it really is unfair how your entire rank is completely dependent on people who dont care.
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I mean, Soon after release even with a Few SMALL Changes, Most characters were Considered OP In their own right, And In That Fact, Everyone had Counter play of Some Form.
Things have changed, And tipped that Sorta Balanced scale in the Wrong Direction.
At least, In my opinion.
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Fair enough. Sniper Mei hasn’t existed for a long time for example. She hasn’t had a pick rate above 2% since.
I don’t think Sym has EVER been strong, nor Torb.
Sombra has always been trash tier.
I think some balancing needs to happen.
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Apparently there doesn’t seem to be any way developers can properly measure performance in a team based game with an objective, back in the day Mercy was broken with team rez because she could only get positive performance by doing massive rez, to this day healers aren’t rewarded for clutch heals or survivability, if you were to perform an experiment you would notice that healers who get eliminations and offensive assists climb faster even if is not their intended purpose.
I have personally Always wanted SMALL Changes… Ya know, Data values and Such… But the changes they seem to like forcing on us are creating “Must Picks” And in my honest Opinion, That is hurting this game.
That, And Nerfing characters instead of Buffing to Compensate.
I run the Overwatch Simulator (it is a training tool to teach people how to balance games). We have a number of automated tools for balancing games.
The one I like the most has the name “the Meta Twister” - end of each week, gather data, and tweak values. It tried to balance hero pick rates at higher ranks.
Heroes which are not picked get slowly boosted up, and heroes who a picked a lot get nerfed down.
The meta constantly shifts, because once you have a meta, the heroes only last a couple of weeks of being powerful.
You don’t end up with dumpster heroes, since they are being buffed on a weekly basis until they have a good pick rate.
I mean, you GET Metas, but you get a lot of them, and all of them are roughly playable.
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Except it always was like that. Whether it was the Double Lucio, Double Winston, Double Tracer comps, or within the first 5 minutes of playing the game when everyone realized that no tank could work nearly as well as Reinhardt.
Any oddball comps that worked were purely the result of people not knowing the game nearly as well as they currently do. If you went back to those days, people would use their current game knowledge to quickly figure out which comp is the best.
Because even when everyone is OP, not everyone is OP to the same level. Literally no Support came close to Lucio before he had like 5 nerfs to his Speed Boost, literally no DPS came close to launch McCree who did 420 damage on a FTH and had virtually had no dropoff.
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Henceforth, Data value changes.
SMALL Changes.
Not the Removal of Entire abilities and Such.
The removal of Hero stacking, Was a needed change tho… But even then, The “Mode” Was kept, and simply renamed to “No Limits” As completely removing that Aspect of the game, Seemed Harsh in Multiple ways.
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So basically you get several tier 1 comps instead of a tier 0 and possibly a tier 1 comp?
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You get a bunch of competing Metas. At least that is the theory.
Any meta which gets popular nerfs itself. Giving rise to other metas.
I like it because it is EXTREMELY transparent on why it is doing something.
You can look at it a few days before “re-balance day” and know what is about to hit.
More importantly EVERYONE knows what is going to hit, and why.
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I am so ready to rip blizzard apart, this game is so miserable at the moment. It really is if you do not have brig you lose. And they are too arrogant and proud to see what is going on, and to actually move back the balance on Brig and Hanzo.
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Considering they never revert nerfs or buffs and always stack them even when they are no longer needed (Hog’s hook pull distance AFTER nerfing his damage.)
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Right, how it works is a bit maths heavy though. It also means you can add a new hero to the game safely.
I mean, they may be wickedly OP or UP, but, a while later and it is fine. Just make sure they have a lot of things you can change on them.
The more handles the system has to pull on, the finer grained the balancing can be.
Don’t get me wrong, there ARE problems with it.
Paladins uses a manual variant of it. Which leads to “interesting” results.
is one of the results.
Which would get complaints for sure.
Huh that has re-balanced again recently. Usually, you lose win rate for every DPS you have on your team.
The reason for that is people play DPS by default, so the game classifies them as stronger (because their pick rates are high)…
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Reworks are an important part of balance though. Not all of them can be re-tuning like Roadhog or Lucio, sometimes to ensure the character can be viable AND healthy, abilities must be axed and/or added.
Pre-hero limits was an awful time and really if it lasted, would have strangled the meta even further. Why would you run Mercy and Zen in the Mercy Meta when you could have just run 2 Mercys? Or Double Dva during Dive? Or double Ana during S2/S3.
It was a harsh change, but it was a needed one to ensure the limited diversity that currently exists in the meta didn’t get strangled even further.
I’m not going to pretend Blizzard hasnt made missteps when it comes to balance. But for the game to grow and thrive, and not remain stagnant means that sometimes they have to take risky changes. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they do not.
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the Hero limits was fixed during the first league. one of the teams got the cart to the end of the map, and the other team ALL switched to tracer and delayed the game for a good 20 minutes.
live… in front of the audience.
Blizzard was pissed, and it was gone in a week afterwards 
Yeah, can you see the horror of the 3 support Meta with 3 Brigittes?
I would NOT want to see that
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I’d love to see when that was. /s
The funny part is, They made changes and REMOVED Entire abilities that didn’t Exactly negatively impact the game…
Yea sure, a LOT Of people complained about some of those abilities, But for what reasons?
We can’t exactly trust the Community to be Right either. 
I didn’t need sleep Tonight.
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Well, without going into anything overly controversial (hi Mercy!), personally I’d argue the Lucio, Roadhog and Hanzo reworks have been incredibly successful in cutting out unhealthy strengths, and refining the hero so there’s been no overall loss in power, and in Hanzo’s case, a pretty hefty increase in power.
Unless I’m mis-remembering, the only abilities that have been removed are Scatter, Mass Res and Symmetra’s old 25 hp shield.
I would argue that those abilities were negatively impacting the game, because they were holding back their respective heroes. It’s hard to argue that Hanzo, Symmetra or Mercy 2.0 are exactly weaker than their pre-rework counterparts. Symmetra still sucks, but she sucked a whole lot worse before they did the first rework to her.
No, we can’t. But that’s a sword that cuts both ways, because with the sheer amount of opinions out there, you can’t trust them to be wrong either.
That’s just how it is. Competitive games always will have a meta. Games with patches like Overwatch and League will have changing metas that cause classes/characters to become more powerful or less valuable. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be played or you can’t have fun. I main Jungle Fighters like Xin Zhao and Jax in League of Legends. That being said, Brigitte retains a lot of the play style of that those fighters present. For non meta I love to play Kog’Maw and Bastion (low mobility and high DPS).
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but yet blizzard accepts it as a reasonable argument.
The worst part is everything was really good before Brigitte. The tanks and supports were diverse. You could run most dps.
Now it’s not even worth running half the dps. Rein is the only useful tank to go with Brigitte.