The ultimate Solution

General Discussion
1

Overwatch sucks for the same reason it is great.

Hero diversity. Heroes in Overwatch are so unique and wacky that balancing them across all ranks is impossible.

Junkrat, Bastion, Torb, Sym etc. These heroes are noob stompers. They are incredibly frustrating and powerful to fight against as new/less-skilled players. However, as you go up the ladder they become less and less relevant until essentially being a throw-pick.
The devs are stuck between a rock and a hard-place because they can neither buff/nerf these heroes without massive negative repercussions.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have heroes like Widow, Sombra, Tracer etc.
These heroes are harder to get value out of than most, requiring team coordination, high-mastery over the hero, good game sense and/or high mechanical skill. At most ranks there are easier and more consistent heroes you can pick to get the same value but these heroes have a much higher skill ceiling allowing for bigger plays.

The solution: Ranked based balancing.

This in theory fixes the vast majority of Overwatches issues, it gives the devs more freedom to buff/nerf heroes, while still making them accessible to everyone.

Take Moira for example, she is also a bit of a noob stomp hero. With a massive hitbox on her primary and damage orb. If you can’t hit your shots, she will slowly drain you to death while A-D spamming. However, for higher-skilled players she is basically a non issue. Her damage output is pretty absymal and she has little play making potential.

At GM she is the least picked support and has the second lowest win-rate in the game. An example of ranked based balancing is that Moira could have her primary hitbox made smaller, while increasing her damage output at GM. Making her more effective at dealing with flankers.

This keeps her accessible at lower-ranks but keeps her viable at higher ranks as well.

2 Likes
2

This could definitely help, but the way the match making works it just wouldnt. If theres a lobby with some masters players and some GM, how would you reconcile what “patch” to play on?

If you hover the line between diamond and masters wouldnt it be frustrating to play one game on one set of balance and the next on a different one?

I do like the idea though of finding a way to keep heroes viable at all tiers of play while not sacrificing the lower ranks to pubstomp heroes.
I

3

I’m hoping that would be a non-issue when more of the playerbase comes back. However, I guess it would balance the game to the highest ranked player.

Maybe a system would have to be put in place to make it harder to fall out of a rank. Like you have to lose 3 consecutive times when your SR hits the boundary to fall out of the rank.

That probably has its own issues though.

4

Terrible idea. Imagine you are put in a 3999 game and it plays differently from a 4001 game. Or you are a platinum playing at night and it plays different from the day because there are less people playing and you might be put into lower ranked games.

If you can use heroes that will grant advantage on lower ranks, you’ll climb until you can no longer use that advantage in your favor. If a hero is too bad at a rank and too good at another, they should redistribute the kit’s value. I think the game should be balanced around these concepts instead of a confusing ranking based balance.

1 Like
5

Yer but to go with that idea you would end up redesigning basically the entire hero roster, making them more uniform/cod clone or just accept good enough balancing and never strive for actual decent balance.

All heroes are unique and play by a different ruleset to what they are capable of at different ranks.

Take hit-scan, massively favours higher-ranked players as they can leverage the hit-scan advantage the most using mechanical skill.

It is really hard to design heroes in a way that they are viable at all ranks and do not dominate at any given rank.

The best solution i have come up with is ranked based balancing.

Other-games don’t have this issue because all players are uniform and have access to the same tools

6

Stop it… just stop.

7

Wouldn’t work. People near median SR, i.e. most of us, would effectively have to learn 3 different balance sets. And it’s not like 3000 in US east at 4am is the same as US west at peak hours, and then you have the likes of Korea and Australia, which as I understand it is compressed and stretched respectively. By the time you account for all the possible combinations needed to actually make the system work, the split dev attention would wipe out any benefits we would have gotten.

8

Good enough balancing is good enough, the playerbase is volatile and so will be the meta unless something is extremely dominant. Not every hero should be equally balanced across every rank because they weren’t designed to be. You have really high skill ceil heroes and low skill ceil heroes. It’s a problem when one is unplayable or just destroys one of the ranks, that’s when you need to balance their kits out.

Oh well, we’ll have to keep looking for solutions then

Every game has this kind of issue. If you take Valorant for example, Jett is terrible in lower elos and a high pick rate hero on high ranks, on lower ranks Reyna is a top pick, not so much on higher ranks. This applies even for MMOs, some powers/classes are simply too complex for newbies but are too good in the hands of experienced players.

9

The only sort of rank based balancing I could see is stuff like objectives capture speed, payload movement speed, and overtime speed. Maybe something with respawn speed. Ruleset balancing.

But not hero balancing.

10

Almost all of the heroes would have to be reworked to have similar skill to value ratios and in order for rank based matchmaking to work without as many drawbacks. Even at that point you wouldnt need to have rank based matchmaking because then the more skilled players would get more value.

11

That could help but I don’t see how we get around the fundamental fact that hero design in Overwatch is wild and wacky and cannot be balanced across all ranks.

Do we just accept that some heroes are always going to be garbage at some ranks and are only allowed to be viable in a certain range?

So many of Overwatch heroes are balanced like this and I think it is a major balancing issue. I means the devs have to continuously tip-toe when balancing heroes in fear of the repercussions at different ranks.

12

Probably. Although I think we also wait an see if they are going to do something like Hero Bans. (i.e. Blacklisting Heroes)

Although more intriguing is if they do something with Hero Drafts. (i.e. Whitelisting Heroes)