Pharah was rarely good in top 500 pro play, and if anything was someone that acted more like a counter to pick to specific subsections of the player base. Such as to play around doom in 5v5, or to avoid interacting with most tanks in general outside of their barriers.
Right now, she is more or less just sky tracer.
And that is a solid playstyle to have.
Well also, outside of YSNA. (Who has their own issues with public perception issues).
Do the devs see any meaningful social media backlash to the changes, from high tier influencers?
Now add in how other influencers either like playing change, or enjoy not having the character be so frustrating.
Realistically Top500 doesnât really matter, at all, unless itâs a social media issue. Since 0.1% of the player population doesnât meaningfully affect playerbase growth or retention rates. So if they lose 0.01% of players over this. Why care? If they gain significantly more than that.
But people got too entitled to the idea that Bobby Kotickâs hard pandering to OWL, and the ladder experience of OWL players, would continue after both Kotick and OWL are gone.
Blizzard Accountants and Microsoft Shareholders donât care about how good a player is at clicking heads in a videogame. They care about how many players and how many dollars it generates on a Quarterly basis.
So if your opinion is the opposite of âMore Playersâ or âMore Dollarsâ, then the devs could probably care less.
While I understand the sentiment in the rest of your post, this is a bit of a stretch. Kotick only cared about money, and generally sought to tank Overwatch when his OWL experiment fell flat on its face. Thereâs no connection between seeking revenue from the OWL and balance changes (except maybe dive??). That being said, itâs very common for game developers to seek insight from gameplay by people that are the most experienced which will pretty much always be high echelon players. However, if youâre implying that the advice given by those players is exclusively accepted thatâs inaccurate; it never works that way, and is used primarily to probe for edge cases in a new implementation because competitively minded players are going to be the best testers. Given youâve made the mod you referenced, youâre familiar with the intended use case vs the actual use case argument devs have to face.
Yes and No, thatâs were the game will break in odd ways. And create the âperceived metaâ, which will be commonly be mimicked in lower tiers of play.
Itâs part of the reason why you will have say so many Anaâs when she is so easy to punish and mess up with her winconditions.
Is because she is deemed a meta threat in tiers she actually has a solid advantage against other players.
Best way to fix or change that is by making small adjustments around those higher ends of play, that see little to no effect on the lower ranks.
So you think itâs a âcoincidenceâ, that for 3 years starting immediately after Kotick took control, that the meta just happened to be slower more sedintary compositions that nearly the entire time that Kotick was in charge.
And how they constantly struggled with camera angles for eSports viewing, even going so far as to make that premium option to buy the ability through Amazon to do your own camera angles.
And that the OWL teams and their wealthy owners had no influence on balance.
Despite OW2 PVP Beta announcement happening immediately after all the OWL teams met in a group conference with Blizzard upper management. So that there was an OW2 patch ready to go for OWL 2022.
And I clearly remember that, since I jumped on that rumor before that meeting, and posted this 2 weeks before the meeting.
[OW2] Balance Design Blueprint
I donât think thereâs a coincidence, I just think that people didnât enjoy goats, and didnât enjoy how oppressive dive was. People liked watching it, so if a fast-paced meta boosted viewership and Kotick had any influence it wouldâve stayed around. Point being, the meta wouldnât have become double barrier or whatever it was by OW1 end; I think that was a consequence of design oversight and lack of balancing changes more than anything.
After OWL started to flop Kotick wanted to tank the whole game, considering that the last remaining old guard were a part of âteam 4â. Once Kaplan left this game took a drastic turn for the worst.
I donât like Kotick, and Iâve said a lot of hate-filled things about him behind closed doors that I wonât repeat here, but I doubt he had any hand in tweaking hero abilities. What he did was gut the team down to inexperienced interns, low budget, and MBA managers with as much software experience as Word and Excel will allow them to have. I still feel this way about the team, and I donât think Microsoftâs acquisition will do anything to improve Blizzard or Overwatch in a meaningful fashipn within the next 3 years.
Well I might as well post an update after trying to get used to new pharah. Some good some bad.
Conclusion: Devs need to work on making the fuel limitation feel natural because standing on the ground waiting for jump jet to come back for 14 sec, using it and having to immediately drop for some reason or another or because you hit a tiny lamp post or something, then having to wait another 14 sec feels really⌠really REALLY stupid. Otherwise, the changes arenât bad⌠just different.
weâll find out tuesday if she is in the top 500. maybe, i cant remember is she was before except for that YMCA (https://youtu.be/CS9OO0S5w2k?si=Y6hlJ74pI71BuT8A) guy. i am curious hehâŚ
personally⌠i kinda love the rework but i have never been a hardcore pharah main but i LOVE the faster rockets and i am playing her how i use to play her never really flew in the sky anyways. i had some pretty good games but yea lol im just some average noob
Itâs not about people not being able to hit Pharah, itâs the lack of interaction for non hitscan heroes
She forced hitscan pick(s), and the problem was exacerbated with a Mercy. Now youâre not forced to swap off projectiles the second the Pharah abusers inevitably swap when you donât have a hitscan
In losing her infinite flight, she gained more horizontal mobility, faster rockets, more rocket jumping potential and easier to land projectiles
Typically a player isnât forced to swap to something to deal with another player doing well. There are two strategies
When a player tries to hard counter itâs a solo win mentality.
This one player, theyâre the source of our problems. Queue players swapping to Bastion for Reinhardt, Reaper for Roadhog.
The lack of interaction statement would hold water if it wasnât completely possible and overwhelmingly easy to simply mitigate the hero instead of actively trying to go out of oneâs way to simulate a clay pigeon game.
Point being, couldnât this argument be made for all picks centered around debuffs being tanked by the existence of Kirikoâs bath water? What about anti-heal eliminating all interactivity from Mercy?
Itâs ambiguous at best. A better DPS will always facilitate a swap from the team theyâre against, regardless of what theyâve picked, but generally isnât a hard requirement if that player is already doing well with what they have. The game isnât designed to be played with every match being vanilla Reinhardt/Soldier. Thereâs CS:GO if someone is looking for that level of predictability.