Why you shouldn't trust Overbuff

General Discussion
1

Overbuff used to be a fairly reliable and accurate way to get information about the game. Even after the introduction of private profiles, it was still reasonably accurate for a time. However, it has stopped being so especially for the data at higher ranks which is what we always look at.

There’s 3 different types of evidence I want to present.

First, it’s dev comments. In the last AMA, Josh Noh said Overbuff was fairly accurate, for win rates. But what he didn’t specify was only in the most populated ranks. Later Gavin Winter clarified that it is not accurate for high ranks.

The second is comparing GM data currently to what I just compiled from top 500 pick rates. Now, I think if you look at this, the top 500 rates I compiled aren’t that surprising. They pretty much match up with your expectations. But the Overbuff rates will be surprising and won’t fit what you are expecting to see at all.

Here is a link to my post. Top 500 Pick Rates - Season 11

Quick summary if you don’t want to look at the full post:

  • Most picked tanks are Sigma, Winston, and D.Va in that order.
  • Most picked DPS are Cassidy, Tracer, and Pharah in that order.
  • Most picked Supports are Ana, Baptiste, and Kiriko in that order.

Here’s what Overbuff has for GM, this month, PC

Tanks

  • Does anyone actually believe that Wrecking Ball is the clear meta tank with a 63% win rate or that Winston is the 3rd lowest pick rate with only a 38% win rate?

Support

  • Does anyone actually believe that Mercy has a near 100% pick rate and the highest support win rate? Even if you hate Mercy, surely this doesn’t look right to you.

DPS

  • Show of hands on who believes that Genji and Mei are the meta picks for DPS right now?
  • Is it in any way believable that Cassidy has a near non-existent pick rate with only a 5.56% win rate?

The final piece is that I can get different data on the site by accessing it differently. As previously shown you can see that Wrecking Ball has a 9.47% pick rate with 63.37. There are 2 other ways to access the data for approximately the same time and as you can see the numbers are slightly different.

Three different pick rates and 3 different win rates from the same site for the same season. Even different data on the KDA ratio and other data also. Which is right? Well, none of them unfortunately.

I know this won’t stop people from using Overbuff. That said, I hope that this opens some people’s eyes to exactly how bad and skewed the data is. It’s not even remotely close. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

17 Likes
2

I don’t know what happened to overbuff but it’s a total mess now! It’s a shame because it was nice to be able to compare statistics for each rank.

5 Likes
3

Just to be clear, because you specified your data was only for NA, is the overbuff data also only for NA? Or is it taking all picks from all regions?

1 Like
4

With Overbuff it shouldn’t matter what region. If one is broken all of them probably are

1 Like
5

Finally someone took the time to show how trash overbuff is with simple pictures that even the simplest forumers could understand

3 Likes
6

Mcree is trash tier so seems very probable. Considering the amount of cheaters blizzard are late to clear out from the top 500 I reckon overbuff is fairly accurate in most cases. Second to this people tend to throw shade on overbuff whenever it does not align with their opinion. Like the mercy mafia that are always in complete denial to rez impact and the toxicity of it. On top of damage boost. On top of pocketing.

7

Yar, agreed. If one region is busted, how would you even trust what it says about others?

I havent looked ar Overbuff in ages, it does day “New Site” or something on the header of their home page, right? Perhaps its just new site glitches?

But yeah. So obviously not right its kinda funny. Im sure theyll look into it sooner or later when they start losing ad revenue :laughing:

2 Likes
8

Which is the biggest irony considering top meta is what everyone seems to be carring about for some reason. :joy:

Actually that one makes a lot of sense.

genji - yes (maybe not meta though). mei not so much.

1 Like
9

Overbuff is taking from all regions but even a quick glance at the leaderboards for other regions would dispell the notion that that is the reason for Overbuff’s discrepancy. It’s just too large for that to be the case.

2 Likes
10

It’s gotten so messy that I’m not even sure it’s worth trusting at middle ranks, even though historically it was good enough there.

Like, we still don’t have Venture shown in the DPS heroes either; that’s a bad sign.

1 Like
11

We also don’t have Champion rank yet.

1 Like
12

Is Sym a support still?

13

always has been.

14

Holy hell you are bad lmfao

5 Likes
15

I imagine this is what AKJ sees through their eyes.

8 Likes
16

Yep, it’s like the worst part to be inaccurate. But also the easiest part to fact check.

17

Ah yes, I too believe that is the most damning piece of evidence on that list and definitely not the 5% win rate on Cass lmao

1 Like
18

You overestimate the iq of this forum. I’m 100% sure there will be some bronze takes incoming claiming this to be evidence that Mercy is the best support in the game

2 Likes
19

To be fair, I mentioned this too. 5% just isn’t believable

2 Likes
20

Ngl, my brain did not register that for some reason. Whoopsie

1 Like