So, plenty of people here on the forums tend to give the devs a tonne of flack for their balance choices, which at this point have led to a pretty inflexible meta. I completely understand that they’re trying their absolute best, but I’m wondering if they could possibly learn a thing or two from other games’ balance practices. Thing is, I really don’t play a lot of other games haha
For those of you who play other PvP games, what’s the balance philosophy for those games? How do they compare to Overwatch? What’s something you believe Jeff and his team could take some pointers for? I know we’re not professional game devs, but we do know when balance changes do and don’t work.
And to be clear, I don’t just mean other FPS games! It also includes MOBA’s, fighting games, and even battle royale games!
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Overwatch is very complicated to balance as is has moba abilities but fps weapons. They should put little frequent changes on the ptr and have some teams experiment with them a little to see if they would be good for the game or mix anything up.
Recently they have been putting out ptr changes to live much quicker, so they’re headed in the right direction.
For character ability related balance problems they should look to games that are focused around abilities(don’t play those games so don’t know any specifically) and they should look at modern fps games(R6 siege, halo, ect) if a characters imbalance is due to overly effective weaponry(not needed at the moment as they seem to have gun balance in the bag right now).
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Tf2’s two latest updates, Jungle Inferno and Blue Moon, were both focused on player feedback. All the changes made sense instantly, and together the two updates turned tf2’s torbjorn into a fair and fun class. What I’m trying to say is, the dev team should stop balancing the game for OWL and focus more on player feedback.
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So instead of balancing around top-level play from players who are likely to know the nuances of specific heroes, they should listen to the general playerbase who are likely to be less-skilled and make arguments out of emotion rather than knowledge and experience?
No thanks.
It works for TF2 because those players making the suggestions are composed of a fairly smaller fanbase who have stuck with the game for… what, 10 years or so? (Google says Oct 10, 2017) They’ve stuck with that game for so long they know its ins and outs. I’d trust the OW fanbase if it were another 7-8 years from now and we heard from the people who’ve stuck with it through thick and thin, but with the game being ~2 years old and the playerbase as is? No.
They’re balancing for both.
See : base jumper nerf ,literally no one in the casual community asked for it ,yet it was still nerfed hard because competitive players used to abuse it by spamming it to easily dodge projectiles.
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Kind of. They are balancing around pro play while compromising for lower ranks. That B.A.S.E. jumper nerf is an item that was being abused by pros as you said, but lower ranks weren’t really using it like that so the nerf that happened barely effected them. Balance changes effect high tiers much more than lower tiers.
They don’t really make balance changes that target lower ranks. I’m sure there are some examples but it’s not really something that happens often.
Overwatch being two years old doesn’t change the fact that Brigitte is only balanced in OWL right now. Or the fact that the devs nerfed Sombra without putting the nerfs on the PTR first because pros requested it, and now she’s terrible. Pharmercy is still overpowered on console.
People of all ranks complained about Sombra. I do believe that devs should listen to people of all ranks while being careful on how the balance changes effect those of other ranks as well. It’s a very delicate process that from what I’ve seen Blizzard does not do good with.
However, balance changes do effect higher ranks more so balancing should be more careful around that rank. For example, I didn’t understand how overpowered Metaknight is in Smash Brothers Brawl. Still don’t because I don’t have the game knowledge and skill to abuse the heck out of his mechanics.
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On league of legends, they have a strategy. One big balance patch each month and two weeks later, one small patch to rebalance what the big patch broken.
On overwatch is like: one small balance patch each two months, and if the patch break the balance, maybe we will fix on 3-6 months.
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I’m happy with what they are doing with Hanzo and Brig now. Smaller (but at the same time more frequent) steps are the best way to aim for balance - going for too much at once will certainly break the character.
Yet I see people here on the forums complain that the nerfs on Hanzo and Brigitte being way too small. I guess they want Hanzo to be completely unrelevant yet again and they want to create another Sombra-situation with Brigitte.
“If it’s new and I absolutely can’t be asked to use my brain to learn how to counterplay that new hero, nerf him to the ground until he is worse than literally all of the other heroes” seems to be the consensus of this forum.
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People from all ranks complained about Sombra, but she isn’t a fun hero to get buffed anyway, because stealth and hack. The pros were significantly more vocal than the other players, and Blizzard definitely skipped the PTR for them. If anything, I just want Blizzard to stop listening to OWL players, because the version of overwatch they play is literally and figuratively way different from what everyone else plays.
I like the use of the metric Tonne instead of the imperial Ton.
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Lol yes my family is from the UK so that’s how I learned to spell it growing up 
It’s refreshing to see it.
Awesomenauts’s design philosophy seems to have just continuously nullifying character weaknesses and adding more and more emphasis on debilitating CC effects and flowcharty combos that kill someone in the blink of an eye.
Playing passive and waiting for the enemy to overextend was always viable, but it’s even more recommended now that it’s so easy to be caught and bursted down. One single kill (it’s a 3v3 game) will usually result in one team pushing extremely hard. Lategame is a steep slippery slope where one mistake means the end of everything, and it’s kinda annoying.
Agreed. We aren’t all Masters or GMs: the average SR is 2350, and there are more Bronze players than Master+ players. That’s why the game should be at least reasonably balanced at all levels, including, yes, Bronze, the “ez rank” “nobody cares about”.
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I think the OWL pros should voice their opinion like everybody else but theirs shouldnt outweigh the rest of the community. There are way more casuals than highend pro gamers and they deserve to get treated with same respect balance wise as the upper tiers.
Super Smash Bros. balance… well I think they go with character defining moves and attacks. Since it is a crossover between several franchises every character brings his/her own moves and abilitys. Nerfs usually happen if something is really OP but otherwise they just try to make all the characters fun with good gameplay and thats enough for me.
That’s all well and good but I just meant that I want OWL out of the balance equation.
Balance changes effect high ranks much more than they effect lower ranks. Smash Bros advertises itself as a casual game. What makes that game competitive is community made rules such as no items and some maps being banned.
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OVERWATCH IS FAR FROM BALANCED. So yeah.