Forums don’t understand that a balanced game is healthier for a game in the long run. Thanks for taking one for the team. though. You’re brave OP.
There’s a second Sombra one; after months of being terrible on the ladder (after her infinite stealth change), the devs revealed they had some changes in the works for her; after pickrates in Contenders where she was ran in some team comps, which failed more often than not, she still remains a bad hero. Pro pickrates and tactics didn’t translate into what the majority of people play, and Sombra got shafted out of what could have been a buff because pro players decided to try her, despite it not working. 6 months later, she’s back where she was before Contenders.
I think pro players also had a hand in the last round of Doomfist and Brig nerfs; not the initial range loss and Uppercut CC decrease, but the ult size and additional seismic slam CC change. I think it was Seagull who made a video on hating CC in the game and the PTR updated 3 days later in ways cutting down on CC? There’s nothing solid there though.
Well… Originally you could clip the Mercy down when she flew in for large rezzes. Then their team would rez, but they’d be down a super powerful healer. This led to it resulting in rolls and stuff more often in mid tiers of play. In lower tiers the big rezzes were more common, and Mercy and her mass rez mechanic was always a thing on console because she was like always strong.
As you climbed up in tiers, Mass Rez was restricted more and more, you couldn’t get away with 3 man+ rezzes without getting punished hard. You could tempo rez 2-3 from time to time. And at very high levels you just popped Mass Rez for a singular Rez on your Pharah that got shot down.
Then came the invuln. That made hide and rez pop off, cuz now if you were getting clipped down on your entry you just pop Q under pressure and now everyones invuln.
Mass Rez was not a “for the pros” thing. It was removing a problematic mechanic. One that plagued mid tiers more than anything else. “Pros” in tournaments did not ever deal with a hide and rez type situation. You can’t do that in organized settings. Thus why so many defenses of it center around “the enemy team just needed to be better.”
It wasn’t like no one was talking about it when those changes went through. There was a LOT of people like “yo wtf” when it came to Sombras hack. She was absolutely broken when she dropped with her buffed hack. Yeah, their fix just broke her differently. It seems LOS checks are finicky af in this game engine.
Nah it was a LOT of people. I remember discussing all this stuff when it first went live. This is when I learned to 360 spin and spray as Tracer every time I heard the hack noise instead of trying to recall or blink. Then they threw that 2s cd when interrupted by damage thing or whatever. LUL. 
Again, it’s much more than “the pros!!!”
It was never problematic. It was annoying, sure, but it was counterable and exploitable. It was a streamer who complained about it first, and his fans agreed with him, but it was never a problem before that streamer complained.
She wasn’t super broken, like Ironclad Bastion where he could live through ultimates. As a matter of fact, her pickrate was dropping in the week leading up to the hotfix change. But even though people were saying “Yo wtf” when it came to Sombra, it wasn’t a gamebreaking change. It could have waited for the next patch, much like Brig waited for her next patch to go from 5 seconds on stun to 6, despite her stun having a stronger impact than Hack has ever had.
I believe Danteh even said in an interview that it was the pro players who told Blizzard that they didn’t want to face it in Stage 3, that the hotfix was their doing.
And how often does Blizzard actually listen to the forums? How long did it take to get Reinhardt’s bugs addressed, or Doomfist’s, or Sombras, or to acknowledge the poor state Roadhog and Ana were in, or to even look at Bastion or Sym. There’s over a hundred thousand posts complaining about Mercy being boring that stretch back a year and a half that were unread before the devs hid their profiles.
The devs have told us that the pros have their ear, that members of their staff are in discord servers with pro players and streamers, something that we the community don’t have. The game could have lasted another 2 weeks for the next PTR patch to go live with a fix to Sombra that was properly tested (note how long the game went with Mercy being as strong as she was), but it woudl have been too late for the pros who’d be playing in a game where Sombra was viable. That’s a decision that we as a community can’t have Blizzard make, but pro players have.
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It was always problematic. From a fundamental game design perspective. Resurrection of players in a 1:1-5 mechanic in a 6v6 objective based game is a problematic mechanic. It teeters on OP and uselessness, like little middle ground. Players having in the game a mechanic that can, in a sense, reward them for allowing team mate death is contradictory to oh so much. Mass Rez was the ONLY MECHANIC to have that sort of interaction with the game.
Moving to a 1 button press = 1 person rezzed mechanic was more sensible. When you think of any comparable example of rez in a game they are all single target. There is no mass rez.
It was a big issue primarily when it came to tanks and such breaking it with shield but still getting hacked. That had huge consequences to how games could play out. Sure they could have done it all differently, it wasn’t a great solution.
It wasn’t a “the pros” issue, though it definitely impacted that scene the most. Sombra has never performed well on ladder. Hack needs follow up. People don’t coordinate well on ladder.
And Danteh was also one that spoke out against the infinite stealth and all that changes. They still went through. He played Sombra for Shock.
It takes them a long time to address bugs and such, but they have made repeated efforts to do so. Not all of them have worked out.
Addressing the perceived "boring"ness of a hero can be difficult.
They can opt to quickly implement a patch I believe. Takes like majority team agreement or something. I believe. Could be wrong.[
They could’ve put the change on PTR, then we would’ve waited 2 more weeks. That’s about all that’d achieve, just delaying that change going through for 2 weeks. If Sombra’s hack is still suffering LOS issues and such now, do you really think they would have fixed them during the PTR cycle? Nah.
So you balance around pro level.
So you completely ignore low levels.
What’s the difference between your conception of balance and the one actually done ?
But I’m allowed to say my opinions.
But pros can not.
Because I said so.
Yes. But you don’t balance FOR the pro level. I hope you can understand the difference between balancing around high level play and balancing for high level play. Balancing around high level play means watching high level matches without wearing biased goggles and making decisions based on what you see. Balancing FOR high level play means taking the advice given to you by the biased high level players and using that biased advice to determine balance. It’s a huge difference.
They have all the stats and data in OWL, Contenders. I’m pretty sure that’s what they try to do.
You may be right. But that isn’t the perception of much of the community, hence this thread’s existence. So we’re discussing it.
For sure, but to bring some more grist to the mill :
If you look at pros point of view, some are very contradictory. For example, testimony about Doomfist varied a lot. Though it still get nerfed.
Same for Brig, some were saying that she is necessary. Still getting nerfed.
Do they decide one player has a better point of view ? They don’t agree on one form of truth. So I guess Blizzard rely on the one thing that is immutable : data.
I would hope this is the case. But Mass Rez was removed because a streamer brought attention to it. Sombra has been toyed with because the pros made a stink about it. There are cases where one could justifiably say that professional bias has indeed played a part in balance decisions. Whether that’s actually what happened or how much influence it had is something we might be debating till the end of time, but there is enough to assume that something along those lines may have happened. Otherwise this thread and others like it would have never been created in the first place.
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Pros aren’t always right. They’re biased like everyone else, and in fact probably more biased, because their very livelihood relies on the game. I mean if you’re the best Widow player, are you going to want Widow nerfed even if she’s OP or bad for the game? If you’re the best Rein, do you want to have him out of the meta so you have to learn a new hero and possibly lose your spot on the team?
Pros tend to be extremely conservative and defenders of the status quo. It’s why Sombra got a bunch of pros complaining, because she’s new, but hardly any complain about any of the meta heroes.
As for whether they’re ruining the game, it depends. If you think the game is great right now, and don’t want it changed, then yeah, pros are helpful to your position. If you think the game needs larger changes, meta upheavals, etc. then pros are indeed the ones ruining the game. Or if you main Sombra… then pros are definitely ruining the game for you.
Not sure if the ruin the game, but they sure as hell are ruining Sombra.
They were whining last february about her buff because they had no time to adapt, so they went on a personal discord server with the devs and convinced them to “hotfix” her, so she wouldnt be an issue in stage 3 of OWL. Said and done, after 2 weeks of her changes she gets nerfed even skipping the PTR. A feat which is only compared to Bastions Ironclad nerf.
At least Bastion didnt become even more buggy in the process. They messed with her LoS on hack which made it brake regularly for no reason. It would randomly take longer than it should. LoS brakes on nothing or if anyone used a movement ability even though they stayed in LoS and didnt damage her. Essentially rendereing her completely useless for the entire community and a troll pick for months.
After initial testing and pros adapting to her they threw her back to f-tier and was irrelevant in the pro scene as well.
She is still trying to recover from these nerfs to this day. Instead of fixng what is wrong with her and looking at feedback, blizzard decided on random to just increase her duration timers which never were the issue to begin with. All negative feedback aside, they pushed it live anyways.
The changes like expected didnt give them the results they wanted, so they planned to buff for real, but then pros started to use her in contenders, while she was still irrelevant on ladder. This made the devs completely cancel their plans for further buffs and essentially Sombra ends up being a pro scene exclusive hero which is not allowed to be viable for anyone else.
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Pros don’t only care about their mains. Plenty of times they talk about changes for Bastion, Torbjorn and Symmetra to make them more viable at the top tier level. Them talking bout junkrat being weak is what got him buffed initially. These are considered the more casual friendly heroes btw.
The issue stems from the way the developers choose to implement changes. They never follow word for word what pros suggest, they don’t really follow any players’ ideas for fixes. They just hear how a vast majority feels some kind of way about a hero and implement what THEY think will make a hero balanced.
That’s the caveat. Their suggestions always tend toward making the character good “at the top level” and ONLY at the top level. We saw the same thing with the Mercy rework: most pros were excited for it due to it finally making Mercy “require skill”. Anybody else remember that?
This community has a habit of demonizing accessibility in favor of arbitrary “skill” requirements.
You know that Blizzard FORCED OW to become an e-sport and that it couldn’t grow naturally like every other big e-sport?
Sure you are right, “pros” aren’t the ultimate evil that will ruin OW, thats the part of Blizzard, there poor community work and balancing.
But back to topic.
Blizzard choose who they want to play OW as a “pro.” All the “pros” get paid by Blizzard and play for a team where Blizzard hold all rights on. So as an grow up human, you should ask yourself than, if the opinion from those “pros” may or may not be bought too. And if this opinion should be a part of the casual OW gameplay.
My main complain about what you wrote is that OW is an e-sport, where I strongly disagree with you. For a real e-sport you would need way better balancing and even more community work than you have at the moment. Every patch that should fix something just break a part of the game balance where Blizzard need more than 6 month to fix it. If they do it.
Another “prove” is that they only played the OWL last year for mabye 2-3 month, where other REAL e-sports are played around the year. Where you see improvment etc. OWL missed all that. And wouldn’t have Blizzard introduced the OWL skins I doubt that there viewercount would be as big as it was.
People who think like that have no idea how pros think.
Seagull gave me bad stock market advice!!! 
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I dont see pros doing what some members of the community like us are doing, making threads like this, trying to fix the game
Most of the pros are just as bias as the other community members, and knowing how to play the game does not make you good at knowing how to balance it,
The mercy situation is one example, thry got her reworked, now they said ults decide the battle, well guess whos ult was made to stop ult spam?
#deletebrig movement was started by one of the PROS i think, and even then a lot joined, did i mention their trying to nerf brig again? Despite her beeing the LEAST PICKED support
I dont see the PROS talking about the problems with Sym and torb rework, i dont see them trying to buff bastion, all they shout when it comes to him is rewoooork, and seeing how the last reworks were mde we all know how that will end
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