Targetting the meta is just creating wild balance swings without resolving the problem it sets out to solve. We’ve had an entire year of doubleshield. A year of wasted time as instead of targetting the shield tanks and making them offtanks, they should have raised offtanks to the level of maintanks. The solution they chose, making shield tanks into offtanks, can have no other result but more doubleshield, by definition.
Experiment the 321 changes for dva and hog in 2-2-2. Make all offtanks equally viable to maintanks!
Messing with genji is not going to end doubleshield either. Buff the offtanks and stop putting it off.
Or balance is difficult to achieve in a composition-based team game because of the large number of permutations and the tactics people use to apply them.
No, it’s really not, and declaring that you’re no longer going to take game stability into account in your balance changes is only going to make it worse.
Nerfing D.Va while simultaneously introducing 2-2-2 brought us doubleshield. Buffing d.va is how you destroy doubleshield.
Another take is balance is difficult when you don’t balance. How many ptr patches have people proved something to be unbalanced and busted yet it goes to live and makes it difficult to play the game for 6 months.
Those 321 changes were made because with only 1 tank off-tanks had to be able to defend their team too or they would be useless.
Those changes would obviously need to be toned down in a 222 setting.
Not to say there isn’t an issue, because there is an inherent issue when it comes to what characters the devs decide to ‘balance’ , and how they choose to ‘balance’ heroes. Off tanks do more damage because they lack defensive capability in comparison with main tanks(As you know).
You can’t just
because they don’t need a buff, they need an exchange(I.e. Less damage - More defensive capability).
However making those trade offs to every off-tank changes what it means to play tank. Before you had the option to play tank with high damage but low defensive ability/Tank with medium damage & Medium defence/Tank with medium damage capability but high defensive ability.
Making this change makes the tank heroes far more similar to one another then before. Overwatch is all about diversity in playstyles/abilities regardless of category. The Devs very much see it that way and as such are going to be hesitant to make changes that make the possibilities of playstyles less diverse
I just have a hard time believing everyone in this forum is such a genius in game design that they can work out balance in a game with 32 heroes in teams of 6 across multiple maps with a creative a large player base that tries to game the system.
Especially because “balance” is ultimately subjective as objective as we pretend it is.
youre absolutely right, in that there are a lot of hero combinations and youll always get unforeseen effects.
however, when you have at the very least some balance within each role, it makes it more likely to get a balanced game as a whole. especially with role lock, where all roles are represented equally.
of course you are right, that wont really mean anything for inter-role synergies, like nanoblade. but i think its a good starting point.
You’re right, but yet I also believe some people on these forums do a better job than the current dev team, and I would even be willing to support financially to a degree a replacement (firing and re-hehiring) of the old guard.
Here’s just one piece of evidence that conveys the sheer incompetence of current balance: Ult charge value gets overlooked almost every. Single. Time. One of the big issues with the game currently is Genji’s ult charge, and before that it was Ashe’s ult charge after her adjustments, and so on and so on. It’s clear that they hardly even play test their own game or simply don’t know how to if they are consistently missing this, like adjusting a heroes damage numbers somehow isn’t going to obviously affect the rate they get their ult in the devs minds.
The workshop crew tend to be a really reasonable bunch and also come up with really good ideas for balance.
The problem is you and the other people on this fourm thinking its possible to have a balanced game.
It is literally impossible to have a balanced game.
There will always be some type of strategy or meta.
Look at all the other competitive games. Even LOL which has been around for like 10 years and by far the biggest esports game of all time and have hundreds of playerbale characters in their game. And they still have metas and best picks.
The only thing you can do, which is what other games do. Is have massive game changing patches every so often. And this is what the devs said they were going to do. Before the whole lockdown thing happened. I’m really hoping they get back to work and make these bigger changes as they said they would.
It’s so much easier to comment and criticize than to make it work in practice. Commenting on forums with a couple of changes (many of which I have agreed on) are suggestions.
I am certain the work of these guys is far more arduous than it looks from the outside as most jobs are. My guess is that the don’t do the job because they can’t do the job. I’m sure they can learn but it normally takes 4 years to be competent at something (and even then, mistakes will always be made because we are human).
I agree on the comment above mine - since balance is subjective, there is no balance.
This is why the game is dying. I sincerely think this is what the devs believe. It’s not true, it’s an excuse for allowing the game to be brokenly imbalanced for an entire year or more. Because if balance is an illusion, then whether it’s a year of doubleshield or a year of rein zarya, there’s no difference.
Except it’s obviously nonsense. Balance is absolutely necessary, it’s not an anything goes kind of world. The reason that people are ok with rein zarya but not doubleshield? Because in the real world, it matters that double barrier is utterly broken OP. And when it’s rein zar you can play other things against it.
The smart bums who keep repeating “balance is fake, impossible, meta will alwYs exist, durr I’m so smart” think they’re profound. They’re not. Balance within reasonable limits doesn’t mean it’s possible to not have a meta, that’s a strawman. Balance means the meta is not exclusive. It’s still reasonably strong to play other comps than the meta comp.
No tank meta has ever been as restrictive as doubleshield is. No tank meta has ever rendered so many tanks 100% unplayable. You used to be able to be the stubborn tank main and play what you want and still have fun and even win even if you’re not playing meta. This is just not the case anymore and people excusing the garbage state of this game with “BaLaNcE iS An IlLuSiOn” are not helping.
Balance is objectively, scientifically measurable with the statistical measures of “average damage blocked” and “average damage done” per game, as well as kill death ratio, etc. They’ve known dva is dead for a year. They’ve known that the offtanks need to perform better to be played. The numbers don’t lie.
Fix the game, stop pretending that it’s naive to seek fixes.
This is not to say that the game shouldn’t be re-balanced but the idea that the devs are missing this perfect state of equilibrium that will make every happy is unfeasible.
Of course, I love referring to stats in my arguments but people come back to it ‘feels’ off. That is subjective and in design, whether we like it or not, it’s valid.
Example, statistically Doomfist is the most killed hero and does the least damage for all heroes other than healers and Widow AND has the lowest (or close to lowest KD. Statistically, this should mean some serious buffs but people complain he is broken, dominates every game and needs nerfs. Those that don’t ignore the statistics say he feels bad to be killed by. I’m a Doomfist main but I understand that.
So in conclusion, I believe we should try to rebalance the game as often as possible to (which I think is happening - whether the result is unanimously accepted as wonderful or not) to:
A: make as many heroes viable as possible
B: keep the meta fresh and interesting
I do not think we should expect perfection and I don’t think some dude walking off the street can do a better job because they posted that Ashe’s dynamite should do max 100 damage and they got 56 heart for it.
This will always be the case until Blizzard accept that there are some very popular heroes that simply need to be given nerfs as their very presence on the field necessitates double shields.
Currently nerfing shields actually exacerbates the problem. Stop being scared to properly nerf clearly problematic heroes. Nerf them, buff Dva/Hog, revert main tanks and then take a look at Sigmas shield and how that plays into the problem.
3-2-1 hog needed to come to live forever ago. Aoe damage reduction during take a breather for close by teammates, reduce his base damage by 10%, add a shield buster passive for bonus damage against barriers. Increase the cool down on breather to 10 or 12 seconds so it’s not as oppressive and we turn hog into more of a tank than a fat dps.
yes of course.
BUT the meta should not be so strict that even low ranks will have an extreme advantage just by picking the “meta heroes”.
meta should only matter in high ranks, where even small differences mean win or loss. when a character/strategy becomes must pick even in lower ranks, thats problematic.
And also, Overwatch used to have metas that did not 100% lock out all other strategies and make every other tank comp literally unplayable. Just because one is strongest doesn’t mean you can’t play the others. This is not true today. It’s doublebarrier in every single game. OWL? Doubleshield every game. Streamers? Doubleshield every single game. Plat comp? Doubleshield every single game.
It’s a garbage balance state and the excuse of “there will always be a meta” is just stupid.
Yup!
“there will always be a meta” is just a fact. a truth.
it is not an excuse for not even trying to balance the game.
that would be like saying: “there will always be people doing crimes, why should we even have laws?”
we always have to try to mitigate and limit the meta, so that it only applies to the smallest possible subgroup of high skill players.
the more varied the game becomes, the more people will play it, and the longer it will thrive.
Because they don’t use the PTR to balance, they use it for bug fixes, that’s it. They have too much pride to use the players and things like PTR to test run things. God forbid they ever have to revert something. They would rather double down on a bad patch instead of saying “hey, we got it wrong, but we’re trying” and revert something.
Once it hits PTR it goes in almost 99% of the time.
The game was EXTREMELY balanced at some point, but they decided to sacrifice balance and entire classes to LCS watchability and the assassin/ADC player fantasy/arms race. The game’s balance and sheer lack of care for almost entire classes like mages and tanks has destroyed the game for many - the main reason why it isnt a dying game its because its a free game and very easy to start and go back to.
Which is LITERALLY what OVW is doing right now as a shareholder appeasing ploy. Buff Genji, nerf his counters, hope the stars align and the alleged golden era of OWL watchability comes back and they make it back to twitch top 10 games or something.
Admittedly, the reason they dont its because the PTR population is a small fraction of that the actual game, balance testing is not very valid when you have a small sample of what you should be testing for.