The homogenization is the one thing I can't get over

General Discussion
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If there isn’t a strategy with associated metrics already, this game is in a much, MUCH worse state than anyone realises. I doubt that’s the case, though.

Balance at the level we’re talking about here isn’t dictated by low-level metrics like winrates in a narrow scope, it’s dictated by the experience the devs are trying to produce for its audience (which itself is at least partially dictated by the higher-ups in the company, but that’s a whole other level).

The combination of specific features of the game is what’s used to tailor the experience. That’s where real balancing takes place. That’s why devs like it when you tell them how something feels rather than suggesting specific changes.

If I had to take a wild stab, I’d say their metrics are going to be primarily looking at things like populations and behaviours before hero statistics.

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I would LOVE to know the metrics they are wanting to use. Non Mirror win rate is part of it, but there will be more than that.

Totally, and THAT is hard, but that isn’t really “a diversity of heroes” problem.

Sure specific interactions could be an issue, and that would compound, but in general diversity doesn’t harm the problem space, and in many ways diversity makes it easier.

Since if you can land how the hero feels executing its game loop, and what the players want out of that, then you solved it.

And being able to have diversity means being able to target particular player’s itches is easier.

I know I would be looking at “for each hero, which heroes were they playing with and against for the last game of the night” for insights there.

There will be outliers, where you have problem interactions.

I am sure that say… Sombra has a higher than baseline value for enemy Ball players to say “that is enough overwatch for me for one night” :slight_smile:

As an example (as a Sombra player, who knows just how unfair it has to feel for the ball players to face me).

There would be a bunch of metrics, I should do a post on them.

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For sure. There’s guarateed to be a whole swath of them for managing different levels of the game.

I would note though, that non-mirrored winrate was more used when talking about tweaks to existing features. Notice that when they were talking about the Moira revert, the justification was more around how the players responded than her match stats.

I think it is. Diversity is inherently unstable and instability has been passively acknowledged as a major problem by the devs through the introduction of hero limits and role queue. I’m not really surprised that they’re now looking at standardising heroes somewhat.It was always the logical next step and doing it at the launch of a “sequel” is the perfect opportunity.

This is the thing. This game has always had a LOT of outliers with problem interactions, in part because “problem interaction” means different things; Not only for different hero enthusiasts, but for the different types of people who have been attracted to the game.

For every Ball player who hates Sombra, there’s a DPS who hates Ball enough to play Sombra just to ruin the Ball player’s night. I am not ashamed to admit that I use Sombra specifically to make Doom and Ball players switch.

Hell, the current discussion around supports in OW2 is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Some supports are happy to play the ‘universal’ support and fight tooth and nail against flankers, others want to be a pure support and deal with direct conflict as rarely as possible. Different types of player, different definitions of ‘problem interaction’.

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Right, but that also opens up the different heroes having different answers to the problem interactions.

Where the supports are having issues, is you will have a problem, and there isn’t a hero which you can switch to which helps that, with a play style you would enjoy.

If you like pure support style play, and get a problem interaction, you have a total of 0 heroes to switch to.

That seems like a problem which is solved by more diverse rather than less heroes.

When you only have a single pure support, saying “well we should make the pure support a non pure support” isn’t a way to fix the problem. It would just make it worse.

If you turn all of your heroes into generic “guy with a gun” with very few outliers, then the players of those outliers will have even less to switch to, if they don’t enjoy “generic guy with a gun” play style.

And that right there is why people are upset with the changes.

You pick your “this is where we will move all the heroes towards” archetype and some people won’t like that archetype.

They played overwatch rather than generic shooter #4 because they were not forced to play generic guy with gun.

You lose why people play the game.

If you move everyone towards generic DPS, then there are other games which do that better. - which specialize in that type of hero.

Why would people keep playing overwatch then?

You can’t remove peoples playstyles, and then hope they will keep playing.

By having diverse play styles, you get wiggle room in the balancing because people will put up with more if they get to play the play style they enjoy. So they will put up with more.

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If they ever release it, that is…

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Adding more heroes with unique kits adds to the complexity, which increases the risk of problematic interactions. Remember that we’re not only talking about the 1-1 interactions, we’re also talking about where a given hero sits within a team composition or against an enemy composition.

It’s also worth noting that many people, for one reason or another, just won’t play the hero which is the best fit for the situation in front of them. People switching to adjust to changing conditions unfortunately isn’t something you can usually rely on.

The “problematic interaction” doesn’t have to be between my hero and an enemy one either. It can be between any number of players in the match.

For sure, but putting on my ‘business lizard’ hat, a complex playerbase is one which may be expanded through simplification. If a narrower scope of player types is more populous/lucrative than a wider scope, it’s justifiable from a business perspective to tailor the game for the narrower scope. If we consider the new monetisation strategy, it’s not unthinkable that this sort of thing might be part of the devs mindset.

It’s not very respectful to the artistic vision, but we’re playing the video game equivalent of a saturday morning cartoon here so… yeah.

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Don’t get me wrong, I almost never take that hat off when I am talking OW choices. :slight_smile:

It is the hat which people making the choices will be wearing, so go ahread!

Only if you will attract more of that narrow scope, which I don’t think you will do.

Lets take an example of an outlier.

Lets take Mercy. If you ditched the Mercy playerbase, by making her more generic person with a gun, I don’t think you will get players flooding your game to pick up the new Mercy.

We already have that group catered to, their itch is already scratched.

We have PLENTY of core generic DPS heroes in the game.

Mercy moving towards that playstyle would just straight up lose players.

You are reducing your potential audience every time you move stuff in that direction.

It isn’t that you can’t already get the generic DPS players to sign up for the game.

And from a F2P perspective, I think if you have a unique hero, which really lands with a set of players, they are more likely to buy skins etc.

Because there is a higher level of engagement there, and they identify more with the hero. - lets be honest, a lot of the skins buying is a stand in for luxury buying for the player.

But for that, you need the person to have some level of identification with the hero, and generic DPS guy have a limited audience, which the player has a lot of options of where to go for that.

OWs value comes from “you get to play the style you want, which other games don’t provide” - so, you get the lions share of their attention. That is great. for F2P, best answer ever.

It is why Genshin impact is like it is. It’s all stand ins for either you, or someone you would care about.

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This is why my original post included “a limited number of unique units” as an option. It’s less complexity, but gets to keep the unique kits.

I just don’t think that’s a likely direction here since people in this game demand a constant stream of new and unique heroes, balance be damned.

No arguments there, a lot of people do play because of specific heroes.

However, this just illustrates the problem I was describing in my last post. People get attached to specific heroes for whatever reason, so they play them all the time, even when they really should be playing something else. This has been a problem all the way through OW1 and it’s only going to be magnified in OW2 when all the “good” cosmetics are paywalled. If someone drops $45 on a mythic skin, you better believe that person is going to play that hero nonstop until they get another.

Standardising hero kits is the only way to make sure this doesn’t turn the whole game into a hot mess.

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All your points are great theory crafting, but it is massively worse now according to every source including myself who has around 500 hours on her and mostly played her through both betas. Whether it is from watching OWL and seeing it frequently getting little to no value, listening to OWL players and coaches specifically state it is just plain bad now, or just the simple fact that it is not a team wipe ability without similar or more follow-up than before.

The 40% is only of current HP, not full HP like Sigma’s ult. So on a 200 hp target you are doing a maximum of 80 damage. Cassidy does 70 damage from a body shot.

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It isn’t, having variants of the heroes also works.

Ashe / Hanzo / Mcree / Widow / S76 / Sojourn

If you enjoy that playstyle, and face something which your hero isn’t good at? Then you my friend have options.

If you enjoy Mercy’s playstyle. Then you are out of luck.

The answer isn’t to turn Mercy into a DPS. The answer is to make more Mercy like heroes. Either by making more heroes, or grabbing a page from the PvE kits, and letting you switch to a variant.

You don’t provide a Mercy variant and then complain that the Mercy players are not switching, then that is a self created problem right there.

Blizzard is NOT scared of producing endless variants on a theme for heroes, look at the Ashe / Hanzo / Mcree / Widow / S76 / Sojourn cluster.

But that they are only just deciding “hey, maybe a second pure support would be a good idea” is a problem.

How many more of the main line DPS do we need, while the other play styles are getting no variants? And moving the others to be MORE like the cluster we already have more than enough of?

Not so sure that is a plan there.

Say, moving Mei to be another member of that cluster isn’t going to give Mei players someone to switch to, because they didn’t want to play in that main cluster in the first place.

Or, you know, they would be already.

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Which they’ve said they’re going to do, but adding more heroes that fill the same niche doesn’t help here because they won’t share those paywalled cosmetics. Not to mention that you can still end up in a situation where that particular niche is detrimental to the match experience.

Like, look at the whole “double shield” thing. There’s always been ton of answers to that, but people didn’t want to play them. They just wanted to play their favourites.

A big part of this game’s hero design is the hero’s cosmetic appearance - Their silhouette, specifically. They want people to instantly know a hero’s capabilities just by looking at their outline. Adding the ability to switch between variants of a specific hero messes with that and just adds even more complexity to gameplay.

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Yeah, but that also solves your problem. You have Mercy variants, they look Mercy like. You haven’t broken that pattern.

They did have an answer, which started to be played, and then they nerfed Sym out, I’m not sure if that is the best example there.

They literally went out of their way to stop people actually using the counters.

Mei too, she got the same treatment when she was the counter to a style of play.

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If they share the same silhouette, you can’t tell their capabilities at a glance, and if they don’t, people won’t switch to Variant B if they’ve bought the mythic skin for Variant A because the skins won’t be interchangeable (unless they put a bunch more work into the skins I guess…). Not sure which is the lesser evil.

The point is that people just wanted to play their hitscans and, for the most part, didn’t want to switch to something they found less fun even if it was the right tool for the job.

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Mercy variants which share skins is literally being put into OW PvE.

You want Fire Mei? PvE has it.

You need short range multi turret torb varient? PvE.

They are already doing all of the work they need for that problem to be solved.

But it won’t work if everyone is “generic gun guy” by the time we get there.

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PvE and PvP are very different beasts. The AI opponents in PvE are almost certainly not going to care who you’re playing or what you look like, they’re going to treat you the same regardless. In PvP, changing your approach depending on what you’re looking at is a fundamental part of gameplay.

Let’s say they do add variants. Based on what we’ve seen of the monetisation so far, how likely do you think it is that they’d add a purchaseable skin that works across variants, considering that the variants must have unique silhouettes that can easily be identified at a glance?

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Do they? Because I don’t think they do.

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They definitely do. Transmission of information is a huge part of this game’s audio and visual design. Their different appearances are not just there for flavour.

It’s the same reason that no two heroes share identical weapon or ability effects, for example. The developers clearly want us to know exactly what we’re dealing with when we see/hear anything to do with a given hero.

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You can only have so many different mechanics in game before you start repeating yourself, the only thing they really reduced is CC.

Having several heroes of the same flavor isn’t a bad thing anyway. This whole every hero is totally unique thing was great when OW1 launched but we are 6 years ahead now. It is not only about how a hero plays in their own sandbox anymore, if there is anything we learned in OW1 it is that you also need to think about how a hero works when you throw them in a game with 9 (previously 11) others.

Also, expect more future heroes to have remixed abilties of current heroes.

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That pretty much sums it up. They are so concerned with their precious OWL and crap that they repeatedly try to change heroes to make them vIAbLe. Just look at the sad attempt(s) at Moira rework. They tried so hard to make her viable for the 1% that they simultaneously kept ruining what was fun/useful about her in the first place.
I.e. average player does not play in some highly coordinated team so many constantly have matches in which people don’t care for teamwork. Moira is a great support pick in this type of environment. She has survivability and self-agency.

The top 1% naturally gets nothing out of this type of “utility” since they actually focus on coordination. And that’s freaking fine IMO! Why can’t we have heroes who struggle at certain circumstances but are great in others? Not every single hero needs to cater to the 1% because by doing so they will lose their “niche” for the vast majority of players. Moira may lack “utility” but she’s a great pick when you as a support start feeling like your team doesn’t bother to help you help them. (And that happens a lot.)

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And that you are facing a Mei, is a lot of information right there. You may not know the exact variant, but you have almost all of the info.