Can you in this case can explain to me how does a game like Team Fortress 2 gets balanced?
Teamwork there is as important as here with the addition that with good enough skills a single team member can turn the tide of the match.
They dont have any official competitive mode but for years they had these playermade tournaments where only the best TF2 players could survive and win.
The devs there either balance on the majority of the players or they ignore them completely to balance based on the idea on what a char is supposed to do.
If you balance around gm only you basically create monsters like reaper in lower elo and sombra will get a nerf which will be a death sentence for her in sub plat games where she is still till this day dead last in win rate.
You can balance reaper and sombra for the entire ladder.
Lower the targets hack duration to 4 seconds for example in GM. Cant do it in gold cause nothing will die to how slow damage is down there in comparison.
With reaper you can run a 40-50 percent leach in GM to help his survivability there but lower it to say 20 in gold where he wont be an invulnerable god without an Ana nade.
You just made the game better for both heroes for both brackets without destroying lower and higher elo.
Why are people failing to understand the point hereâŚ
itâs not a ONE HERO game.
Donât complain Sombra needs a buff in one rank because OTHER people donât know how to play the game properly in lower ranks and therefore Sombra is weakâŚ
Just as the feeling that Reaper is OP, because none of your team actually deal with him and just play FFA in a 6v6
There is a CORRECT way to play the game. Not just one hero, but the game as 6 people.
This game is notâŚI repeat NOT a shooter.
Itâs something far more complex. and it requires a pretty deep (even if subconscious) understanding of the game.
I am not going to defend the game into the ground and say it feels completely balanced, because it doesnât. Itâs nowhere near as unbalanced as people say it is howeverâŚ
I will also say there is a problem for the devs where 90%+ of the player base are going to complain because theyâre not in GM because they donât understand the way the game is to be played to get to that level.
I want to see a group of GMâs complaining about the game before I will take opinions seriously
GM here, only thing i can say is that GOATS is pretty annoying, but it doesnât RUIN ladder. Glad the devs are slightly chipping away at it (taking away a little from discord, a little splash from zarya, bit of speed away from lucio) instead of straight up blowing it up.
WOW okay this single comment proves that you know absolutely nothing about game design.
The game is (and should be) balanced for the higher tiers because they are the only indication of something actually being unbalanced.
For example, reaper is considered overpowered in plat and below. This is not because of his abilities or the skill required to play him, but because in these ranks players generally do not know how or want to counter him. The counter play exists, but is not used by these players because they havenât learned it yet or are simply casual players who are contempt with the rank they are in. Now why would it make sense to then nerf this character that is basically never picked at the higher levels of play solely due to people that donât know enough about the game to counter him?
A competetive game like overwatch is meant to have a learning curve, and the rewarding part of it comes with LEARNING how to IMPROVE. Balance the game only for the inexperienced players, and you take away the entire point of a game like this, while at the same time, ruining the pro scene that blizz and hundreds of thousands of people have invested so much time and money into.
Video games are not sports, and should not be compared to them.
Look, I know you probably wonât believe me here, but as someone who whent to school for game development and has designed games, there is way more to game design than just shoving an idea into the game and hoping it works.
As a designer, you have to consider every POSSIBLE action the player can take, and determine if said action is overpowered, underpowered, too effective for how easy it is, or if it goes against the games core design philosophy. Designers spend all day every day asking themselves and each other these kind of questions, and ultimately they have to make a decision on what should and shouldnât be changed to match the games core design philosophy.
My point here is that game design/balance in competitive games is dictated by what is POSSIBLE with the actions a player can take (abilities), not what is PROBABLE with these actions, AKA the section of players still learning to play the game.
GM/Top500 and pro players are simply from a design standpoint, the most accurate indication of what actions are POSSIBLE or EFFICIENT in completing the objective of the game. They play the game the most and understand it/their role in it better than anyone.
Therefore, if one specific action seems too EFFICIENT at these levels of play, then the design team steps in to bring these POSSIBLE actions back in-line with the games core design philosophy.
Are you really trying to tell us that when Blizzard for example buffed reapers lifesteal to 50% they have actually thinked that this will make him better?
I dont think i have ever read a post here or in gen discussion where they wanted to change anything other than wraith and shadowstep ever.
What about the release state of Brig? Not to hate on her but stunning throught barriers is a pretty bad idea.
We had a bunch of strange design choices what really do feel like they are just randomly adding/modifying stuff just for the sake of it.
I actually believe you so im gonna ask you a question regarding to game balance.
How do you balance a game what does not have a pro scene?
When it comes to balance i mainly think of the other hero shooter what was often said at release to be the game where ow stole the idea for Torb.
Team fortress 2, that game never had an official pro scene/competitive play till 2016 where they released a beta variant of the competitive.
The question is how did they balanced before that? I was playing long enough there to see many new weapons added and many changes rolling out before the competitive appearing and even after it the whole competitive area just died down too much to get actual value out of it soo the devs have to reserve to their own testers and knowledge to generate balance.
I know that by using some pro you get to see the maximum strenght of a hero but you cant expect that the said hero will always be handled with the maximum strenght constantly throught large amounts of people.
Ill rather have middle ground balancing or what he suggested:
Itâs a proâs job to break the game over their knee and exploit every little advantage they can because they get payed for winning their matches.
Panicking strictly over what theyâre doing is just going to ruin the game for the other 99% of players who arenât included in the upper epsilon of the arbitrary ranking system.
If you want the game to be enjoyable to the average player, the average player needs to be taken into account. People really need to stop treating proâs as infallible gods that need to be treated as royalty or something.
Yes, absolutely. You have to balance against players who make the least mistakes and play the heroes correctly.
I dont see a problem with Reaper dominating lower SRs and climbing out, no one stops you from doing the same. It is the same with many other heroes, look up skill floor and ceiling. I started off in bronze and smashed everything with bastion, doesnt work anymore
Its being done now heavily. Look at LFG sometime and laugh at the amount of road to bronze like groups in there. I thionk my record so far was seeing 5⌠so trust me changing hero power levels in lower brackets wont make them sandbag more than they already are.
The game would be better especially in terms of variety if you balanced heroes differently across the ladder.
Bastion in low elo is still a problem for a lot of people as it takes teamwork to kill him
In GM they could just make his transformations faster for example to help him out there.
A game without a pro or competitive scene is generally balanced toward the goal of making the game âfunâ 100% of the time for everyone. The interpretation âfunâ could mean a lot of different things, it could be that the devs want to make a challenging game, relaxing game, strategical game ect. Every game is different and devs can balance to please whatever they decide their target audience is, it is their game.
Competitive games have to consider a lot more than just âis the game funâ
For competitive games, and especially games designed to be esports balancing for the maximum possible strength of a character is good game design, what you are suggesting is horrible game design.
These kind of games are designed towards a target audience of COMPETITIVE players, players who want to improve and get better at the game. Designing balance changes against any level of player other than the highest directly destroys the games competitive nature.
A certain character being good at lower ranks due to people there not knowing how to counter said character does not in any way make that character OBJECTIVELY overpowered.
Brig is a prime example of the devs balancing the game for the lower tiers, they tried to make a hero that is good, but also very easy to learn and play. THIS is a perfect example of bad game design on their part, they tried to please everyone and what they got was a single team comp so strong that it was used about 95% of the time in higher elo games on EVERY map.
The entire GOATS meta and brig being so powerful at launch was caused by the devs balancing the game for lower rank players. You call her a âbad ideaâ but then say that you want them to go back to balancing the game for these players? I know you think that balancing for lower tier players will help the game, but in reality this kind of balancing is how the game got to its current state.
So please donât push the devs to go back to this when they are FINALLY starting to balance the game the way it should have been balanced for the past year.
The thing with brig is that if she would have been released without her shield with a projectile gun only keeping the cc ability, quick repair and the heal aura it would have still resulted in the goats meta, something what due to the skill investment could have been potentially worse than the current one.
The main problem with brig at low ranks was the same as what people had with roadhog, she just gone up to you whip here, stun, whip there, you are dead. At higher ranks her quick burst heal and the aoe heal along with her ult resulted in an undying comp.
If blizzard at the start would have removed the repair pack, im sure the goats meta would have never came to live.
Im sorry im gonna react to the rest when i get to some stable wifi.
Thatâs why I think they should just Nerf everything, especially ultimates. The higher you go the lower the TTK is which means a reaper can no longer walk 5 seconds into a tank face cause he would be properly peeled by his fellow DPS, which doesnât happen in the lowest elos. For things to be balanced they should be as much similar in mechanics as possible, like make reapers guns less of a spray and pray cannons, make them harder to aim but better consistent damage and you will solve the issue for both sides.
They have to take it all into account, and given the right abilities on a hero, they can.
If they ignore the lower ranks, then it stops being fun down there, and they donât keep new players.
If they ignore the higher ranks then they get the âone meta to rule them allâ and it stops being fun at the higher ranks, and⌠the people who are not playing those heroes in the lower ranks get unhappy, because they would like to be able to keep playing their heroes as they climb.
But, heroes have abilities which are used better or worse at different ranks.
Lets take Torb.
The turret is very strong at lower ranks. Unlike most of the people down there, it doesnât miss.
Making the turret stronger or weaker effects the lower ranks more than the upper ranks.
His gun is used to more effect as you go up in ranks.
Making his gun stronger or weaker effects the upper ranks more than the lower ranks.
This gives them the ability to make a hero stronger or weaker at different ranks, which lets them balance across more than one rank at once.
