Yeah, I think in general, soft-counters are fine… and hard-counters are awful.
But hard-counters can be resolved in two different ways… adjust the counter hero, or adjust the hero being countered.
The Sombra vs. Ball counter, for example, should be resolved by simply preventing Sombra from being able to hack formations… She is able to hack Ball out of formation, but not Bastion… She shouldn’t be able to hack Ball out of formation.
The Sombra vs. Widow counter, on the other hand, is a poorly designed band-aid. The problem is that Widow’s that never miss are too dominant and ruin OW matches entirely… Peak and die makes the game pretty unplayable. So they tried to fix that, not by adjusting Widow, but instead by creating a hard counter that is simply invisible all the time… And all that did was create an even bigger problem… because trying to play OW against invisible heroes also ruins OW matches.
Counters should make playing certain heroes more difficult, but not impossible or virtually impossible. If you practice a hero enough, you should be able to play that hero most of the time, if not all of the time… And if you do, it might not provide the most value bc of the counter, but you should still be able to exist.
So it really boils down to preventing hard-counters by doing two things:
- Don’t design heroes with abilities that hard-counter other heroes.
- Give each hero enough survivability to prevent being hard-countered by the rest of the hero roster.
Key word being “hard”-countered… Again, soft-counters are fine.