Obviously this is referring to McCree but I’m interested in the idea of this because it doesn’t seem to make much sense. Let’s just assume for now that overbuff stats are fairly accurate for the sake of the discussion. So when I think of an overperforming hero I’d expect a high pickrate but a negative winrate is kinda eye opening. Because it basically says this hero on average loses more than they win which seems odd for an op hero. More educated forum users than myself have explained why this is the cases but I’m either not entirely convinced by their arguments or maybe I just don’t understand them so I’ll go over each one by one as I understand them.
1. Mirror matchups cause the hero’s winrate to go down
My problem with this is that If we expect a hero to have nearly a 50% winrate against their mirror then I’d expect their winrate vs non mirror matchups to far exceed 50%. That fact that it’s negative makes me think two things and this is based on my limited understand on how stats work so I’ll break down two cases. One where the winrate vs mirror matchups is slightly over 50% and one where it’s slightly below 50%. I do this because idk how the winrates will be accurately tracked based on things like leavers, disconnections, server crashes, etc so I doubt it will be exactly 50%.
1a. If their winrate vs mirror matchups is slightly over 50% but the overall is negative then this means the winrate vs non mirrors is negative too. This seems really odd for a hero that is supposed to be op.
1b. If their winrate vs mirror matchups is slightly below 50% but the overall is negative then this means the winrate vs non mirrors is either the same or barely positive. Again this seems weird for a hero that is op.
2. Winrates are based on time played
This is a much more nuanced point that seems hard for most to understand. The way I hear it is that winrates are based on time played, from what I’ve been told something on a per 10 minute basis. This means heroes who are only strong on defense for example will have artificially inflated winrates. The opposite is true for heroes who are only strong on attack. The basic idea is winning teams tend to spend less time on attack therefore heroes who excel here will have a lesser share of the time played…aka lower overall winrate.
My problem with this is that it doesn’t seem to apply to heroes with large pickrates. If in our example we’re talking about a dps hero with a near 8% pickrate then it seems hard to believe they are only played on attack. If that we’re true I’d expect their pickrate to be cut by a significant amount since they won’t be played on half of 2CP and escort maps. Even If I were to concede that most of their time is played on attack then It would have to be only a slight majority with a large amount still played on defense. The argument might then be, well they just aren’t as strong on defense as attack. In that case I’d have to wonder if this hero is really that strong if they are weak nearly half the time?
3. The hero is just popular but not that strong
This is true for many heroes who might not be that strong but are fan favorite and will always have higher pickrate based on their popularity. Think heroes like Mercy or Genji. The only reason I can’t accept this as a reason for a hero being weak is because we can look at gm pickrates. At those ranks picks are made based on what is meta. And you have many times where “popular” heroes like Genji or Widow will have low winrates because they might not be as strong even if people in that rank might want them to be. This is more an argument against those who say a hero is only picked a lot because of their popularity.
Anyway this is how I see the topic and I’m interested in what you guys think. I could be completely wrong on these so please don’t take this as a slam dunk post against McCree haters lol
. I just don’t expect the overall winrate to be negative because if the hero were really strong then shouldn’t their winrate vs non mirrors be really high and bring the overall to be positive?
