They better nerf Widowmaker today!

General Discussion
48

Here’s my interpretation of the most senior gameplay designers at Valve and Riot defining formal Counterplay.

  • (I.e. The companies that own all of the popular eSports)

One of which is the literal guy who designed the TF2 character Widow is based on.

“After you make your Choice, your Opponent should have the capability, to respond with their Choice, which includes the awareness that a Choice exists, and enough time to understand and react with their Choice”.

But you can take your pick:

Like are we violating Tom Cadwell’s principle that counterplay should not just have the capability to counter, but the time and obviousness that a counter should be used.

  • https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:JAlbor/GDC_2013:_Teamplay_and_Counterplay_in_League_of_Legends
  • https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018273/Counterplay-and-Teamplay-in-Multiplayer

Or are we violating the Sid Meier and Soren Johnson, style “Optimizing Fun out of Games” design issue? Where “Technically possible to defeat” was absolutely not sufficient by itself.

Or Robin Walker’s “We literally designed the character Widow is based on, and we empirically measured that onesided counterplay lost significant amounts of players”

And, my post, where I detail how every other modern PVP FPS game in existence follows the above rules.
But not Overwatch.

Like if your Business is trying to engineer the emotional concept of “Fun”.
It’s bonkers to act like the emotional aspects don’t matter.

Bottomline is.

It needs to be one of these options.

And #1 is the only option the devs would ever do.

  1. Kills/Fragility/DangerRisk
  2. Blocking the action of Sniping (i.e. Can’t snipe while taking damage)
  3. Blocking the kill with Heals/Peels (i.e. Poison Damage over time)
  4. Don’t fix it, just nerf the crap out of it (A below average pickrate at all ELOs)

So if she’s not dying 20% to 30% more than a generalist hero like Soldier 76.

That’s a massive design problem.