Why is Blizzard So Bad At Balancing?

General Discussion
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Ok this is a serious question and it has been a massive issue with Overwatch for a long time… but why can’t they balance a game properly?

I’m really struggling to see how a team dedicated to nothing else but finding the sweet spot for each character finds the task so difficult. Some characters in the game are literally dumpster picks and some are like S tier.

The fact that Blizzard have always done a poor job with it really suggests you need some new talent in that department. I just don’t get how you have been so bad at it for 6 years… you do a new style game and still struggling.

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SHOCKING Revelations About the Hearthstone DESIGN PROCESS in the Community AMA Session! - YouTube

That’s a hearthstone AMA from the devs talking about their approach to balance and design. Their approach is essentially winging it, basing designs on “vibe” and playtesters having no idea what’s coming out ahead of the pipeline. Blizz balance has always been a clown show circus.

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When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys
-Gordon Ramsay

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Blizzard is bad at balancing as a company philosophy. blizzard cares about three game designs above all else. Obvious fun factor, smooth mechanics and polish.

balance is an afterthought after they figure the rest out. then they try to fit balance in but they ignore how balance really factors toward the game fun they so want to design for.

its not that they arent capable of balance . they are just philosophically opposed to it. they dont balance. they just adjust the balance so hopefully every hero or spec and card deck gets a taste at the top for awhile and hopefully switch it again before the outcry gets to big.
the problem with overwatch is … fast moving, hitscan aiming heroes will always be better than projectile. they tried to add CC to counter that but it just broke the game and now they are lost.

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Because of two things:

  • a company-wide unwillingness about not admitting or fixing mistakes. This also goes for their other IPs. In OW however, starting with not nerfing Widow/Tracer, reworking Mercy/Sym into unbalanceable messes, releasing heroes for ‘‘rule of cool’’, refusing to create actual mobility counters that dont hurt immobile heroes more, 5v5, etc are all mistakes they will never admit making.
  • a vested interested on keeping what is perceived by corporate as watchable strong and everything else passable to weak. And now that new heroes are locked and have to be bought with money (or farmed for weeks to get them), they have a very greedy reason to force you out of the ‘‘legacy’’ heroes so you buy Kiriko.
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cause they think shifting metas is good for the game. when in fact it is not.

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Cause they want to get people to buy the mythic skins.

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its not that its good for the game but its easier to have little Billies warrior which was crap last patch to be top dps this time around and let him get a turn at the happiness carousel.

Shifting the meta is why Overwatch community is always Split because some group will always be happy because their Hero pool is doing excellent at the moment and don’t want the game to change.
then the other half that isnt happy can be written off as one tricks or whatever other reason people want to come up with

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Hot take: game has better balance right now than it ever has.

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Yes.

Now the problem is nobody wants to work there since the lawsuit + bad pay. The dead sea effect is real and is affecting Blizzard on every department. All of their games struggle with balancing issues.

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Balance doesnt require money or too many people.

That isnt their excuse. OW just has a bad case of e-sports bias and ‘‘buy BP for new heroes’’ bias.

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You mean that thing that was just kinda forced from the start and has been losing viewership constantly (They have been pretty much bribing people with tokens to keep the feed open on a muted/minimized browser tab)

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Yeah well, never said it was logical.

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I don’t think it’s been the same problem over the years. The original team had the unfortunate habit of implementing sensible sounding ideas that tried to “encourage” the playerbase to play the game how they were “supposed to”.

I think that most of the HISTORICAL balance issues come from an inherent conflict between

  1. what the development team WANTED the game to be

  2. what the players thought the game was SUPPOSED to be

  3. what the game REALLY IS when you sit down and play it

Naturally, these well-intentioned changes were usually the MOST disastrous additions to the game, and led to things like brig (let’s make a support that’s fun to play and breaks the stagnant dive meta!) double-shield (let’s make a new tank that has a barrier you can move around because it standing in one spot holding up a shield isn’t fun) and the slow creep of healspam (let’s make healing your team something you can do quickly so you get to focus on the more fun parts of playing support).

We don’t have that problem so much anymore. Why? No more Jeff Kaplan. Jeff was definitely the most… ambitious… part of the team when it came to adding something completely new and different.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s better to have a head guy who wants to keep trying new things, even though some of them end up creating a huge problem(s). You won’t come up with any great ideas if you aren’t willing to try some terrible ones. Why? Because you can’t actually know which ones are great or which are terrible until you do! The best ideas might sound bad, and the WORST ideas always sound reasonable and seem to make sense before you try it.

I think they (the current development team) has a bad track record of relying far too heavily on statistical data mining and also including too much decision making based on short-term trends from top-tier gameplay.

This is what happens when math majors are exposed to the reality of thousands of people (ie a typical game’s playerbase) who complain about EVERYTHING and have absolutely no interest in differentiating between their own personal experience with the game and objective reality. A quantitative thinker exposed to this reality will quickly decide that all opinions are inherently unreliabe and therefore equally useless, thus, the only useful source of information must come from hard data like statistics.

Statistics are great for helping you measure things. Statistics can HELP you determine whether a problem exists, whether evidence is reliable, etc etc

When used as a secondary source in support of observable patterns/phenomena, statistical data is hands down the most reliable and dependable form of information you can have to determine the validity of a claim.

BUT

When used as a PRIMARY source of evidence, or worse, when used to DEVELOP a hypothesis instead of SUPPORT one, pure statistical data is REALLY FREAKIN’ BAD at providing any kind of accurate or useful information. It is entirely unreliable if your goal is to interpret what is ACTUALLY happening on that sheet of data and it is EVEN WORSE at helping you understand the overall system which generates those statistics.

I think until they stop being afraid of causing the next “double-shield meta” that somebody is willing to try a genuinely outside-the-box-type-thinking solution for some of the longstanding issues the game has, they aren’t gonna end up doing much more than tweaking numbers back and forth.

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hot take:only dive mains think that and telling people who don’t play dive heroes to just ‘adapt’ is dumb

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because they don’t actually care, the only reason ow2 pvp exists as it does is so that people couldn’t complain (and it would be illegal) that they released the same game twice under a different name.

this was a monetization update, a quick cash grab and nothing more by greedy disgusting executives at the top of the company.

that is it, expect PVE to be dead and definitely expect them to never fix anything or update the game ever again. I would legitimately say expect them to DROP DEVELOPMENT in a couple of weeks or months.

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A couple reasons.

  1. They lack confidence in their kit design and hero identity. There should NEVER be any reason to remove or replace an ability. If anything it just punishes the players who put the time and love into mastering a hero. Whenever they do a massive hero rework, it’s very disruptive and is NEVER done for the people who play the hero, it’s always done for the people who complain about the hero.

  2. Overbalancing. They should realistically make miniscule changes over time and let the game slowly adapt to a stable state. But the devs are so paranoid about the meta getting “stale” that they will just nerf whatever is currently complained about the most into oblivion.

  3. Control freaks. The devs insist that the intended way to play is the best way to play, and will shut down any tech or other expressions of player creativity by putting rigid rules and making all the heroes more generic and less diverse so there’s less chance of powerful hero synergies.

  4. It’s literally impossible to balance a game because balance is subjective and pvp players always need something to blame for their losses. Name one pvp multiplayer game where 90% of the community agrees the game is balanced.

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Because they only favor a handful of heroes… The news one and the old favs. Genji Tracer Solider 76