I honestly feel like they are struggling. I am not sure what exactly is going on behind the closed doors but my main issue since OW2 was released are things: stale metas and some drastic, big hero changes to heroes that don’t need it.
My main issue is a hero receiving multiple (big) nerfs or buffs at once, without any testing at all, clearly underperforming or dominating after them.
And also stale meta and few same heroes being picked and dominating, without much variety.
I can’t say that i am really happy with how things are. I hate Hanzo not being touched at all for so long, i hate Orisa being picked and counter picked constantly, i hate how they are ignoring Moira being so meh in every way, i hate what they did to Illari and how they sucked out the fun out of her, i hate dealing with new Sombra…
It’s interesting how many people loved the beta, and how many people are dissatisfied now. I wonder if they had kept things in the beta state if people would still be happy with it, or if that would have gotten old.
first impressions are not the same as final impressions…
anyway alec is doing no better or worse than geoff was in all honesty…the balance will always be “off” because everybody has their own warped vision of what balance in this game should look like…and even if it meets some peoples expectations, it will never satisfy everybody’s…
and just to add to it…guess which group of people are the ones that tend to be vocal about it
I find that hard to believe. You can lose people who want it to be a hitscan mobility fest and not impact your player numbers all that much. But if you don’t get and keep new players, you have serious problems.
There is a reason all of the successful overwatch type games balance this way, and the same reason why the ones which did not, no longer exist.
Hero shooters as a Genre are littered with the corpses of the “we should cater to the high skill crowd” designs.
The ones which are left, either pick balancing for casuals, or have heroes which are in practice almost identical, and are not really hero shooters.
I hate them for destroying Sombra. I also think they’re not very good at balancing for the reasons you listed. They want to switch things up every season so it doesn’t feel the same from one to the next but what that means for this balance team is to make some heroes OP to force a meta rather than balancing the crew to allow for more diverse metas. I can’t say anything about them when it comes to tanks and the counter-swap metas that happens there, that’s just the natural consequence of the awful decision to remove a tank so it wouldn’t matter if they had the best balance team in the world because it can’t be properly balanced to remove counter-swapping without destroying everything OW is.
Which is the ONLY successful formula in the hero shooter genre which has worked.
Yes, and the companies which have not learnt this lesson don’t have games now.
Complaining that Blizzard is doing this, is a VERY weird choice.
Literally going down the other path is CRAZY harmful to long term health for the game. As shown by the number of games which tried, and it killed them.
How many clones of Quake champions / lawbreakers / brink / etc / etc / etc
do you need before you realize there isn’t a market for it.
Building games for the group which you will get no money out of is bad for your games health.
The casual player base is literally the only playerbase which actually counts for anything, and if you want your game to be healthy long term, it is the only crowd you 100% have to have on board.
ANY other choice is ruinous.
TF2 was successful, Paladins has been successful, Overwatch has been successful. They all have one thing in common, which the unsuccessful did not do.
You can NOT have a game if you don’t make it work for casuals. Saying “screw them, we only balance for the high end” is a god damn death sentence.
It is like PvP only MMOs, they either move their focus to PvE or they die, and there is nothing outside of that.
The issue with beta was it came after long content drought so everyone will be hyped and they also make exceptions thinking a lot of fixes will happen.
Your the one failing to accept what Ow is… i mean its not like the Owl existed… or that the game was balanced at that level of play and worked well for years.
Along comes overwatch 2. And suddenly every heros masively unbalanced… some of which who were mid teir in ow1 and still are, are suddenly the most broken heros in the game despite having little to no changes…
Blaming format change or aruging its a diffrent game is just s cop-out…
The audience ow2 panders to does not have the right mindset for a game like this, and many of which would rather cry and throw tantrums than adapt to it…
And yet, OW2 gains players, where OW1 only lost them.
There is a reason Blizzard has made this choice.
What do you mean, they have the right mindset for it, you are the one crying and being upset at how the game is balanced. The casuals are playing and having fun.