Just remove it then

General Discussion
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That’s their solution to everything.

We added one hero that ended up causing a meta where the most populated role became almost pointless? (Force Role Queue)

Not enough people picking Tank because of Double shield? (Force 5v5)

People getting bullied over having a gold border while still being an average rank? (Remove borders FOR EVERYONE)

People getting called out for throwing on a hero they don’t play or have a terrible win rate on and refusing to swap? (Force default private profiles)

PvE is going to take a lot longer to make than anticipated? (Just give up on it then)

Every single time they are given a problematic situation they just choose to remove the root of it and act like it never existed.

For each of the major issues the game has faced over the years there have been extremely reasonable solutions that just got completely overlooked.

Example for Brig, disable the hero from competitive, rework her, then re-release her in a more balanced state.

For double shield, nerf the sustainability of the tanks. Force them to be weak to dive. It’s a poke comp, dive should naturally counter it by getting up close. Either that or remove Sig shield.

For the rank borders, literally just give an enable option to hide border??? Instead of removing them all for everyone. I was nearly at a diamond border by the end of overwatch one, would’ve been so cool to get that.

The private profiles, how is the default setting private? Bring back the pop up where when you hovered over a public profile you’d see the players time played on current heroes. Don’t know why that was ever removed. On top of that grey out the option to view someone’s profile who has it locked to private. Why even give me the option in the first place to view it, if it’s private? Come on man that is literally like two lines of code max. It’s an if function followed by an “if so”.

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Yeah many of Kaplan’s ideas weren’t good financially so had to be redone

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Fixing the root cause of stuff is normally the right thing to do.

Except Brig was there because there was major problems in the game. re releasing her in a way which didn’t fix those problems isn’t fixing the problems.

Now, removing brig and then nerfing the living hell out of mobility could have worked, but you would be here giving the same complaints about that. “they removed mobility rather than having an effective counter to it”

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its not that they wernt good financially, its that companies dont want long term money + good will they want short term money by any means necessary.

what made blizzard so popular was that they put out high quality products, this lead to world of warcraft becoming the biggest mmo or overwatch being this massive launch.

but the executives dont care about the reputation of the company, they’ll leave and be apart of a different company in a few years anyway, so they force people to milk that good name for short term profits.

what jeff kaplan wanted to do with pve would of been something old blizzard would of done, but as always the executives are shortsighted.

they dont care if it’ll make the company more money in 10 years, they expect to be on to the next job in 5 so might as well milk it dry.

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Playing devil’s advocate here, because I don’t think you are wrong, but it also isn’t good game design if you can’t create new game mechanics to balance ones you already have. If it works like a house of cards and making balance means remove one, you are causing instability in the rest of the pyramid.

Meanwhile, if you ADD cards, you just build from the top.

One of the forgotten issues Brig caused was having to rework numerically how armor functioned. Now, maybe I am wrong, but perhaps having a change in how Brig function rather than nerfing/removing would have fixed Brig. Most players told me her addition created two major problems:

  1. Armor packs made mobile squishies deadly
  2. Her intended design of being a backline/midline defender acidentally made her really good as a frontline brawler that could 1v5.

Wouldn’t the best answer to just design things in her kit to make incentives in her kit better at the backline defense rather than gimping her overall power entirely so she wasn’t broken at frontline fighting?

I think the same line of thinking could apply to a multitude of aspects of changes this game has had over the years.

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Which we can show was false. Because it came with Tracer being kicked out of the meta hard.

It was being pushed by the Tracer players as a way to get Brig removed, but it was extremely obvious from the stats that the armour packs were helping the supports against the flankers WAY more than it was helping the flankers themselves.

Yep, it did.

Pulling her from the game and reworking her wouldn’t fix the underlaying problem which caused her creation. Because it would mean you would have to create almost every support later to ALSO have to fix the problem.

They should have nerfed Tracer so she had a similar power curve to the other heroes. She is still a problem to this day as a brief look at T500 shows, or a look at the stats ever since they had nerfed Brig.

She has been a total outlier in the game, and Blizzard doesn’t want to fix it.

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Too bad the devs never actually did that and would instead force some extreme backwards change to the whole game. Creating more problems and sometimes not even correcting the intended one.

Bingo.

Hard stuns counter everyone. Brig never needed a hard-stun on bash. Not to mention that a beefy tank/support hybrid hero that can duel most of the roster ends up countering much more than just mobility heroes. Blizzard has a very poor habit of designing all-or-nothing abilities either out of incompetence or laziness. They never actually understood the importance of powerlevels or road mapping out hero designs.

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The issue is Tracer is back at being the hugely T500 pick she ever was. I think they have decided it is a problem they are willing to live with.

Where if you were after actual balance, she would have a similar power curve to the rest of the heroes.

On the other hand, you don’t need actual balance for a game to be successful. So them choosing game success over actual balancing is a viable choice.

But saying …

is ignoring that it wouldn’t have fixed the problem. Because the problem was bad enough you NEEDED a hero like release Brig to actually put an end to the issue, and there wasn’t a rework which could have fixed it.

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A new perspective I haven’t been told. Interesting.

The example makes it difficult since we have a similar agreeance from the first thing you said, but it also makes a hard example for what I’m talking about that can’t apply well if her armor packs specifically were changed through propaganda.

Any game has an issue that a new added concept changes meta and brings about new issues, but this is especially true for Overwatch and ESPECIALLY true for old Overwatch.
Back in the day, patches and character changes had larger gaps because, as the team admitted, the code was too complicated to make quick hot fixes unlike now. So, the idea of a character removal and rework was impossible to just do casually. As well, if hard nerfing a character led to them being dumpstered, they would stay that way not because it was a dramatic change but because the time inbetween their next change could be like… a few months.

In case of Brig, one of the big thing people argued to hating was her ability to duel tanks through stunning but it didn’t really tackle the issue of Tanks vs CC in general. Tanks hate CC entirely and their alleged mitigation to CC was miniscule at best.

I think my main point is that Overwatch and the devs always and currently have many tools to try experimental, interesting, and individualistic concepts that could’ve helped their metas more. Yet it seemed strange they did things like, instead of making tanks stronger against CC durations and making their already existing CC immunity meaningful, they removed CC entirely. Instead of making a means of dampening the ability of Layering shields over one another or shield spamming, they removed consistent shielding entirely.

Dps passive, concept of flight for anyone but DPS, second tank, armor-giving supports, Symm supports, there is kind of a pattern here and I feel like Tracer is a symptom of exactly what I’m talking about.

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now if they’d apply this logic of removing the source of the problem to the overlords making these terrible game-destroying decisions, we might get our game back

toxic bean-counters destroying the game? remove them.

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That, and it’s hard to point out Tracer as a problem right now when so many other OP heroes are controlling the game.

I don’t see how that is the case. Obviously overtuned heroes like launch Tracer, Widow, etc would have still needed nerfs all along. Brig was never needed, at least not as a support hero. She would have been such an easy rework into a tank while retaining her original brawly playstyle players loved. AND she wouldn’t have needed a stun either.

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Agreed.

Not would have been my choice, but the mobility heroes were complaining that CC was skillless, they were on the “higher skill” train, which of course left flankers extremely overpowered when OW2 was betaed.

Because it is hard to make a “high skill” counter to mobility.

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I’ve kinda beated around the bush because I was trying to discuss this lengthy convo I had with Ranulf about issues of team durability and 5v5 months ago but can’t find it.

But basically what it came down to is that the dev team is scared of characters that have concepts which are team effecting abilities and this can be seen by the new heroes and finding even more additions of unique abilities to offset niche ones.
Yet we keep falling back to and keeping things limited and we still have the massive “Cyclical Balancing” issue currently. Which leads to things like… say… Ana’s nade is still only hard countered by Suzu yet people agree Suzu should mostly only be at it’s strongest removing anti-heal. So it becomes a tug-of-war to keep both in line to opposites of a coin.
Same of dive.
Same Flankers.
Same with Rush.
Same with Shields.

Essentially that old conversation I had with Ranulf is that the game would feel MUCH better if the DPS role overall had a higher focus on defensive and utility capabilities instead of just such a hard stance of committing to DPS overall and would make up for losing an off-tank.
Which, his response was “It will become a battle of what team composition is better: Defensive oriented or offensive oriented”.

and my response essentially saying our very issue here right now is the dev’s not being able to find solutions to making styles and concepts work so they nerf and remove them and keep high-value aspects that cause these problems the same. Which is what led to, you know, how Widow caused GOATs and double shield but Widow remains the same and we still can’t introduce an aspect into the game that makes her playstyle sensible. Because the devs are scared of scaling the power ceiling of heroes. Probably because of burst DPS, but massive damage is one of the variables that got us here and remove team durability exacerbated it.

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That’s not true. Before brig the game was pretty good. Bridget made things way worse than they should have been, and it spiraled downhill since.

Mobility’s counter was stun-meta, which mobility players whined about for ages and got gutted. Now we have high mobility no stuns, and they’re crying about getting 1 shot because snipers exist still. They gutted everything good about overwatch because they couldn’t balance it and wanted it to be super arcade pingpong instead of a bloody shooter.

Imagine being a rein main before all the boop nerfs. Toxic af and took ages to fix.

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As long as you were not playing support in high ranked play.
It isn’t a good game if an entire roles life sucked.

Sure DPS and Tanks were enjoying themselves. But that does not a good game make, if you have your supports leave in high amounts.

Just like forcing stuns as the counter to mobility had the tank players leave later.

You can’t sacrifice the enjoyment of players you have to keep, if you want your game to work in the long term.

So the game was not “pretty good” it was doomed.

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For the record, none of what I said above really applies anymore because it seems pretty apparent now that whoever is working behind the scenes can’t make additions and changes to the game dramatic enough in certain directions to avoid all the spoken of issues and it’s for the same reasons we are getting a form of PvE that has only gotten poor reception.

So, really, if the corruption which even LED to the bad management of the game was removed, we probably wouldn’t even be stuck in this Mobius Patch-Fixes-Patch.

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This guy gets it. Its sad that OW is like an orphaned child, that once had loving parents. The new parents dont care about it/ show it any love and simply use it and as you said, milk it for everything they can get out of it while they still can.

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holy fk I was questioning my sanity wondering how the hell I made a thread 2 hours ago about “Just remove it then” before realizing I was still in work.

I didn’t know there was another Ninetales on the forums.

… Small world.

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Modern gaming in a nutshell.

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Easy. Percentage based armor, based on health.

Was never a real issue. People just never hard focused her, making it seem like she was unstoppable.