I LITERALLY QUOTED them saying that Sym in OW2 is getting outclassed EVEN IN her niche.
Like, seriously, the devs literally saying, “We agree with community feedback that the reduction of shields being thrown about the battlefield makes Symmetra’s Photon Projector harder to get value from. At the same time, Symmetra is suffering from increased overlap with heroes like Mei, who possess better tools for close quarters survivability.”
How on earth do you interpret that as “Symmetra’s doing fine in her niche”?
Look, it honestly seems like you’re trying so hard to support your narrative that you’re not actually analyzing what they’re saying. Blizzard was NOT sharing Symmetra statistics to demonstrate how great she is doing in OW2. They were doing it to demonstrate that win rate, as a statistic, doesn’t directly show how powerful a hero is.
Otherwise, they wouldn’t have followed it up with:
“If we apply the reverse of this logic to Sojourn and Orisa, we can better understand why their win rates may be lower than one might suspect. Players were excited to play them in the beta, but everyone was unfamiliar with their new hero abilities and playstyles. This led to players picking them even in losing situations where it may have been more advantageous to swap to a different hero.”
And they definitely wouldn’t have prefaced with the statement: “The analysis technique that ultimately makes these metrics useful is a healthy understanding of the context in which they are generated.”
The fact that players ONLY play Symmetra when they feel like they can win, that symmetra is disproprtionately played by people who have a lot more hours on her, the fact that people are willing to switch off quickly when they aren’t losing… All of that contributes to a higher win rate without actually demonstrating that she’s performing well in her niche.
If there was a hero where you could only play that hero in competative after logging at least 500 hours in them, you can bet their competative win rate would be through the roof, but that doesn’t actually say anything about how powerful they are.
A 300 hour Symmetra will beat a 1 hour Sojourn 9 times out of 10, but what does that tell us about balance? Nothing.
They were trying to teach context.