I’m seeing people claim “This is why we cant let pros balance !!” which is ridiculous. This panel was bad for other reasons:
Firstly, this panel was not comprised of pros in the way it should have been. There was ONE OWL tank player. Twohitscan OWL players. And onenon OWL flex support player. They were also letting a gold/silver caster vote on things? Wasn’t he supposed to be there to translate???
Only Space gave intelligent suggestions, but was shut down by others and people like Soe, and Fran also gave good suggestions.
We had no OWL support players. No Main Support player (Lucio/Mercy/Brig player). We had no OWL main tank player. We had no OWL Flex DPS players.
So already, this panel was not representative of pros. If it was, it would have been 1 Main Tank, 1 Off Tank from OWL 1 Hitscan DPS, 1 Flex DPS from OWL 1 Main Support, 1 Flex Support from OWL
And maybe a coach from a good team like Shock to offer Coach insight
Soe was influencing the panel too much. She’s not a pro, she’s low ranked. She was turning down good changes, like when Super (OWL Rein player) trying to revert Rein’s damage buff, she basically stopped it from happening. Why is she influencing the card at all?
She also only enforced the “2 Changes Per Hero” rule when she wanted to. With Hammond, she let them do like 4-5 changes because she hates Hammond. But when they wanted to do multiple changes for people like Lucio, she wouldn’t let them. Moderators aren’t supposed to be biased when enforcing rules.
This “2 Changes Per Hero Rule” shouldn’t have been a thing in the first place.
Only some heroes got specialists called in. Rein, Genji, Dva, Junk, Echo, Ball, and Lucio got videos sent in from OWL players who specialize in them/main them to offer insight. Other heroes like Mercy, Doomfist, Brig, Pharah, Torb, Sym did not get this luxury and were left to be changed by people who don’t play them. Hence why Mercy got a buff that…resets her GA CD when she kills someone in Valk? What?
So no, you guys don’t get to use this card to say “Pros can’t balance the game”. Because this card wasn’t set up nor conducted in a way that allowed pros to actually have a fair shot of balancing the game. The panel was poorly put together, missed representatives from 3 roles (Main tank, main support, and flex DPS), and only had Hero specialists called in for certain heroes. It also had miscommunication due to having to translate two of the players, and Soe was interfering way too much.
It didn’t fail. Nothing is wrong with this card. It’s most comparable to an April Fools joke, because that’s how seriously its meant to be taken. People are putting way too much thought into this.
and besides that, they ignored the specialist stuff anyways
for instance sparkle asked for more burst and they decided to reduce his spread lol
super asked for shatter revert and they make a good change but still pretty weird
its obviously a joke though and it seems pretty cool to see how the game would play in the exp card, after all they were prob payed to do this and it was edited and everything
also it would be a massive PR fail if actual pros got to legit balance the game and have their card be better then blizzard payed workers could do in 4 years
kinda already shows that pros can’t balance the game. like legit as an example, which pro actually specialises sym? the best you can answer is like soon who legit was on the panel and did jack for her.
and instead buffed the very thing (insignificantly tho) that most players complain about her (cause “loW sKIlL”), turrets.
meanwhile they very well could’ve buffed her orb projectile speed to make them more aimed (“more skill”) and to make sym’s effective range longer to significantly help her.
What does this have to do with the casual community event? They were supposed to have fun with the changes, and they did. Why should they make a boring true to balance patch? The point was that the limits were gone and they could do wacky stuff.
Super literally asked for one revert in exchange for a nerf and Soe piped in to make it sound like the damage buff wasn’t that bad in plat and below, even though most people not in GM I know say his damage when he closes distance is the worst thing about him rn.
it would not be interesting whatsoever if literally all the changes were numerical number changes, going on tangents about whats meta, whats not
remember OWL is a sport, stuff like getting players and famous celeberities to do crazy things, look at literally every OWL teams videos, nothing to do with their play, only their players. Not only is it entertaining for fans but looks good for sponsors
judging from blizz they went pretty successful in this idea
I believe the problem is in the randomness of changes are almost as random as the direction of changes the live buffs/nerfs the devs do.
Like you nerf Baptiste and don’t change Moira why are you going to ever pick these heroes over Ana in this experimental?
This has always been the problem with OW balance. Why pick this hero over better buffed hero. Why would I go with Hammond over buffed and less nerfed tanks?
What’s going to make me think to switch to Symmetra over her counters that got buffed or the rest of the DPS as faster turret in the air doesn’t counter anything?
It’s a shame they were given a chance and they went pretty meme on to inconsistent on the hero changes.
What rank was needing a grounded Pharah to do less damage when that is already a failing way to play her?
Again I ask do they want this game to be pro esports or casual fiesta party game? I can’t tell if they want either extreme, a mix of both, or if they are just trolling.
Quality of players won’t change anything… they still need to be smart about their changes. A lot of people, even high level players, are biased and only want buffs for their heroes or nerfs for their counters
You have to ask though, what was the purpose of this card?
Was it to actually create a better balance for the game, no I don’t think so. The devs know what their doing mostly or at the very least think they do. I seriously doubt their about to really hand that responsibility off to guys doing this in their spare time. Yeah these guys are pro’s who know the game but the season is just about to start, do you really think them or their coaches are going to make this patch a priority over scrims and stuff?
In my opinion this panel was there to do two things, promote OWL and provide a stab of content after a blizzcon that confirmed we’re not getting anything new for the foreseeable future. It did that, we’re talking OWL, we’re trying the card and that’s all it was meant to do.
The easy answer is that, out of the very small pool of people, most of them dislike Bap and Moira but like Ana and there was nobody to tell them “no”. Unless you have people with low bias or a different person advocating for every hero then it is pointless.
This was the most confusing part for me. The rule seemed to appear and disappear on a whim, it made it really confusing.
I also feel like nobody entirely knew how serious this was, like, we had suggestions like “2 Torb Turrets” alongside really legitimate suggestions such as all of Moth’s ideas for Lucio.
A clear statement on wether or not this was silly or not wouldve made this 10000% better… because we got a really weird combo of the two.
for her.