It keeps happening: Hero has an issue, months go by, then the hero gets a whole pile of changes at once and ends up in a bad spot.
Hanzo is exemplary of the problem. The community had a problem with Scatter Arrow, but the change that came down was a buff to every aspect of his kit and a new mobility tool without compensating nerfs. Who seriously thought that was a reasonable fix to scatter arrow?
Scatter was problematic, but Hanzo himself was trash tier
Yes? Then he was (and arguably still is) bluntly OP while the devs flailed and failed to meaningfully balance his changes. I’m expressing frustration with what appears to be simple development logic: Don’t make delicate changes with a sledgehammer.
That’s the downfall of the slow balance changes, tbh.
If they do minor number tweaks or small adjustments, people will get impatient if that hero continues to struggle.
But then when they do the opposite to ensure it helps the hero, they make them OP and it takes equally long for them to start trying to correct it slowly.
And yet Sombra can’t get even those little tweaks as her winrate sits firmly at the worst. What’s the PTR even for? Let’s try 5% less spread or 1% more damage or a hack break threshold on a longer hack or SOMETHING
And the community’s extreme impatience doesn’t help. They’re constantly being bombarded by people telling them to make this or that change right now and whining that good balancing takes so long, People need to chill and realize that anything worth doing is worth taking the time to do well.
True.
I think there are two big issues:
Even when they make changes, not enough people play on PTR to create an optimal environment for testing. That’s why even when the community flags something (i.e. the Mercy rework, Hanzo’s changes, etc.), they still go through to live. That’s why when a change like Reaper’s life steal buff is put on PTR, people will often say “This isn’t going to fix his issues, this just makes him worse in these tiers” - and bam bam boom, we have that. But they don’t take our word for it because the testing environment is poor.
So it really comes down to, their balance changes are super slow, and they don’t give us an incentive to use PTR so they can actually better make usage of the PTR and help determine if the changes are optimal before pushing it to live.
Especially during events…why would I play PTR when I can actually earn permanent rewards on my account on live?
Hanzo is a balanced hero with a below average winrate and average pickrate across all ranks.
Hanzo is not an issue. Just because you see him in 90% of quickplay games doesn’t mean he needs to be changed, the game should NEVER be balanced around quickplay. His ranked results are fine.
Did you see Hanzo after his big buff stack? No one was calling him balanced. Even Hanzo mains wanted nerfs.
Its called the Blizzard approach to balancing
They nerf something into the ground and never revert it, only building upon the issues and leaving behind a mangled hero
for years this community cried and whined about how devs took too long to get things done. Crying about metas never changing because “Devs don’t know how to balance a game” When in reality they were just changing things slowly so people could learn it and the meta would shift organically.
After years of being trash talked, berated, and downed by the community for this, they finally decide to do it the way the community thinks it should be done.
And now they are crying about changes being too much.
This is why I never refer to myself as a part of the Overwatch community, but rather just a gamer who likes OW. Because this community is the most hypocritical, impossible to please, and sometimes stupid community ive seen.
" …When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons […]" - Cave Johnson
I think this is overwatch dev motto.
I don’t know how you came up with that opinion, since it seems quite detached from reality. The example from my opening post is almost a year old. Hardly “after years of being trash talked…” and I do think the problem is much older; The PTR has been a place to advertise changes that’re already decided upon. Blizz has heeded Pro feedback more often than they’ve listened to the PTR feedback.
I’ve seen your other posts. You usually make these big acrid counters that aren’t actually counting anything in the thread. That’s a debate tactic usually reserved for untenable positions.
because consoles
PC they could patch whenever they want but it costs them money to patch consoles.
Clearly they want to spend as little of that as they can since they are laying off hundreds
Youre really going to sit here and try to say that what im saying isn’t the truth? Have you been on the forums longeenough to even have a horse in this race?
oh where have I done this? please sight once ive done this.
remember you simply not agreeing or not liking what I say or how I say it, doesn’t change the facts of the matter.
The forums have trash talked the devs to hell and back about everything they can. The devs have even come on the forums saying they don’t like to say things because if they don’t pan out they get crucified for it, but you think im detatched from reality?
guess Jeff is just making stuff up then huh?
theres only one person here detatched from reality. Its you.
Hanzo was drastically underpowered so they reworked his scatter arrow while buffing him. He sort of really needed buffs at that time because he was one of the two or three worst characters in the game.
Well, aside from the last point. That just also makes sense.
Console players already feel like they’re 2nd rate citizens in the game… So imagine how much worse things would be if devs just constantly updated things on PC, and consoles had to wait till eventually they got the huge list of patches to be caught up?
On the other end, imagine running the show, you want your game to be widely popular, but every time you push an update to the consoles you have to pay a troll toll.
You think too short on this and you either force yourself to meet the expectation and put a lot of pressure on the quality and relevance of the game (this is how I kind of see fortnite, it can’t afford to be bad or upset fans, ever), or you have to say, “Guys, it was fun, but it’s not working out anymore,” and pray it’s received well (hint, it probably won’t be).