Why so many threads about hog every game when...?

…hog isn’t even high pick rate except in Masters. We keep seeing “nerf hog” threads and most of them start off with some variation of “I’m sick of hog in every game” and “he is so broken” but he isn’t even that highly picked compared to other tanks like Rein and his win rate is pathetic - bottom half of tanks for 5 out of 7 ranks,

Here’s his pick rates for the last month among tanks:

Bronze : 4th 12.63% (1st Rein 25.37%, 2nd DVa 15.09%)
Silver : 3rd 12.99% (1st Rein 30.75%, 2nd Zarya 15.60%)
Gold : 3rd 15.14% (1st Rein 31.44% 2nd Zarya 17.18%)
Plat : 3rd 16.57% (1st Rein 27.71% 2nd Zarya 16.70%)
Diamond : 2nd 16.33% (1st Rein 23.82% 3rd Zarya 14.25%)
Masters : 1st 17.10% (2nd DVa 15.91% 3rd Rein 15.05%)
GM : 3rd 16.29% (1st Ball 20.58% 2nd Sigma 17.53%)

Rein is close to double his pickrate up to plat - where are all the bronze to plat players complaining Rein is in every game and broken? They are busy saying that Zarya is trash even though she is 2nd most picked in Silver to Diamond (and falls away in Masters).

His win rate is even worse than his pick rate

Bronze : 6th (1st Zarya 2nd Rein)
Silver : 6th (1st Sigma 2nd Rein) - 4th Zarya
Gold : 5th (1st Rein 2nd DVa) - 4th Zarya
Plat : 4th (1st Rein 2nd Zarya)
Diamond : 5th (1st Rein 2nd Sigma) - 6th Zarya
Masters : 6th (1st Rein 2nd Zarya)
GM : 3rd (1st Zarya 2nd DVa)

I included Zarya in each line because the 2 themes recently are “hog is OP and needs nerfed” and “Zarya is trash and needs buffs”. Yet Zarya has a better win rate than hog in every rank except Diamond. So how does that make sense? From the stats, hog is terrible and really could do with a buff if anything was to change about him (I think they should just leave him as he is).

I think this tells us that people are a) not seeing hog in every game, b) not being beaten in every game because the other team has hog c) that hog is not broken and d) from these stats Zarya is currently in a better state than hog and does not need a buff (she is top-2 winrate in 4 of 7 ranks and hog is top-2 in 1 rank.

It also shows how stupid the balance teams’ buff of Rein was - he is a top pick in all ranks except GM and top-2 winrate in all ranks except GM. AND THEY BUFFED HIM!!!

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Well, people don’t adequately check for Hog flanking, and they get angry when he flanks and kills them. They make posts to try and shift the blame to hog instead of saying “even Mei can stop a flanking hog, I should watch for him more”.

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If you base community consensus on these forums alone, then the complaints seem valid.

But, to put in perspective, the forums are the island nation of Hawaii and the real scope of the community is the entirely of Asia.

It only seems like the Majority because you cannot see the grand picture from here.

There’s your problem. You’re looking at stats below masters which are literally meaningless. These people play Rein Zarya Ana Mercy Cass Genji for heavens sake. That literally sounds like the biggest meme comp going and has just about 0 synergy :rofl:

With these stats in mind for Rein, I’ve actually lost hope the balance team will ever do anything for the good of the game. Rein being one of the top-2 winrate in every rank but GM and the balance team sitting with their list of heroes thinking “which tanks need a buff” and settling on Rein shows either they don’t care about stats or they simply don’t know how to read them!

So far they have proved they can’t fix the problems the community raises (when backed by stats, not these bozos posting right after losing a game that had hog that he is broken), they can’t rework heroes without breaking them for OW2 (hi Sombra) and they can’t fix the glaringly obvious problems in the game currently but instead produce random changes that nobody was asking for and which buffed already top-tier heroes.

Sad to say I don’t think 1 extra year is enough for them to sort out the mess 5v5 will create.

I mean your first problem is that you’re using winrate, when it’s objectively a flawed stat due to the way it’s calculated.

Your second problem is that you’re using lower ranked stats. Just because Rein has a high PR in lower ranks doesn’t mean he’s OP in lower ranks. Literally the entire comp contradicts itself!

You have a brawly tank (Rein) with a brawl/dive hybrid tank (Zarya) with a dive dps (Genji) A spam DPS (Cass/Soldier) A poke support (Mercy) and a dive support (ana). It literally makes no sense :rofl:

Rein isn’t even that good, may I even say in lower ranks. If people just picked double shield brig zen and poked the living hell you would literally destroy this comp with 0 effort, you would literally laugh at it :rofl:

Did you look at the stats? Even in masters, the only rank he is the highest pick, he is within a couple of percent of the next 4 highest picked heroes. Masters looks like it has a very diverse set of tanks being played. And Hog’s winrate in masters is 6th and GM is 3rd, 2 places below Zarya.

Even if you discarded everything below Diamond you still couldn’t come to the conclusion that Hog is broken.

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I was just saying this in anoter thread. People only seems to care what happens in GM as if they are playing there.

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People absolutely don’t check their surroundings anymore.

Actually, you could very well come to the conclusion that hog is overtuned, the game is balanced around GM/T500 after all, and hog is right up there.

He doesn’t even have to be top 1 to be overtuned. Due to the nature of his kit (Fat DPS who provides nothing to his team) he should never be good in high elo. Yet there he is, right up there with sigma and ball, and even actually ahead of d.va

Overall though the hero is only slightly overtuned. The main thing that guy needs is a rework.

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Anyone ever told you how arrogant you are by chance? “These people”?

Yet it is where a vast majority of the player-base is, plat and below. So whether it makes sense or not, it should still count. But you already displayed your arrogance so to you probably not.

Strange if he’s not that good how come he still only drops to 3rd top winrate in masters and drops lower only in GM (sure you can argue winrate is not caclulated the way you want it to be, but it’s what we have)? He seems to be pretty good everywhere but GM. But since you are above all “these people” I guess that doesn’t matter to you.

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Ok sorry but the comp that is played in lower ranks is just silly.

Just because majority of the playerbase plays there doesn’t mean we should balance around it. Imagine if we actually balanced around lower ranks, Brig would be mega OP in higher ranks and rein would be absolutely butchered. Even hog would be nerfed because he’s good in low ranks too. We would also nerf bastion, reaper, etc. Let that sink in. This game would be ruined if we balanced around lower ranks, Higher tier play would be infinite orisa sigma brig bap.

Also, pretty much everything works in lower ranks. Not joking.

There’s your problem again, stop using the objectively biased stat.
I am not saying Rein is bad btw, I am saying he is not that good (As you are making him out to be). Rein d.va rush is still good.

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Simple terms

People mad cuz bad

Because Hog is viable that’s why. It’s the same thing when Brig, Mercy or Moira are high tiered viable. Or when any of the non-Ashe, Cree, Genji, 76, Tracer is the go-to DPS pick in highest tiers even though Cree caused a lot of friction but that’s mostly because they overbuffed him a bit with the changes. Regardless when these heroes become the winning picks in higher tiered gameplay it causes a lot of random friction because apparently influencers who dislike these heroes have the loudest communities

My advice is to just ignore them and focus on just looking at those who complain about actual balance issues. That’s the best way to weed out the bad grains from the bunch to not ruin the whole batch

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Are you really implying that Rein is OP??

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I mean honestly I’m not gonna deny it, I hate hog, I think he ruins the game in general. This game is supposed to be a team game yet he enables a FFA type of playstyle. I think he’s only slightly overtuned but with how much he ruins the game I don’t think he deserves to be top spot in GM. Imo he needs a rework, but that’s just me.

So many of my friends just stop playing comp during hog metas (including me)

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He’s the flavor of the month. People see posts about him in the forum, later they play the game and get killed by hog and instead of having an original thought they think back to that thread they read and they jump right on the bandwagon of hate. It’ll be another character in a week or two.

Orrr… he got 2 big buffs, is arguably even stronger than giga hog period!?

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I get that and after playing a lot of DPS ever since tanks fell off I dislike Hog in my teams too since the games tend to be polarized with him. That might also be because he’s so popular amongst priority pass farmers who go on flanks and then die and that’s about it. But he definitely does make the games more FFA as he still plays as part of the team since he needs the distractions for his flanks to not get his hook combos just ruined while offering the same distraction and he imposes the space with his offensive capabilities so he fits the tank role and does the job. However the way he does it is what you could describe as “selfish” which understandably makes some players feel frustrated to play with a bad one in their team and to play against a good one as their opponent

Hog metas have been far and between however. I enjoyed Orisa/Hog or Orisa/D.va meta a lot since Orisa used to be my favorite tank to play and I believe the one after that was Hog/Zarya meta, but that was the worst meta ever to exist simply because it was an explode meta where everyone just exploded to the powercrept DPS+Mercy/Zen combo so you wouldn’t play any barriers while Hog was there for extra pick potential and to counter Winston/Ball dives. The one besides that was the occasional Hog ‘N’ Ball torture stuff, which was the uncoordinated version of OWL’s Ball/D.va comps

However he hasn’t been the main thing metas have been formed around and calling him overtuned is a stretch and a two since that has to be compared across the roles too in which case I’d say that no tank is overtuned at all, unless you consider OWL in which case D.va is always overtuned. And like I said earlier I personally don’t consider hero’s enjoyability or whatever subjective feelings one way or the other towards their overall balance so I have to hard disagree on the overtuned part. Especially when my dislike towards Hog is not so strong that I’d get salty over him. I do get where your frustration comes from though :sweat_smile:

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They already blamed Orisa for the tank players leaving despite her being in barely 1% of the game outside of GM.

h.t.t.p.s://i.imgur.com/glo56Ds.jpg

This was Oct 2020. Almost a year after the shield nerfs. At that point, the top level is still complaining about Doubleshield and saying that Orisa was the reason tank players are leaving.

Think about it. A tank that barely anyone has seen since January (And doesn’t even win when picked) outside of the absolute top is the reason players are leaving Overwatch because everyone’s tired of fighting her.

Seriously, tank numbers have plummeted not because of the tanks getting cratered over the last year, no no no, they stopped tanking because they don’t want to fight a tank that’s barely in the game. It CANNOT possibly be because ladders been hard locked into just two tanks.

They will concede queue times have gotten worse, but they will always have blinders on what’s really affecting the playerbase.