It’s painfully obvious that you are just selecting heroes to ban to see how other heroes perform in a meta.
I think it’s pretty lame you are using this tactic instead of actually making big balance changes to your game.
You get all my thumbs down votes for being a good game company!
Aren’t we getting balance patches faster than ever before? Not arguing they’re good but I mean it’s not like we’re not getting balance changes.
well the ptr was never really for balance feedback it was for stability testing
its a step up to finally be iterating on players who are at least half motivated
I hope it is exactly what they are doing and applaud them for it.
I was really excited for hero bans, but after they banned Ana and Moira this week, it’s kind of obvious they did it to see what would happen with only Bap and Mercy and Brig main heals. Kind of feels like they’re using competitive as an experiment instead of the actual experimental card. I wish they’d use hero bans to shift the meta, not to remove a large chunk of one role from the game. I liked last week’s bans, it shifted up the meta and made it fresh. This week just removes too many options from one role (Legit banning the only 2 viable main healers).
They better buff Bap and Mercy after this. If they don’t, then I guess they are substituting hero pools for actual balancing. If healers are only gonna be played by banning half of the other healers, then they should be buffed. This week’s bans make me hope that Hero Pools don’t return for Season 22, whereas before I was rather excited for them…
We were. Past tense.
I’ve heard rumours about there being a ptr patch later this week, so I am naively optimistic.
This way you get a ton more players playing the mode. Aside from the Damage players swamping 132, how many are playing experimental modes/ptr?
I mean, wasn’t this somewhat the intent? Wasn’t this even clearly said by Blizzard, that to help with hero pickrates, they’d be using the hero pool system to bring variety?
I thought we were all on the same page when they discussed hero pools, because that was definitely part of the intent. Blizzard knows, and we should know by now too, that perfectly balancing this game so that every hero is equally viable is just not going to happen. It’s virtually impossible to have all these heroes all have viability all at the same time. So to mitigate stale metas from forming and to encourage players to pick different heroes, hero pools was introduced to boost that type of gameplay.
There isn’t some magic buff button that will make all the healers equally good. And there’s no point in even trying. What Blizzard has discovered in the past is that trying to balance heroes and make big changes to them often does equal harm to good, if not worse. Making one hero stronger in order to compete with the others often reveals that the hero was actually fine before, but with the buff, they become too relevant and the rest of the game ends up changing to accomodate. This happens pretty much regardless of who the hero is or what the changes are. This is how metas almost always form, figuring out which heroes are the best together, and then forming the rest of the team comp around them. Buffing off-meta heroes doesn’t make them compete for the slot, it just either makes a balanced hero too strong without actually being relevant in a competitive scene, or they overtake the meta and everything becomes about them.
I think we need to accept that this is honestly one of the better ways of keeping the Overwatch experience fresh and invigorated. If we want to see different matches of heroes, if we want to avoid stale metas without totally flushing the game with every change, then there needs to be some force that compels us to play different heroes. Hero pools does just that. It isn’t a system to just ban out the most overpowered heroes, it’s a system developed to keep week-to-week gameplay exciting and new.
I still applaud Blizzard for at least trying a double-support ban and I think we should see this come up again, honestly. I hear the argument, “They just took out the only two viable healers,” but that really makes me scratch my head. Like… so? It’s not like the other team gets to have viable healers and you don’t – both teams, all players, have to adapt and actually show a range of skill at Overwatch. There are other healers and if they don’t coincide with the meta… damn! Guess everyone needs to learn to not be meta-slaves and actually consider the strengths and weaknesses of heroes rather than just replicating winning trends.
I’d also like to mention that Blizzard already warned us that they would be trying new and different things with the hero pool system while introducing it, so, not sure why everyone is so surprised that they would go on to try something new and different. It really feels like everyone just forgot how Blizzard introduced hero pools with the clear heads-up that it would be a bumpy road while they figure out what works, what doesn’t. Even if they hadn’t said anything, I’d still assume that the process of introducing a new system would still come with some hardships, and that it would be imperfect at first – something most people, I had thought, would come to assume.
And also, Blizzard has been introducing new patches faster, so they have been keeping their word. We just got a big update to several heroes just earlier this week. Did we just forget this too? It’s really starting to feel like willful ignorance for the sake of blasting Blizzard, as if we need to make up stuff to do that.
We had an update litteraly less than a week ago. What the hell more do you want?
for the update to not be on the ptr for a month and forever inbetween patches? when the latest update was is irrelevant.
They said they’d balance quicker and target the meta.
They have failed in doing either of it.
they made so many balance changes and nothing helped… they dont want their game to be balanced…
Patches almost always go and stick to PTR for a few weeks before coming to live, and the reason for that has been because of how consoles handle patches, requiring a significant amount of time for approval processing. Blizzard couldn’t control how quickly something goes from PTR to live. Only recently with the experimental card have they opened up the opportunity to test smaller balance adjustments more quickly.
And just looking at the last patch, which went live earlier this week mind you, we see nerfs to Mei and D.va, two of the most picked and successful heroes this meta, and we see buffs to Soldier, Baptiste, Orisa, Sigma, and Sombra, all of which have been underperforming for some length of time. It’s straight up denial to suggest that they aren’t targeting the meta when they just made changes to key heroes. And this is only one month after the previous patch went live, so we’re averaging at about one patch a month (if we only consider balance changes and not anything else) compared to the previous pace of one patch every three-to-four months.
I do not want changes to Rein, McCree, Lucio, or Ana. But where they at? Heck, even Zarya for ladder?
Mei and Dva are not the meta. 1 second on booster is not targeting the meta, fam.
Well hopefully these new bans highlight how Baptiste is incredibly powerful in a comp that bunkers together.
And utterly garbage when healing a mobile team. At least Ana is a hitscan and she can get away with trying to heal her spergy Genji.
Popular heroes do not require direct changes in order to make them less oppressive or relevant. In this instance, rather than nerf Rein directly, Blizzard instead opts to make other barrier tanks stronger and thus give him competition. Mei getting nerfed in this patch is also an indirect buff to Rein, who is most easily wrecked by Mei, so it can be easily assumed that Blizzard likes Rein’s value where it’s at, but undestands he’s the center of the meta and thus want to give other tanks opportunities to shine. Same can be said about Lucio and Ana – all of these heroes are meta because when tied together, their synergies are very strong, but individually, their power levels are where they should be.
I would have to argue that Mei and D.va are indeed the meta when they have pickrates as high as they do. And whether or not you think a 1 sec nerf to Boosters is impactful or not, it’s still a direct adjustment to a hero with a very high rate of success. So it cannot be said, then, that Blizzard isn’t targeting the meta, when they are in fact making direct changes to the meta heroes in an attempt to influence it.
they are doing it to shake up the meta not see how they do in it…
Rein and Ana are banned… meaning it’s a new meta this week.
this is what we wanted.
The meta will literally be the same once the bans revert, correct? Then the point is moot.
Not if Blizzard is making changes to the meta… like they’re currently doing? I don’t get what you mean here, to be honest. A general meta still exists even when heroes are excluded from the hero pool, so it’s still worthwhile to tune problem heroes so that there’s more genuine variation and less a reliance on just banning out those problem heroes every other week.
If we’re talking about what any exact week’s meta looks like, that’s pretty much impossible to tell until we know which heroes specifically are locked out. But we can still feel and see trends happening that speaks of which heroes are too strong, too weak, etc.
If Rein is not banned, which I do not believe he can be, we got back to Rein/Dva/Mccree/Mei/Ana/Lucio. That is what I mean. The boosters have nothing to do with the meta. Dva would be meta with the old boosters. The changes are so small that the meta will not shift. You said it yourself, the bans are a WAY bigger influence.
I do not want meta changes, by the way. This is the healthiest meta we have ever had and hero bans will keep it from becoming stale. But to say they are targeting the meta is to be disingenuous.