I wouldn’t call OW balanced at any rank. Thing is, games are so much team dependent that you can have one player with cheats, and still easily lose. That gives them a lot of room for mistakes…
It really isnt balanced for the top 1%.
If it was, why is utility>skill?
Why has the game turned into counter picking is the only way to win? 
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top gm players are not on a similar level to pros. pros scrim and practice the game far more than any gm ladder player and thats not even debatable. the comps and the heroes aren’t unviable but the pros carry them, they are viable and the pros use the tools the heroes/comps give them to win. they play and practice more and better.
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And my point is that balancing around that is terrible for the other 99.9% of players.
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Every other successful and good Esport does it. Why would Overwatch do different?
to appease the peasants and make pro play a joke?
Are you out of your mind?
I mean, I post so much on the forums, it might as well be a job.
So, you know those low win rate heroes which people say are OP? - #11 by GreyFalcon-11737
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Pro play was in no way ‘a joke’ before OWL. However, it became one after OWL launched and the balance focus shifted to it.
I’m refering of course to the anti-dive shift and the trashfire that was Goats mirrors in pro play that that caused.
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you haven’t explained how that’s necessarily true
It’s totally true.
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I remember this game being marketed as a competitive, team-based game from very early on. I never got the impression that it was primarily for casual players, just that there would be a variety of play styles that might appeal to people who don’t usually play FPS games. I think it’s important to balance around the people who know the game the best. There’d be no true competition if it was balanced around the average player.
Tanks in year 1 were much more fun than they are now…
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Do you think the next balance patch is going to be Tanks or CC?
Kinda feel like the second previous patch was CC. And the last patch was conspicuously missing tank changes.
So, I’m thinking Tank changes.
If the balance is top down you can solve your problems by getting better. If it’s balanced for the bottom you’ll reach a point where no matter how much you improve your hero is simply too weak in comparison to others.
Now the argument of how high the balance should be is another matter.
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I made an entire OP about it.
Tank pick rates are hilariously unbalanced, and no one is playing them as evidenced by DPS queue times going up and up.
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Because this game is meant to be competitive. Balancing it any way other than top-down instantly makes it a purely casual game.
That also means that there’s no reason to try and get better. Players like myself just wouldn’t play the game as much, if at all, because we’d know that the better we got at it, the more the game would fight against us.
The tanks are balanced badly and are generally unfun for most people. But that’s not a consequence of their balancing methodology. Balanced for casuals and the average player doesn’t inherently mean more fun.
those don’t describe a flaw of top down balance though. if anything you could just argue that the devs balance poorly even though I personally wouldnt.
TF2 managed to be a game that was made to be casual, but could be taken to a higher competitive level if you wanted to take it that far, because it was just a well-designed game.
(Also Equalizer mechanics like Crits could be and were always disabled in Competitive-minded matches.)
CS:GO literally has a Casual mode where certain rules are changed to accommodate a less hardcore preference.
I don’t see how it’s so hard for Overwatch to do what’s already been done, especially since it’s a game built on doing what’s already been done with a lot more polish.
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Oh so you found some truth about this game. That’s good, but yeah their direction of this game is forever lost. Whatever their focus on has been distorted due to distraction of OWL and catering to players who don’t like counters. This game was fine, but only for 1year.
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Would be kinda easy to fix Tank balance+popularity if they just did this.
Well, despite some of the changes, I think devs generally aim for balance somewhere around high Plat, or low Diamond.
But GOATs stuff was a unusual circumstance.