“Mercy shouldn’t be looked at because she’s been meta for months”

[WelshInvader-1994]

Sorry, have you seen me spam the forums insisting that Mercy be deleted?

[MakeOWGreat-1938]

fun factor

Lol she plays exactly as she did before except now has more use of GA, the only fun ability in her kit. She’s more fun now than before. Not that the bar is set very high. She’ll never be fun till she has more offensive power befitting the nature of a shooting game.

[MizuKun-11878]

She’s more fun now than before.

Playing with stale bread is more fun than current Mercy.

[MakeOWGreat-1938]

You’re not wrong, but that’s always been true.

[JackisWack-1292]

A hero not being meta doesn’t mean they’re useless.

I don’t play Mercy but play Moira/Ana, and whenever I pick Mercy she just feels horrible. you can’t sustain even the single person you’re healing during a fight. Ana can, and Moira can sustain everyone near her for 300% the value that Mercy currently can.

her rez isn’t enough to justify picking her now.

[AdunSaveMe-1202]

Why are we making threads about quotes that maybe one or two people have said instead of just responding to those people?

[Pequod-11153]

She should not be a priority right now. The priority right now should be changes aimed at making the roster more diverse than it was in the past OWL season in the upcoming season.

Where in OPs response did they ever say to make her a priority? I can’t recall a single instance in this whole thread where someone has said “ignore every single character until Mercy is fixed!”. You act like the whole overwatch team can only focus on one character at a time which is obviously rediculous and untrue. By all means, fix bastion and Torb. Have a crack at Reaper, Soldier, and McCree. It doesnt take a full team to adjust some things here and there on Mercy and slap it on PTR

[Halofreak90-2566]

My prediction, is that Mercy’ll be back at the top of Blizzard’s “Heroes that require immediate attention” list once the e-sports scene gets the support patch and Mercy’s pick rate drops through the floor.

Remember, the rework was pushed through to force Mercy into seeing play time in Overwatch e-sports. Going off Mercy’s current GM pick rates, I doubt she’ll be seeing much, if any at all, play time there, and Blizzard will have to react.

If they don’t, and I’d honestly be surprised if that happens, that means that e-sports isn’t the main focus of balancing, anymore, and we might, eventually, see a properly balanced game.

[Andrej-22745]

That is, spamming the forums

Let me look up the definition of “spam” for you:

Irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.

Calling threads with legitimate concerns and feedback “spam” just because you don’t agree with them doesn’t make them spam. Apart from that consider the fact that the devs themselves asked the (Mercy) community mulitple times to provide feedback. 2-3 threads talking about Mercy in some way (not always directly) on the front page don’t hurt anyone - and certainly aren’t “spam”.

[airwalker-11432]

There’s something called multitasking. This excuse is exhausting.

They can look at Mercy and the heroes that have been doing poorly at the same time.

From what we’ve seen so far, the Devs don’t work on major changes to Multiple Heroes at one time, so no, the excuse isn’t exhausting when there has been a pattern to all this. Mercy has had constant attention for months and only recently has she stopped receiving that attention. It sucks that she’s in such a bad state when that happens, yes, but there have been Heroes is worse spots for much longer, so it’s kind of selfish for some people to demand that one still require attention drawn from those others when they had received it for a long period of time before.

Poor justification to keep an unbalanced hero in the game.

And what is the justification for taking resources from looking into other Heroes who are even more unbalanced and have been for a longer period of time? Mercy is STILL more balanced than Reaper, Roadhog, Bastion, and some people would include several others. Where is the justification is keeping them as garbage so that Mercy can get all the attention to “fix” her when she’s actually in the most balanced state she’s been in since her rework?

Yes, let’s let one hero suffer because Blizzard has let other heroes suffer. Great argument. The correct thing Blizzard should’ve done in the first place is to NOT let ANY of those heroes suffer for as long as they have. And that is Blizzard’s fault. Not the community. The community shouldn’t suffer, nor should their hero (for ANY hero), because Blizzard refuses to look at them for long periods of time. Ana also being a prime example.

No, the argument is that there are other Heroes that have needed to be looked at for an extremely long time, and Mercy has had constant attention until just recently. Yes, Blizzard shouldn’t have let any Heroes suffer, but hindsight is 20/20 and we’re living in this reality, not the perfect one where all Heroes are fine. That doesn’t take away from my statement when i said FOR NOW because they can get to her once they have fixed those Heroes. Mercy is still relatively balanced, unfortunately she is unfun to play as, which is also a major problem. But Heroes who haven’t been able to work for a very long time and are legitimately unbalanced are also unfun. Where is it fair to take resources away from rebalancing Heroes and make it fun for THOSE players to rework a Hero a second time? You say the community shouldn’t suffer, but we’ve seen a pattern of Blizzard not being able to work on several Heroes at once, unless they’re only minor tweaks here and there, so having to rework Mercy a second time would lead to that being the major thing they focus on, as we’ve seen in the past, and everything else pertaining to other Heroes being put on the back burner, much like that has happened to the Heroes I’ve previously mentioned in this comment.

[Arceus-2238]

And what is the justification for taking resources from looking into other Heroes who are even more unbalanced and have been for a longer period of time?

Sorry to burst your bubble but no hero should be a priority over an other. If I was qualified, I would be suggesting balance changes for other heroes but as of now, I’m only really qualified to talk about Symmetra, Sombra and Mercy. In short, I’m addressing Mercy’s state because I know she is not balanced. That being said, I also know that other heroes are unbalanced too but I’m not qualified to talk about other heroes so I’ll only be able to talk about Mercy.

Mercy is STILL more balanced than Reaper, Roadhog, Bastion, and some people would include several others.

Doesn’t matter. All you did was avoid the question and resort to strawman arguments. Again, this is just you poorly trying to justify an unbalanced hero being in the game.

Where is the justification is keeping them as garbage so that Mercy can get all the attention to “fix” her when she’s actually in the most balanced state she’s been in since her rework?

When did I say they should keep the other unbalanced hero unbalanced? Also, your assertion about Mercy reeks bias. Apparently, underpowered is the most balanced state she has been in… Sorry, but she has never been unbalanced after her rework.

[airwalker-11432]

Sorry to burst your bubble but no hero should be a priority over an other.

That’s extremely true, and my opinion on the matter isn’t the opposite of that statement. I am just pointing out that from previous trends from Blizzard seems to prioritize one Hero over others temporarily. I agree with you that they should all be looked at and fixed equally, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Doesn’t matter. All you did was avoid the question and resort to strawman arguments. Again, this is just you poorly trying to justify an unbalanced hero being in the game.

I didn’t see a question, and if there was one there I apologize for missing it. Would you mind asking it again so I can clearly answer it, as I’m not trying to strawman, only respond to those that responded to my comment.

When did I say they should keep the other unbalanced hero unbalanced? Also, your assertion about Mercy reeks bias. Apparently, underpowered is the most balanced state she has been in… Sorry, but she has never been unbalanced after her rework.

You didn’t, I’M saying that according to past trends, that is what is likely to happen if they were to focus on fixing Mercy. Also, Mercy was a must pick through numerous nerfs, continuing until just recently with this previous, most recent nerf. The fact that a continuous string of nerfs kept her as the most picked Support shows that she was not balanced, and constantly nerfing her shows that the Development Team saw that she was too powerful, even after previous nerfs. All this happened AFTER her rework. Plus, much of the community believes that she’s balanced, right now, even many Mercy mains. Unfortunately, she’s not the support I play, and therefore, as you said before, I don’t have much to go off of by my own experience. Therefore, I use the experience and arguments from others who have hundreds of hours on Mercy instead.

[Arceus-2238]

That’s extremely true, and my opinion on the matter isn’t the opposite of that statement. I am just pointing out that from previous trends from Blizzard seems to prioritize one Hero over others temporarily. I agree with you that they should all be looked at and fixed equally, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Unless you’re talking about reworks, just recently, they managed to release balance changes for almost all of the support roster. It’s definitely doable and certainly doesn’t require a hero to be in an underpowered state.

I didn’t see a question

Mistake on my part. Apologies.

Plus, much of the community believes that she’s balanced, right now, even many Mercy mains

What they believe is not relevant. According to actual data, she is underpowered.

You didn’t, I’M saying that according to past trends, that is what is likely to happen if they were to focus on fixing Mercy.

Not really, unless you’re talking about reworks.

[ĿȀŖǠǂ1ǾǂƑPŜǃ-2660]

The devs are looking to fix heroes that are unbalanced, not heroes who are just “unfun”. There has to be something more than just “unfun” to risk messing up the balance again with changes.

If Mercy proves to be unerpowered, they may change her again.

[airwalker-11432]

Unless you’re talking about reworks, just recently, they managed to release balance changes for almost all of the support roster. It’s definitely doable and certainly doesn’t require a hero to be in an underpowered state.

Those changes weren’t as large as what would be required to make Mercy balanced and fun, therefore it would need to be a rework yet again. That’s why I said in the previous comment that unless they were several small changes, then they wouldn’t be able to work on everything at once, and the support changes were in fact those small changes.

Mistake on my part. Apologies.

All good, I thought I missed one and didn’t want to leave it unanswered.

What they believe is not relevant. According to actual data, she is underpowered.

Unfortunately, if you’re talking about Overbuff, that data is inaccurate because of private profiles, and Overbuff shows it’s statistics based on public profiles that have already been searched in it’s system. We don’t know to what degree it’s inaccurate, as we don’t know how many people have private profiles, but we can assume it’s a majority of players as private profiles are the default. I hope Blizzard either fixes this or makes their own system like Overbuff so we can see accurate data and statistics. But until then, we can’t really take Overbuff as gospel like we used to.

Not really, unless you’re talking about reworks.

I am talking about reworks, since that is what it would take to fix her into a fun, balanced Hero that we can all enjoy.

[Arceus-2238]

@airwalker-11432

Unfortunately, if you’re talking about Overbuff, that data is inaccurate because of private profiles

Not really. The sample size is still massive plus the data didn’t change significantly after the private profile patch.

@airwalker-11432

Overbuff shows it’s statistics based on public profiles that have already been searched in it’s system

It has the data of anyone with a public profile. All it takes is a quick name search.

@airwalker-11432

We don’t know to what degree it’s inaccurate, as we don’t know how many people have private profiles, but we can assume it’s a majority of players as private profiles are the default.

That didn’t change the data significantly when the patch went live so I don’t think that’s an issue. Also, the sample size is still big enough.

Here’s a better post:

@Agnostika-1802

This post was conceived as a companion piece for evaluating my previous post (A month of Mercy nerf in numbers). Other than that, it’s not really going to be about Mercy (though I use her to work out examples). It’s about everyone’s other favorite subject - math. More specifically, I want to address the question: how much trust should we place in Overbuff statistics?

I’ve seen a lot of people claim that Overbuff’s numbers are meaningless due to private profiles (or due to the fact that even before private profiles Overbuff only received statistics from a subset of the player base). This claim is false. You absolutely can make very good claims about a large data set by sampling a large piece of it at random.

Here’s an example. A very big bag is full of blue tokens and red tokens. The bag is shaken thoroughly to mix up the tokens. Then you spill 100,000 token on the floor. Of these, 60,000 are blue and 40,000 are red. The remaining tokens stay in the bag (in the Overwatch context, these are the “private” tokens). What percent of the tokens in the bag are blue?

You can’t know for sure without looking at every single token. What you can do is make claims, and then give probabilities that they’re true. The bag should contain about 60% blue tokens and 40% red tokens. If you claim that the bag has exactly 60% blue tokens, then you are probably wrong. If you claim that the bag has somewhere between 59%-61% blue tokens then you are almost surely right (with a probability that can be calculated and shown to be very very close to 100%). The more tokens you draw from the bag, the closer the percentage should be to the actual percentage in the whole bag. In math, we call this the law of large numbers.

You end up replacing a certain claim (exactly 60%) with a more nuanced one, together with a measure of how sure you are about it. This shouldn’t worry you. Your entire life is lived like this. For instance, your brain processes information from your eyes at a certain frame rate, and your eyes themselves have many missing pixels (so there are “private” pixels and “private” moments in time). Everything you see at all times is based off of probability. That’s the way almost all of human experience works.

The situation in Overwatch is almost identical, except we’re not sampling entirely at random. For instance, we’re only sampling people with public profiles. The good news is that there’s excellent reason (supported by data analysis) to believe that private profiles aren’t correlated with, say, skill at playing Roadhog. So the conclusions still hold.

So, now on to the main question that I wanted to discuss. How much should you trust Overbuff data? Like in the bag of tokens example, it really depends on how many games Overbuff records. If you drew 2 tokens out of the bag, your conclusions would be off. If you drew a trillion, they would be really good. So, how many games does Overbuff record?

We can’t know exactly without someone from Overbuff chiming in, but we can get a very good estimate. The thing that comes into play here, and will be important for the discussion later on, is a beautiful theorem called the central limit theorem. I won’t state the theorem itself, since it’s a bit too technical for a forum post, but it deals exactly with the kind of situation we have here - repeating a random event over and over again and trying to understand its averages. The central limit theorem is the source of the bell curves that you might have seen pop up in all kinds of aspects of your life.

Suppose you record N games in which Mercy was played (I told you there would be a little bit of Mercy here). Suppose that Mercy is balanced such that she should win about b% of the time (and b% is pretty close to 50% so the standard deviation for one Mercy game is close to 1/2), but that in those games she won about a%. How far apart can we reasonably expect a% and b% to be? One thing that the central limit theorem (and its companion, the Berry-Esseen theorem) says is that you should expect about 66% percent chance for a% and b% to be within about 100/2 sqrt(N)% of each other (i.e within one standard deviation).

So I looked at the time period between late June (when private profiles were introduced) and early August (when the support balance patch came in) and found several characters whose pick rates were stable (Mercy was one of them). For each day, I found out how far the win rates for that day were from the average win rate during that time period. Then I found the percentage that 66% of the results were smaller than and solved for N.

Now, this is only an estimation but the upshot of it is that Overbuff
records around 80,000 games a day. Using Blizzard’s statistics about player distribution (yes, I know that player distribution isn’t the same as the distribution of the number of games per day, but they’re close) we get about: 6,400 games in Bronze, 16,800 in silver, 25,600 in gold, 20,000 in platinum, 8,000 in diamond, 2,400 in masters, and 800 in gm every day.

Now back to the central limit theorem. Say we are trying to understand Mercy’s win rates in all ranks. Mercy’s pick rate in all ranks is currently 7.32% so she appears in 7.32% * 6 * 80,000 = 35,136 games. The central limit theorem tells us that we have about a 66% confidence that her average is within one standard deviation of the actual average. This means that we have a 66% level of confidence that the average in overbuff is at most 0.26% away from the actual average. It also gives about a 90% confidence that the average is at most 0.52% away. That’s about the level of trust we should have for a daily win rate in all ranks in Overbuff.

In diamond for instance with a pick rate of about 4%, we get a 66% chance that her daily averages are within 1.14% of the correct average and a 90% confidence that they’re within 2.28%. That’s not amazing. But, we can improve it by quite a bit. The first thing we can do is to limit the direction - we have a 84% confidence that the correct average is not MORE than 1.14% above the overbuff average for that day (in this case I don’t really care about it being less) and a 98% chance that the correct average is not more than 2.28% from the Overwatch average.

Better, but still not great. So, what do we do? We take more games. We calculate the average win rate over a whole week (if you want to be accurate, you should weight each day by the pick rate). This ends up being 7 times as many games so the accuracy improves. When you do this, you get a 84% confidence that the actual average is not more than about 0.43% from the Overbuff weekly average in diamond, and a 98% confidence that it’s not more than 0.86% more than it. And if this accuracy isn’t enough, you can average over a whole month. This will give you an 84% confidence that you’re not more than 0.2% too low, and a 98% confidence that you’re not more than 0.4% too low. Not bad. In all ranks, the monthly average has about a 84% chance of not being more than 0.048% too low, and a 98% of not being more than 0.096% too low.

In Masters and gm, you really shouldn’t be paying attention at all to daily numbers - only to weekly and monthly averages. Especially for characters with low pick rates. Mercy’s pick rate in gm is about 2%. That means it only measures about 96 Mercy games a day. That means that you only have a 66% confidence to be within 5.1% of the correct number (or a 84% chance to not be more than 5.1% too low). That’s really bad. However, if you average over a week then you are 84% confidence you’re not more than 1.9% too low, and if you average over a month then you’re 84% confident you’re not more than 0.93% too low. Similarly, in Masters if you average over a month you’re 84% confident that you’re not more than 0.53% too low. Note: you have to be careful when averaging over a month. The days with higher pick rates should count more than the days with lower pick rates because they represent more games. And if this level of confidence isn’t enough? Wait another month and average. This will divide your 84% and 98% confidence numbers by about 2.

The numbers given here are just guidelines. They’re based off of estimates and approximations. But the math behind them is very real. They’re good estimates and guidelines. There are other places to go from here that can increase the confidence levels even further. For instance, if the character you’re interested in spends more day below a certain number than above it, that increases your confidence that the number is low. Or, If the character you’re interested in spends most of their days very close to a certain number, that increases the likelihood that this number is close to the correct average.

I hope this helps people interpret data in future discussions (and not only Mercy based ones).

Note: Special thanks to Helel for pointing out some calculational errors. The numbers are now corrected.

[airwalker-11432]

Can I get a TL;DR on that? I’m at work and don’t have time to read it all at once.

[Arceus-2238]

Umm. All of it is important. I’d suggest just reading it when you have the time to.

[airwalker-11432]

Alright, I’ll have to read it once I get off.

[Aulus-1929]

Lol she plays exactly as she did before except now has more use of GA, the only fun ability in her kit.

People misunderstand the “fun” argument from long-time Mercy mains a lot. It has nothing to do with how well her numbers look or how many abilities she has on paper, but about her ability to make a game-changing difference in a clutch moment.

She had this with mass rez, and no longer can have that kind of impact with Valkyrie because her power has shifted massively from her ultimate to her reliable kit. She just keeps plodding along at 50-60 HPS, rezzing only when she won’t get killed for it, and that’s it. Her team’s getting destroyed? She’s the only support with no means to at least try to save the day. The only unique ability she has in that situation is having the best view of her team losing from spectator mode.