Here’s a response I saw to this on reddit. Had to remove some mean words though
The Dev who posted this thread is the one who designed Sigma, you can understand why he doesn’t believe in power creep.
His logic represents vintage Blizzard, balancing around context-less win rates and aiming to make zero-skill heroes have the same winrate and pickrate as high-skill heroes in the highest skill bracket. The developers can’t sleep soundly at night unless every patch there exists at least 2-3 absolute braindead heroes who are strong enough to onetrick into top 500. Nobody at Blizzard ever stopped to consider whether it’s healthy for a competitive FPS game to have zero-aim, zero-brain heroes like Moira and Brig be tier 1 picks in T500 and pro play.
A good game designer like Icefrog for Dota 2 is continually tweaking heroes to ensure they have a consistent skill-to-reward spectrum. Every hero is designed to be rewarding at both low skill levels and high skill levels, proportional to the input that of the player. Many Overwatch heroes utterly lack that spectrum due to the developers being terrible. They then proceed to brute force these braindead heroes into relevance by buffing their numbers, with the goal of having every hero be at the same power level at professional-level play.
Blizzard’s fundamental approach to balancing is wrong. Let’s say they fully succeed in their balancing philosophy. The heroes in this game are tweaked to the point where Jjonak playing Zen, Jjonak playing Ana, and Jjonak playing Moira have the exact same impact on the game. In this scenario, why would the bottom 99.999% of the playerbase ever play anything except Moira? A top Ana/Zen would be 4.6k MMR, an average Ana/Zen would be 3k MMR, a bad Ana/Zen would be 2k MMR. Meanwhile, a good Moira would be 4.6k MMR, an average Moira would be 4.3k MMR, and a bad Moira would be 4k MMR.
Tiny skill-gap heroes cannot be allowed to be viable at a competitive level. The best solution is to design better heroes. Blizzard is incapable of doing that. The second best solution is to stop buffing stuff like Moira/Brig/Torb/Junkrat/Orisa to the point where they’re viable picks at a pro level. Blizzard is too stubborn to do this, and that is why Overwatch is fizzling out.
I know, right? I am really surprised by how people are treating our first dev post in months. That is absolutely why they do not want to engage with us. They come here to spit facts and everyone is all like, “no u.”
That is not why they rarely balanced the game. They have NEVER done radical balance patches. Even during beta where they write supposedly making sweeping changes. They have largely been satisfied with their game for the longest time.
I can agree with that, their opinions are not objective. Either way, a gold player might believe that Bastion is OP and needs nerfs; that’s mainly because of their rank and lack of solutions to take care of Bastion; as we know, he is far from OP.
Albeit, to be fair, they are nerfing both Hanzo and Baptiste… Prime candidates of power creep. And buffing Dva, a victim of it. Actions speak louder than words if you ask me.
Yeah sure. You know, some heroes get their time in the limelight, then the balance shifts and other heroes get their chance to shine. I don’t have a problem with this kind of balancing as it keeps the game fresh and allows metas to change from time to time. Perfect balance would result in a single dominant meta which gets boring pretty quickly imo.
I think the issue arises because many players are hardstuck one-tricks and don’t want to learn new heroes and playstyles.
I am a “hardstuck” one trick and I do not really have too many issues with the balance myself. I definitely think it could be better… But what can you do?
LMAO, the dev reply is hilarious. Yeah, soldier winrate may not be that bad, but he is VERY situational hero and you should play perfectly on him in order to be good. So yeah, Soldier is only played by players who have an experience on him and aim VERY good.
On the other hand, heroes like Hanzo, Mei and Widow are so good that you can pick them at almost every map and point on attack or defense and be useful. That’s the problem with the heroes like Soldier - they are not bad as a heroes, but picking them is just too situational and risky
what the f?, are you serious? the winrate of soldier on gm is that because 0.40, literally, NONE, is playing him, ask all gm players, wtf is this exactly? reaper, hanzo, mei got STUPIDLY BUFFED some patch ago, mei literally can 2 shot you from her base as soldier, who are you exacntly? the worst developer reponse ever made.
Hero choice bias is a thing that stats cannot reflect, as usual.
I don’t quite think widow instead of doomfist fits into that category of “pick at every map and be useful” situation. But it does have a point as in her consistency in good hands.
Onto the main topic: Support sheer healing power decides if sustain dmg need a buff to outdo enemy healing, which means nerfing support is THE way to nerf power creep becuase it’s the root cause of it.
I absolutely dislike Ana’s kit after 1 year of playing this game because it caused so much trouble, but u can’t argue that she is the pinnacle of support providing more ultility other than healing. And therefore she does not contribute into the problem of negating sustain dmg as much as hero like Moira and Baptiste, both of which have an ability that provides almost nothing else but massive healing.
Im amazed at all the disrespect and lack of self criticism on this thread… so many “i know better because muh feelings” and wannabe analysts… they have literal employees dedicated to analyse stats… they know how to interpret winrates, they are the ones who explained what torb and syms winrate, that a lot of you love to quote, meant…
He comes to participate and expand on the conversation and most of you just angrily respond “I KNOW BETTER!!! SHUT UP!” and straight insult them. Then you cry in a few weeks that they dont participate anymore.
Please reflect on your life and do catharsis somewhere else.
Yeah the balance team is the worst. Why would you not criticize a team that essentially deleted a character by reworking them.
Sym 2.0 and 3.0 are different characters with different kits. The devs didn’t give a crap about the old players at all when they made that rework they just listened to people who complained. Not the people that actually enjoyed the character
Screw the balance team for pulling a stunt like that. They should have some respect for the characters they create
So if Genji and s76 have 60% win rate but are played by 10 players and then you have heroes like Orisa and Sigma with 55% win rate or any other dps and played by 100 people you call that normal and not powercreep ?
No wonder I get 7 minute queue in QUICK PLAY even as duo supports these days.
