relevant than they were when the only major revenue stream for Overwatch was that $180M YouTube exclusivity deal, and conning OWL team owners to pay-up on their $40 Million dollar buy-in fees. Or just to keep all those many OWL sponsors.
That’s all dead now though.
Grey, you put far too much faith in Blizz btw.
Reworks from blizz rarely are a great gift, they are more like a piece of stale fruitcake.
Plus they aren’t giving much care to hog it seems. They are pretty content to let him rot IMO.
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Let’s just say, it’s not what I wanted, but I can understand that it’s “for the greater good” to make an annoying hero I like, be less annoying.
Personally I think they should have just removed 100hp off of him, and raised his breather cooldown. Which would instantly knock him out of meta tier.
That said, I’m sure I’ll give plenty of feedback if they screw it up. Like I did ever since the Season 4 Hog rework.
Also my “faith” can mostly be measured in how few forum posts I have…
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Snipers have had a chokehold on the game’s balance/metas/direction for literal years now, it’s been long, LONG overdue for them to be addressed. Their current state is unacceptable and Blizzard needs to step up to the plate and actually nerf a problem for once instead of introducing “counters” that break the game even further (see also; Brig and Sig). If snipers have to be gutted to make the game enjoyable for everyone else, then that’s just what has to happen for the game’s longevity.
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This is probably one of the safest things to try. It seems clear they don’t want to aggressively buff flankers because that would likely drive people away from playing Support, and this improves flanker matchups against the characters they most need to be winning.
As much sense as the reasoning and commentary from the TF2 dev makes, that’s not really hard numerical evidence that snipers are as much of a problem in terms of driving/keeping players away. Blizzard is the only entity right now that might have more conclusive data on the subject in this specific circumstance.
But the flip side is that it’s hard to make sense out of not really trying anything at all. It’s not exactly difficult for them to tweak numbers like health or reload times/ammo and put those changes live to see how things shake out, and it should be very easy to undo if sniper nerfs end up causing more problems than one might expect. Tweaks to ammo/timings to similarly tone down one-shot uptime, which in theory should broadly improve counterplay viability (if only slightly) shouldn’t be hard to test out in a live environment either.
I do think there’s an underlying map design problem in terms of viability of flank routes and general cover on payload paths, but that’s slower to address and likely should be done regardless of how they tune snipers.
I’d still argue that it’s not that difficult to do a process of elimination that
- Almost every FPS game is struggling with Sniper design.
- Sniper design in FPS games being a problem for player retention has been a known issue for over 3 decades.
- The devs have identified “Oneshot Combos” and “Freeze Combos” as a major problem, in regards to player retention.
- I honestly can’t think of any enjoyable counterplay against Snipers, besides CounterSniping. And I think I went to a lot of effort to try to find some.
- While it is possible to measure Fun, it’s very difficult, and it’s not that easy to figure it out based off of raw data.
So the way I see it, it’s dramatically more likely than not, that Snipers are a major problem for player retention. And I’ve never seen any compelling evidence that would lead me to believe the opposite is true.
Additionally, if a third of Sniper players are “Sniper Mains”, and a third of those “Sniper Mains” quit. That’s about 1% of the playerbase give or take. Probably smaller than that. And I don’t think it’s possible to have less than 1% of the current/potential playerbase playing more if Snipers were more enjoyable to play against.
Even if miraculously this was all horribly wrong, there’s basically zero business risk if it was wrong.
And to the extent there is any risk, the devs could just try a few design approaches in a series of Experimental Cards, and then just figure out what the community sentiment on the best Sniper rework/nerf approach.
Or easier, have all the approaches on the version of the game that’s only accessible to OWL players and Content Creators. Which take them about 2-3 weeks. To the point where it’s almost done to perfection.
I don’t think it’s possible for sniper nerfs to cause any problems that couldn’t be easy fixed with a bit of number tweaking.
Like a reduction in burst damage viability, would make Composition Durability go up a bit, but that’s ridiculously easy to make Composition Durability go back down with things like less Healing or less Tank health.
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Snipers dominated the game’s balance despise of them.
Same that Tracer dominating despite CC and more lock-on/no aim damage sources existing.
GOATS and DS ended up being mandatory due to this ‘‘Sniper aiming’’ singularity. Ashe and Sojourn might be latest iteration of trying to reinvent the Widowmaker, but ultimately Widow was always the core issue since OW1’s beta.
She and Tracer have been the prime balance issues from the very beginning of the game, just waiting for someone to learn all the tricks and twitch clicking aim to fully abuse them to break the game.
Ok the first problem here: you are drawing a comparison between burst damage (oneshots) and ‘‘burst’’ healing (just high healing). But the later does not have anywhere near the impact of the former. High healing can not undo a death.
Only Rez mechanics have anywhere near the impact that sniper oneshots have.
The other issue is that sustained damage will always be healthy for everyone involved, and sniper oneshots will always be obnoxious and unbalanced for anyone that isnt the sniper.
Sustained and non-oneshot damage allows everyone to make plays on every side.
Oneshots are the only play possible when they are allowed to exist.
Hog, Sigma and Junkrat were all nerfed out of 200hp hero oneshottting (or CC burst combo to attain the same result, whatever). Its Widow’s turn.
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To be fair, I didn’t like the idea when I heard about it and definitely did not know the game was gonna suck as hard as it does now. Prior to the ow revamp the biggest change I was used to in video games was new maps (apex legends)
I’m sorry, I just don’t buy this premise. People like playing snipers, that’s why they are in all these games. They aren’t just some negative externality that pops up against the devs’ wishes. People like playing snipers. It’s a popular gameplay mechanic.
Winston, D.Va, Genji, Sombra, Tracer, Lucio – all these heroes are fun to duel Widow with. I’m in Diamond and I can even beat most Widows there with Zen. All of these are fun.
And you think every FPS just somehow keeps making this mistake?
Which is more likely, that every FPS game dev is a moron who can’t figure out something this basic, or that you personally don’t like snipers and that’s why you think they’re unfun?
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Snipers are only problematic in OW2 because at some point you MUST get within their LoS to play obj. In a game like Valorant/CSGO you have multiple objectives to avoid sniper lanes but also it’s round based. Killing all enemies wins round as well so obj isn’t as crucial as in OW2.
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As I said, I’m inclined to agree that there’s not strong reason to try nothing unless Blizzard has data which resoundingly says opposite. I don’t necessarily disagree with you that there’s more reason to expect snipers would cause a player retention problem than not, but as a small counterpoint to keep in mind- Snipers are in general considered a prestige class within shooting generally. Having functional and viable snipers probably does bring in a non-zero amount of players.
There’s really only one caveat that crosses my mind in regards to the numerics of the playerbase size, and it’s that if a character is selling skins very disproportionately compared to the average character, it probably does make business sense to keep them away from bottom tier.
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Okay, which specific FPS game or games would you like to talk about?
I think pretty much every other FPS game has more enjoyable Sniper counterplay than Overwatch.
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Another day, same propaganda :p…
Right after Alec Dawson announced snipers wouldn’t be touched for the moment :p…
What a coincidence :p…
The only thing that’s strangling playerbase growth is the Overwatch toxic community, the same that’s been making this game worse and worse over the years because they can’t accept a game for what it is and wants over-the-top changes (which eventually decreased the population of said game).
I guarantee that removing / tweaking snipers in the harshest way with do nothing but impact the playerbase growth for the worst but I guess we really want Overwatch to reach a highest low 
…
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They’re not. The support role being overtuned because you people can’t stop complaining about being ‘weak’ despite the fact that the role is now literally broken, that is what’s preventing any player growth.
Now if we’re being additionally realistic, demanding $20 per skin will keep the game in irrelevance too but I know the OP in particular loves to be delusional and arrogant.
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That is not what influences how I feel about Widow. I actually don’t feel like Sombra is that bad and I like her OW2 version more than her OW1 version.
I have always hated Widowmaker. 
Because I find her fundamentally flawed.
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This is it exactly. The approach to snipers in Overwatch is fundamentally flawed and has been since 2016. So far, they’ve refused to actually address the issue and they’ve instead tried literally every other option so far.
The only thing they haven’t tried is meaningful changes to the snipers.
These problems have (mostly) been solved before. By Valve. In 2007. TF2’s implementation of a Sniper class isn’t perfect, but it’s obviously done a better job of player retention than Overwatch’s.
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The problem is that each heroes should have specificities with strenght and weakness and should countered and counter each others. To counter snipers, you should use flankers like reapper and sombra but both are countered by snipers especially hanzo.