Logistically it doesn’t make sense to me so I was hoping to start a discussion.
If well over half of the player base is ranked platinum or below, why are changes that effect the game as a whole made to heroes who are only messing with the meta “at Overwatch’s highest levels of play”? I understand that a hero’s kit can perform differently at different levels of play, but I don’t understand why massive changes should be made to said hero when it only effects less than 10% of the player base.
Because well over half the player base plays whatever they like and you can’t balance random.
Well competitive games practically work like that, can’t really explain it in depth since it’s almost 4 AM for me though i’ll just leave that there.
Because they don’t want to implement Hero Bans. The solution is right in front of their faces, but they are being ultra-stubborn about it.
That’s because most people hated hero bans. I personally liked them, but very few people were like me.
Ultimately it is a competitive game. The goal is to rank to the highest SR possible. If they don’t balance around that “goal”, then you’ll never really become good at the game. highest rank means almost to best way of playing a hero… why shouldn’t they balance around that?
basically, if you’re not good at a hero, that means you haven’t mastered them yet.
Because below low masters you can play whatever you want and it will work.
So balancing for lower elos makes no sense since the balance changes don’t effect them too much.
There’s only a few cases where something has legitimately been broken enough to run at all elos, with the best example being mercy after the rework.
Apparently Blizzard, for whatever reason, believes that players enjoy watching other people play Overwatch then actually playing their game. There has been a big push for OWL/Streamer promotions for the second half of the games lifespan so the balance changes generally reflect what is more interesting in the views of OWL and Streamers.
How many events celebrated and promoted the community of Overwatch? Video, music, art, story contests? Promotions and acknowledgement of workshop creators? Many other games have done and have the ability to do these things yet Blizzard has not.
Overwatch players do not matter. Twitch and youtube viewers do.
If you are merely looking at SR numbers, it does feel odds, but you have to understand that player’s skills are not static, we are constantly improving, evolving. Even the slowest poke of us all will learn to improve over time, however long it takes. Plat rank today is stronger, better than plat rank from season past. One day, the plat rank of tomorrow will be the equivalent of the master rank of today.
So it is in the best interest of everyone to balance top down and not being short sighted.
This kind of makes sense ig. I think what really throws me for a loop with the entire concept is how the top ranks will have wildly different metas from the lower.
You have heroes that the lower ranks rarely ever pick reigning supreme in grandmaster, and when they’re given a huge nerf I feel bad for everyone who’s hanging out in gold, trying to improve with a character that now the top 1% can’t even run successfully.
The entire thing is weird and I wish there was a better alternative than pushing changes that effect 99% of us so that 1% of us don’t get stuck in a meta.
Well you see the answer is actually very simple little Timmy. It’s because, MONEY!