I mean that’s really the question every dev has to ask. For example, soldier. His pickrates are godawful, but because they’re so low, his winrates fluctuate between 40% and upwards of 60%. Then you’ve got heroes like moira with huge pickrates and fairly tame winrates. I would be surprised if they only balanced around stats because they’re so easy to misinterperet.
It’s kind of arbitrary but the OWL does this a lot. They’ll say things like “___ wins ___ percent of fights when ____ happens first” or something along those lines. It’s usually just to point out weird things with teams playstyles though, like how vancouver would win almost every fight as long as Bumper died first lol. I don’t remember how they determine what’s a teamfight based on the stats for the OWL. Like there will always be weird edgecases that don’t make sense but it seemed decent enough.
I dont think its ever been revealed if the OW devs do this too though. From what I understand, the people who work in the stat department for the OWL are completely seperate from the OW team. I dunno if they watch for things like “Players are 80% more likely to win if ____ does ___ first” that would be interesting to hear from them on. Maybe they have a machine learning tool to look at trends? “a disproportionate amount of teamfights are decided by who casts ____” that would be kinda cool.
That’s what every tool does though, they’re purpose made to boil everything down to easily digestible trends. The important part is responsibly balancing artistic vision vs what’s fun vs what’s reality.
I think Blizz get a lot of negative feedback because people think they either care too much about their vision or too little about what’s fun for more than just a small percentage of players.
If anything I give them negative feedback becuase it always feels like the current patch is being balanced for a patch that we won’t get for months.
But why would a future proof patch work in the present where the future patch doesn’t even come online.
Also, feedback can be questionable.
For Meta’s we could have them look for different data. Like TTK, Health pool and DPS effect on it. Point capture time of GOATS vs GOATS and then others.
Its like CSI: OWL but with 8Head computers and miles of excel sheets
Ya that’s true. I wonder how much they have to consider their slow patch cycle too. They get a lot of hate for having metas that last for months because they patch the game so slowly, but do they embrace it? Pretty much since the game’s launch we’ve seen metas that last for at least an entire competitive season, if not more. I’m sure it forces them to try and theorycraft about what might happen a lot more… this might just be hindsight but it seems like they miss a lot of obvious stuff lol and it makes me think they do embrace their slow patch cycle rather than fear it.
But sometimes to me it feels like they are waiting, seeing if any new trends emerge themselves without the devs having to step in, watching for patterns. And when the graph goes flat, they put a new balance patch in motion
I wonder what their waiting period is. I remember at the pro level at least, for a DPS comp to be viable enough to win the grand prize, it took 3 full stages of the OWL along with however many months teams were playing moira goats in contendors. Yet that was called a success. I dunno if I’d call that a success just because it happened eventually…
It would be nice if they would at least drop some more hints. Like for example, halt hook was an extremely solid meta for quite a while. Even if players didn’t organically figure out a “counter” playstyle (using dva or mei to deny the combo) they probably would have still chosen not to nerf hog or orisa because they knew Sigma was coming, who would likely force a new meta. It just bothers me because it leaves people guessing if something’s actually going to change or not.
I take it you mean there are situations whrre changes occur regardless of what the stats say, and yes, if the devs and the playerbase agree on something changes will occur to it, case in point every Sombra nerf ever
Yes they dont lie but they arent the only factor that should be considered, for instance the game still has to be enjoyable to play and if a character who is statistically fine is actively harming the enjoyment of others they will most likely receive changes to reduce the power of their unfun abilities, they may receive changes at the same time to compensate it or later on in a different patch
