3 weeks wait time till the balance patch? The only valid reason to not go with the changes is if you don’t know exactly what changes you need to make. That’s the case of “need to observe for longer, gather the data and make a decision”.
But you have already identified the issues with the balance and decided what changes you want to make! So:
You know that there is a problem.
You know what the problem is.
You know how to fix the problem¹
Why not fix it NOW?
It can be compared to having a bug in the production code, becoming aware of the bug, finding a solution and then developing a fix .. only to wait for 3 weeks just to push the button to roll things out to live service. Why? Why let it damage the service for so long?
¹ Even if players disagree with some/all of it, let’s still call it a “solution”
To give players with OP heroes their time in the sun. If you haven’t noticed, OW balance is a revolving flavor-of-the-month style balancing with obvious meta “solutions”.
But that will hurt the service in the long run because while there are groups of players of 4-5 OP heroes there is a much bigger group of players of the remaining 30 heroes. And if they get frustrated enough - they leave.
They said every season will have it’s own “flavor”, so I guess this one is damage.
I’m sure you’ll be back on here to yell about whatever they do give the big changes to, when that time comes.
I hear you, but they can’t perfectly balance every hero, or else every hero would be too similar. Does that make sense? In order to keep the heroes’ unique identity, they cannot (always) be perfectly balanced or equal. Can you think of a game that has unique heroes that is very balanced? Closest I can think of would be maybe TF2.
I have mixed feelings. I feel constantly changing games on the whim of the weekly or even monthly player meta outcries will never reach a satisfying state and just induces the demand for faster changes. Like there was even a small period where the community felt things are good and then they say, “good, now tweak this too” and we go back to the drawing board, so to speak.
And from experience, I’ve played games that go untouched for months or even years (they might do one or two major post releases patches), and the meta still changed over time before those patches. So, while I do think it’s important to touch the game once in a while to keep things fresh if they want to keep it active or as a live service, I don’t think we need to kneejerk change a hero or meta too frequently (it should happen if its busted of course and I think the Junker Queen meta the OWL had before the Zarya one was more severe).
I also think there shouldn’t be a fixed schedule to balance changes either, the developers should keep it flexible. Because people might see a balance change and come to conclusions on the outcomes and decide whether or not to play the rest of the time without even trying things out until the next assumed schedule patch roll out. The hope that a quick change could come might encourage players stick to it maybe discover that things aren’t as bad as they assumed.
But the changes they introduce are not that “big”. Sombra will be the most impacted, followed by Genji (his overall damage will suffer but his burst damage output won’t change as much despite the complains I see).
And if they don’t even think about nerfing Sojourn - how long will it take for them to fix her? One more season? Are we reliving goats yet again with them refusing to nerf things?
Oh possibly, I have no idea how much the heroes will be impacted. My concern is more on the frequency rather than the degree of change. Mainly because I’ve always liked the idea of like play testing out strategies and compositions, but then I feel there’s really no point to doing that when we can just pick the assumed best as patches occur often and wait for the next update when it’s too boring or frustrating to overcome.
There was some thread I saw with some developer related comments, it seems they’re looking for a way to keep Sojourn’s oneshot but make other adjustments eventually. Not sure how long that is going to take.
