I’m curious about the ban rate per tier per region. It seems Sombra and Mercy are banned pretty often in NA and Ana in KR server.
Something should be done to the problematic heroes, and I’m excited how they change those heroes as well.
Also, I hope they open the data about pickrate/winrate like in CN server + banrate.
I’m curious to know what their plan is, too, especially with heroes that aren’t overperforming but still get banned a lot… are they going to get rework these heroes just to address their banrate? If so, what’s the time frame on that? What’s the plan for heroes like Sombra who have been through umpteen reworks and have been hated in every iteration?
Honestly I think the only sane solution is to reserve hero bans for high elos, where players will actually focus their bans on overperforming heroes. Blizzard can fix an overperforming heroes.
At lower elos, people just ban based on what subjectively annoys them. There’s nothing Blizzard can do about that, so what’s the point, other than promoting toxic community dynamics around not letting people like things you don’t like.
Yeah, I’m also really interested to hear their thoughts on hero bans and how they think they are going so far.
Sombra is an obvious outlier, and I’d love to hear if they have any plans to try and rework her again. They clearly can’t keep her in this state. But I don’t think the devs will care as much about Sombra being banned since she is a low pick rate hero.
Now the Mercy one is definitely going to get some attention from Blizzard. Mercy is probably the most popular hero in the game, and definitely accounts for a lot of Blizzards money intake from the sales of her skins.
If people can’t play Mercy, they won’t keep buying her skins, and that is a huge problem for Blizzard. So I feel like the number one priority is going to be to make changes to Mercy that Mercy mains have been asking for, to alleviate some of the things find annoying about her like damage boost and rez, and hopefully they lean more into her mobility and add some more utility.
Good luck Blizz. I love hero bans personally, but you definitely opened a can of worms with adding them.
I disagree. The fact that players can ban what they find annoying at their particular rank is what makes bans such a good feature.
People in lower ranks can’t deal with Sombra, she isn’t just annoying in lower ranks, she’s oppressive. Which is why she gets banned more than Sojourn and Widowmaker in the lower ranks.
While in the higher ranks, Sombra isn’t that good, so the higher ranks ban heroes like Sojourn and Widow who require more mechanical skill to get value from.
Each rank has the right to cater their experience through banning the heroes they deem unfit to play against.
If you take that right away from lower ranks, you are just ruining their games again by allowing the oppressive heroes in that rank back in the game
They aren’t going to do anything, they are just going to be lazy and let bans be their “solution” to frustrating game design. Because let’s be honest, they are terrible at understanding gaming and only good at understanding selling skills and fomo
I have found this to not be true. Every game I see sombra banned it’s so silly. And that’s coming from a zenyatta main.
i would love to see the statistics for each rank and yea i wonder if it would matter for platform and region (console-pc-country-rank)
would be fun statistics to comb through… alas i think we will never see it tho and yea they will be vague and name the most ban heroes but not in detail
Are you saying the higher ranks are banning Sombra as well? If so, that’s actually quite interesting. I play mostly plat (low rank imo) So I don’t know what higher ranks are actually banning
So you’re saying in the most high skill region Ana is getting banned more? But the ana brigade insists that 100% antiheal and 5s hard stun are fun and bslanced
Bans working as intended. Oh no, my hero got banned three times last night. Did I punch my monitor and call everyone toxic? No. I just picked another one. Imagine being able to cope and adapt.
The point of this thread wasn’t to complain about hero bans, it was the OP wondering what the devs would say about hero bans.
I agree that they are working as intended, but I am also curious as to how the devs feel about it.
Seems like the only people who know how cancer Ana is are the ones who have a gigantic focus on gaming and are good at it. Nice to see.
I agree so hard with everything you have said.
The obvious option is to nerf her frustrating points and to buff her in ways that make her viable, but that very rarely happens.
It baffles me how Marcy mains drive Blixzard to nerf her further because we are the most one tricked, fund them by mad levels Just so we can look pretty during games , and cause mental detriment to our teams.
You don’t wanna touch DMG boost? Fair play given the circumstances.
Just don’t make us unviable due to the OP heroes you decide to bring out. It’s not fair and if you nerf Mercy without nerfing Sojourn, Freya and Zarya, it shows clear bias and is simply detrimental to the game as a whole.
Honestly every game has been the same bans for me.
sojourn, sombra, mercy, and the last one is a toss up between like 4 different heroes.
Yup. Because it’s not about competitive balance it’s about annoyance. And this is the entire problem with hero bans. There isn’t a competitive balance problem enough (outside sojourn imo) for anyone to bother banning anything for that reason. No hero at a level lower than true pro play is exploitably strong enough to really need one.
But since they try and balance all heroes to be 50% winrate at all ranks some just also feel too good in low ranks. I wish they would adopt the philosophy that some heroes can be bad at high ranks. You don’t need a gm viable Moira kit you need a mid and low level player to be able to play Moira if you want to get beyond that I think you should need to grow skill. But blizzard feels that every hero should be viable at every rank which isn’t really possible. A sombra in her current state for instance is so awful for some people to play against in lower ranks they have to ban her. I’m higher ranks because all the heroes are pretty much fine she just gets banned cause why not ban the one that annoys you the most. So heroes like that get it from every side.
It’s just a completely flawed system and it comes from bad philosophy and laziness on the part of the dev leadership.
If anything I think that’ll make them care more.
The hero already is hardly picked- now they are bans adding to that? She’s basically gone in the middle ranks where she’d usually get the most playtime.
Annoyance, or strategy, or both. Bans aren’t needed, you can always choose to not select anything. I’ve done that several times. Sometimes i’m tired of facing the same meta heroes on loop all the time so i’ll opt to ban something out of that meta so I can face something different for a change out of an enemy team’s skillset. I’m not always successful but i’m happy that I have an opportunity to try.
I agree - you reach a certain point where there are so many moving parts and heros that it’s just not feasible.
The devs will definitely care that Sombra has been erased from the game, sure, but it won’t be their priority to do another rework for her, at least not yet.
Because the people who write the checks and pay the devs salaries are gonna prioritize getting the hero who makes them the most money reworked first, which is Mercy.
Once Mercy is reworked to the point where she is not banned, Sombra will get the love she deserves… Hopefully
The bans will give a very accurate sentiment that actual players feel about other heroes, more so than any amount of forum chatter ever will. There is no other system that will gather better data - polls aren’t often answered by many and even fewer answer them seriously.
It becomes hard data that will have to drive decisions when a hero is an outlier in ban votes and others who are almost never banned.
Like I’ve said however far back before they even announced bans - a hero ban system will compel them to face a reality that doesn’t get told in the spreadsheet data, aka, this hero makes this product suck and the players are communicating that in a way that was never possible before.
I just don’t know if a high ban rate necessarily means the hero is guaranteed to be reworked though. My understanding is that they said they would look at it and try to figure out if it was because the hero was overly oppressive or broken, or if the hero was ok from an impact standpoint but had a kit element that people generally disliked.
As long as there’s an option to remove something then someone’s going to use it for any number of reasons.