um… isn’t that what people who disagree do?
They probably embarked on a quest ton find the Dragon Balls and make OW playable. Thats why patches come slowly, they are just bussy.
i believe blizzard up level management knows this ideology isn’t the way forward
that’s why i believe they are forcing in office 3 days a week.
sitting at home 24.7 isn’t healthy and is contributing to this ideology in my opinion
I have disagreed with their handling of Doomfist but
You mean very few Mercy players initially liked it. Many have come round and many other players feel it’s a fairer chance to kill Mercy now - this was also mentioned in the AMA.
They didn’t say pickrate was unchanged - they said it went down. And it’s quite frankly stupid NOT to look at unmirrored winrate as the primary metric for power level and pickrate as the primary metric for popularity.
I actually do disagree with their handling of Hog so I’m with you here.
I think they kind of went against their own principles with this one although there is a massive difference between the entire playerbase complaining about Hog and the Mercy mains complaining about their hero being nerfed.
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This is the biggest question we’ve had since the release of OW1. Why do they have to trash heroes for no valid reason and contradict themselves constantly regarding any and all changes they end up making to heroes? They used to put out consistently good patches for 2-3 quarters only to absolutely trash all progress they made with some horrible subjective changes towards the end of the year. When we got past summer it was guaranteed that they made absolutely horrible changes. Nobody knows why they made any of these patches or how they got past the dev teams to begin with, but those responsible for those patches hopefully got laid off and replaced for their absurd incompetence and harming the game directly causing also harm to the company
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Objective raw data doesn’t tell the full story, and OW1 proved that using only winrate/pickrate to balance is a bad idea.
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I mean, her pickrate dropped by 1%. Folks are either still playing or the “almost everyone” is a simple 1% of it.
Any change is disruptive. Due folks aren’t fan of change. Unless is to make their lives easier. The change made players to leave their comfort zone.
The changes didn’t negatively impact on her. Doesn’t mean that didn’t changed.
The shift towards new passive showed the increase of more damage taken, but that damage taken didn’t reflected on more deaths. Which represents that the issue of “evasive behavior” was dealt with low impact on deaths.
If their goal were to make her deaths per minute increase they would need to reduce her healing values in later patches. So is pretty much a good change by shifting away the evasive behavior but not hurting the numbers.
Because is metric that affects everybody. A hero with high winrate and pickrate means they’re stronger than the rest. Is better nerf stuff than actually powercreep everybody. At same time a hero with high winrate but low pickrate is only viable in a small set of situations, the ones that are most likely to win. While high pickrate and low winrate means it is below the pack.
Her metrics on pick rate and win rate stayed similarly. Which means her metrics weren’t negatively impacted by it.
Having a drop of 1% of it’s playerbase means that a small portion of those players actually didn’t adapted or liked. So, isn’t everybody.
Fun can be achieved in several ways, they’re changing the game due the game needed to be changed, both due the 5v5 but also CC changes.
The roadhog nerf, is a small change. Is more related to the muscle memory and folks relying too much on the one trick combo.
His overall lethality didn’t changed, just got more perky to get used to the new combo.
Well, changes were needed, due the new concept. Most of heroes would need reworks or several changes.
Mercy one effectively reduced the time she spend on DB, also made her less evasive. Which addressed mostly what they wanted to achieve.
While the fun factor can be adjusted afterwards, what they wanted to achieve was achieved. Not reflecting negatively on her stats in fact shows that the change gone well.
The way to protest the change would be not playing with the hero. But a decrease of 1% showed that change wasn’t that badly received as folks want it to be.
Their data can be interpreted in several ways, but the fact of not having big negative impact is a indicator of the change being fairly balanced.
The fun factor can be debateable, but the balance one shows they achieved what they want.
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This is the biggest issue for me.
It’s not about win rates for me. It’s moment to moment gameplay. This is why they don’t see Sojorn as a huge problem. Her winrate isn’t crazy high. It’s just stupid frustrating to get 1 tapped from miles away from a woman who slide rockets in suddenly.
Stats do not show frustrating things like that.
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That’s what the experimental mode used to be for… I swear they have removed more things than they have added in ow2
And weirdly didn’t they like say in the AMA it doesn’t have much of use anymore since they are doing more frequent balance updates…
Yeah quote:
Josh (Lead Balance Designer - Blizzard) —
The Experimental Card was much more useful in the past when the patches were further apart (months vs weeks). The turn around time to have it patched and reacted to between releases means it isn’t really feasible as a testing for upcoming live patches sort of thing, though hopefully we’ll try to find some fun uses for it again in the future outside of just patch previews.
It’s so frustrating though! Like these rework ideas they have Mccree’s grenade could be tested and fine tuned right now by the help experimental.
There’s so many future potential changes they can run through that mode and help perfect the changes.
They have the tools, but they don’t even want to utilize them. It’s so god damn frustrating.
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Oh look another Mercy post.
hog is getting a rework so hes temporarily left in the dumpster and mercy is still good and viable, just less annoying to kill and nonetheless shes still hard to kill.
Perhaps they just want to create themselves more work.
One of constant issues with programmers is that some companies measure their performance in number of changes they made. Blizzard has odd system, that ranks low 10% of developers as underperformers, even if they did everything.
So, to keep their profit shares and bonuses safe, causing harm to their game is useful - it creates more work to do.
I’m surprised the balance team still has their jobs as balance developers tbh, but they have got to go with how much they’re actively trying to kill the game. Surely they’re brought in by Kotick to kill the game before he leaves because this is just unreal lmao, it would explain why they’re still on board.
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It seems OW2 team is afraid to make a Brigitte situation again and they’d rather tweak very little details, look at stats and we’ll consider it as a success since numbers don’t drop (as they did for Moira necrotic orb ie).
Cause crying is an individual experience. If you’re crying about Mercy but her pickrate is still fine, that means most people are actually okay with the new Mercy.
If your anger was shared by the majority of players, her pickrate would lower.
The winrate also shows Mercy is still as viable as she was ; she’s not becoming OP or underperforming.
And tbh, I don’t remember the metrics about Hog before his nerf. I know a lot of ppl had a problem with him since Zarya’s nerf. Maybe, because of “immortal Hog” strat going on in some pro matches, his pickrate was going up and devs decided to cut it out before it becomes “meta”.
But what metrics don’t tell is how people play Mercy. If her pickrate and winrate don’t change, what does it mean about how Mercy is played ? Do people still pocket ? Do people still sit damage boosting the DPS letting the other support do all the healing ?
I feel the latest changes were to make Mercy more active and less afk-pocketing but it might not something shown by metrics.
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Ofc their metrics are fine, when they have changed one overpowered aspect of hero into another. But the thing is that her movement at least take some skill, rathere than just putting the beam over 50% hp allies to have this 50% healing bonus. If they think that playstyle is something better, well, I wish them to be imprisoned and playing some 2 cp like anubis with that mercy changes for 8 hours a day against some goats. Because I bet they spend less time working on the balance and they never play their own game at a half-decent level TO BE ALLOWED TO ANY BALANCING!
What also doesn’t help is 3-4 hour commune to work. If that’s too much they could always rent a place out in the city where $70k a year will barely scrape you by, dig straight into your savings or worse into the credit hole. You gotta take the least path of resistance, i can definitely tell you that starvation will cause much more problems.
They already did, by creating Kiriko to counter Ana. Same “we would create hero to counter a problem, instead of dealing with problem”, that gave birth to Brigitte.
And, surprise, they had exactly opposite effect. Which seems to be common theme for changing Mercy.
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Brig didn’t counter one hero, she litteraly broke everyone for weeks.
She was made to counter dive heroes, Tracer in particular. But, just like with Kiriko countering a lot more, than antiheal, consequences were a bit too large.
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