I agree w/ OP but this makes perfect sense too & it’s a common Theme w/ Blizzard to generate issues like coming forth telling us you are Renaming McCree 6mths in advance instead of just DOING IT w/o the Drama. 
- Half of the panel wasn’t even trying to balance the game. They were taking it as a funny joke
- Over half the panel weren’t even pros
- The half that wasn’t pros had more power than the actual pros, including the gold/silver players
- The pros were poorly picked (2 hitscan DPS and 1 tank, really?)
And with that aside, I doubt it’s about feedback. It’s a showcase; they are showing how the game will look at its skill ceiling. Closed betas have existed before. And I’m glad pros are finally getting to play it. They’re the ones who will be practicing on OW2 for next season, so they could at least get a feel for what its like.
And besides, 80% of pros don’t even care about balance. A lot of them just don’t care and adapt unless it’s borderline unacceptable balance. And it’s not like the forums/community on average are any better at balancing
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Because OWL viewers. That’s about it. Knowing that the OWL is gonna be playing on a build of OW2 (by April) will bring a lot of attention to it. Not only will there be feedback from the players, but also Youtubers and stuff will probably watch the matches to make videos about how OW2 plays and what changes and what not.
Overall this can create hype for OW2 while bringing eyes to the OWL.
Honestly, I think this is why heroes like Tracer never fall out of meta or when they do they’re still viable.
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they weren’t listening to the community when they were testing brig out, it doesn’t even matter
It just a showcase, to keep players engaged through the fiasco of workforce exploitation, shredded documents, and protests of designers. It’s all about money, and with the huge decrease in population, now they fear losing sales and hype regarding Overwatch 2.
I protest. I will not buy Overwatch 2 because I hate companies who do workforce exploitation.
Besides the balance of this game was destroyed by Overwatch League. They sucked the fun out of this game with their balance and recommendations. Let them have Overwatch 2 all for themselves anyway, and hopefully get paid for playing it.
Hey folks,
Since we’re talking about feedback, and why we would have OWL pros playing the game, this is an area where I can speak as a CM first, rather than as a proxy for Team 4.
Every designer I’ve worked with has understood that any player feedback (whether Bronze, Grand Master, or professional) is laced with personal biases and assumptions. Game designers are like artists in many ways: both disciplines take in feedback from many diverse sources, and apply that feedback with a central vision guiding their decision making.
A large part of what community managers do is to try to remove the personal biases from player feedback, and then communicate what’s the root cause of player friction to designers. The designers have an understanding of how that feedback fits into the bigger picture, and have analytical tools that they can use to evaluate what’s reported via community sentiment. Most importantly, according to Lead Hero Designer, Geoff Goodman,
Geoff: It’s part of our job to respect the context of the feedback.
Your concerns about player biases are completely understandable. We agree, and it’s something we always account for, even when we’re providing feedback on our internal playtests.
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Andy, on the discussion of feedback. Can you say if it is still the philosophy of the dev team that they take into account these three factors when determine balance changes overall:
- Player feedback across all ranks
- Statistical performance of heroes at pro level and grandmaster play
- Developer team insights
I know this was something former Game Director Jeff Kaplan discussed at length on the old forums. (I really need to finish the old forum archives…)
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But, it has been leaked before that quite a few balance changes are made solely for OWL players. Remember Zen’s right click getting nerfed because of JJonak?
Overwatch is an OWL player’s job. They will do anything it takes to maintain the status quo of what strategies should be meta as they have the most time invested in it.
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I hope however way brigitte will be reworked will reflect this because right now, outside of if the player has reflex memories with her she isn’t exactly at her best state and the last buff she remotely got was reverted insanely quickly.
Difference here is the regular playbase dont have their paychecks on the line.
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It would be nice to know much feedback is weighted. It is frustrating to be a lower ranked player that loves a certain hero (and where metas don’t really exist) and have your favorite nerfed because it was overperforming in OWL/GM. A few of my favorite characters in OW became far more difficult to play, if not unusable due to changes like this.
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Can confirm.
Geoff: Add stats to that list as well (sic; metrics, analytics, etc…)
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Well, my usual concern on this issue, is that I’m completely stumped on how they make Hammond balanced such that
- He’s not godtier overpowered in the top 3% of players, with the lack of CC in the game. (Especially dependant on how harsh this Hack nerf is).
- While also making sure he’s not an automatic defeat within the first 5 seconds of the game for the bottom 95%.
Pros obviously have a good idea how to solve #1. But I can guess that most don’t even comprehend that #2 would be a problem.
Since unlike Healing, or Damage, other teammates aren’t going to be able to supplement a lack of Tanking. Especially since there’s no second tank player to Fill if the tank player picks “the wrong tank.”
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Since 32859987 people are probably going to ask you a question, I just have a quick one for you, are you looking at making balance patches shifted towards fun rather than balance? It’s been nice having a balanced game, but I’d really love it if there were some more fun changes added for specific heroes to lighten up the game a little bit.
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Thank you very much!
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And now I’m hungry for fast food.
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In my personal experience, the answer is “it depends”.
I’ll fall back on what I said about having an understanding of the bigger picture. Because live operations are very dynamic in nature, feedback can be weighted differently in different scenarios.
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Fair enough for me.
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Perhaps wont fully answer the question but i would assume potentially 5-6 new heroes will alone shake up the game quite a bit to begin with.
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I just want to know whether dva is going to get hard nerfed or not yet again into an unplayable state because OWL pros love to play dva and it bleeds into dev balance decisions, where they balance heroes around owl so much that the hero becomes unplayable outside of owl.
Aka, if we stopped balancing around unreasonable pro player gameplay expectations for rest of the game, that would be great.
But seeing as they get to play the game first and give their feedback on it… I don’t have much hopes for that happening.
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