Exactly. Especially with this long into a game’s life, you want to keep those people who’ve committed to the learning so much of it. If the lower level players really cared, they would work harder to improve. People are going to either A., commit and really learn the game, and appreciate the high level balance changes, B. acknowledge that it the game just isn’t for them in the long run and leave, or C. just casually play the game and not care about little changes from time to time.
No. When a strategy involves a high level of coordination and mechanical skill to pull off, you don’t have to “fix” anything. You buff the lower end to make them viable competitors to create upsets.
This makes a counter-snipe from a McCree incredibly exciting when it happens.
To which, Widowmaker is a crowd pleaser. If you were at the grand finals, you would have seen how loud crowds got just from seeing Widow get an assist – on an actual Elim the cheers were so loud you literally couldn’t even hear the casters talk over the loudspeakers from inside the Barclays Center.
Balance does not require iteration. Balance requires players to be happy.
Quake, Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike 1.6, Halo 1-3 (and to name some other games that aren’t FPS games), Melee and Street Fighter 2-4 were all games that achieved fun and exciting gameplay with a nearly completely static balance patch state.
You do not have to balance the game according to “necessity” or “frustration”. The game doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced, because perfect balance is all subjective. You simply need to find a state where a large majority of playtesters and target audience find it fun.
This is outright false.
Capcom outright says that they buff more than nerf in conference panels. They make the game accessible (read, more friendly to lesser skilled players) to encourage players to keep playing and enter the eSports scene so that players can actually upset and rock the existing players, whilst at-the-same-time bolstering their existing pros (if they can continue to stay top dog despite the constant potential upsets from newcomers, it adds to their legacy and gives them more notoriety).
Riot Games has gone on the record that they balance things according to the most impact on the population.
For their balance, they simply remove the most excessively powerful things on the high end (like broken item builds that are numerically too high, or changing character stats that might enable a non-conventional build, so that it more closely aligns with their character archetypes), whilst still keeping the skill ceiling intact.
They don’t balance towards the high end, they just keep the high end in check. There’s a very distinctive difference between the two.
On the low end, they consistently throw the characters that underperform a bone, and redesign older and mechanically harder champs to be more accessible.
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Players below Masters do NOT emulate anything that requires insane mechanical skill.
They emulate everything that’s safe, and when they try unsafe things it usually ends up being a complete dumpster fire.
Dive meta became widespread because of the safety it provides, not because it was used by pros. Golds are running Dive without properly pushing through the choke and sit around and poke for five minutes… but at the height of Dive they ran (and are still running) Dive because the alternative is playing Deathball and trickling because they’re too inexperienced, impatient, and they’re self-aware.
The current Deathball-double-sniper meta however, has a low execution barrier and is comparatively safe, which is why it’s being favored.
The point is…
Pro play should not dictate balance. It needs to be balanced around the middleground where it’ll impact the most number of players (and organically affect pro play). Choosing to cater to pros only hurts the game in the long run.
Just look at what happened to SC2.
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Widowmaker? That’s why they didn’t change her fire rate at all. They nerfed her hook CD, which should allow for more counter-play at higher elos.
Sht widows will always be sht widows.
Either way, people are certainly (starting to) emulate the pro scene. Widowmaker use is up signficantly in every elo compared to dive. Even in bronze/silver, where widow should NEVER be played. During dive, Tracer use when up in every elo, even though 90% of tracers below Masters played like garbage.
Objectively speaking, most Genji/Tracer mains would be better off playing Reaper. Most Widow/Mccree mains would be better off playing S76. And yet they don’t. For some reason, most players prefer to choose high-skill heroes rather than low-skill heroes, even though they lack the skill necessary to use them.
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If widow had a problem its in her weapon/lack of a good secondary ability.
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If the nerf is meant to target higher Elo players, then the nerf should be specific to higher Elo tech. Widowmaker has so little in her kit, but the obvious answer should have been to change the damage charge (maybe revert it back to launch). They should not have touched her mobility, because in lower Elo, that mobility doesn’t even work half of the time.
(specifically bugs #8-15)
Changing the cooldown timer, on something that was already a cointoss for most people, ruins her for most people.
GM has been exempt because players there have reliable healing and literally grapple the floor.
You shouldn’t have to adopt a completely non-intuitive technique to survive. Which is why this…
… rings true.
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I’d rather keep a hero’s strengths and nerf their weaknesses. Otherwise, we end up with a bunch of bland, unbalance-able heroes rather than more unique, situational ones.
that mobility doesn’t even work half of the time.
Here’s a secret: turn your grappling hook sens down to like 30, aim slightly above the ledge you want to grapple to, and cancel the grapple by jumping to make sure you reach the ledge. Boom! Problem solved 90% of the time.
In case you haven’t learned, Wall-climb, Grappling hook and Reinhardt charge must remain the most buggy abilities in the game. That’s a simple rule of Overwatch.
While it would be good for the devs to actually fix their bugs, all we can do is adapt and overcome them.
This is an outright lie. You didn’t even bother looking at the examples.
I’ve tested the hook at every single instance in 10 unit increments. If you place it any between 10-50, it simply doesn’t auto-target to ledges. Even when there’s nothing else within range.
You literally have to look at the ledge in particular in order to grapple to it, and that’s simply not reasonable to expect on an ability that has auto-targeting. If the auto-targeting isn’t going to work, then why have it in the first place?
And the fact that you have to fiddle around with a slider is ridiculous anyways.
Besides, it’s not just auto-targeting issues. There’s issues of the hook simply not reeling you, getting caught on some map geometry but not others, not pulling you up to a ledge and literally just dropping you in a pit. Previously, there were issues of it not even latching to specific walls even if the auto-targeting kicked in, but it was recently patched. These are things that are beyond player control. You can’t fiddle with the slider to fix them.
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I call bs on your first claim. Those 30 is my current widow sens, and you can definately aim slightly above a ledge. Go test it in-game.
*Edit: Need a video?
I don’t need a video.
gfycat. com/WillingAdorableDogwoodclubgall
This is a video fit with 100% sensitivity. If it doesn’t work at 100% sensitivity, it’ll have the exact same issues at 30% sensitivity.
Thank you. Somehow, I lost Trust Level 3 and lost the ability to post links, when literally an hour ago I could… dunno why.
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First off, I said 90% of the time.
Secondly, here’s me trying the same jump:
Notice how the jump-cancel saved me one time.
Here’s proof that it auto-locks at 30% sens:
As a side note, railings are downright stupid in Overwatch. That why it’s common courtesy to remove them at the start of the game.
IMO she was way to dominant in matchmaking i never realized due to no good widows but when i tried quickplay widow was more of a threat then i had realized
People don’t want to counter her with skill.
They want the easiest tank in the game to hardcounter her again by pressing W + M1, because god forbid Widow can escape Winston’s super lame afkable way of killing her. Oh, but it’s totally fine that Winston himself, one of the easiest characters in the game, can stay away from his counters with his mobility!
Gosh, i wonder why every other gaming community looks down on us.
Widow did not need a nerf on consoles. Pharah is much better in GM than either Hanzo or Widow. Heck, Brig has both a higher pickrate and winrate than Widow.
You do when the meta revolves around one playstyle to the point where it crowds out all others, like in those three metas that I listed.
Widow is a crowd-pleaser. So? Like I’m not sure why that is relevant at all to her state of balance.
Tracer and Genji were crowd pleasers too. So was Ana.
Balance absolutely requires iteration. Unless you think we should still be okay with broken crap like McSniper/420 FTH, 150 damage Widow bodyshots, 100% Bionade, Doomfists Rocket Punch being larger than Brig’s shield bash EVER was, and Lucio being mandatory simply as an aura bot?
The difference between all of those games and Overwatch is that they weren’t designed around synergies or constant updates. Not to mention that as many of those games are VERY old, it wasn’t practical to update them to begin with.
Overwatch is constantly changing through new heroes, reworks, maps and so on. Iteration is necessary for a game like Overwatch to achieve better balance.
Perfect balance is impossible to achieve in a game like Overwatch. But that’s not the point. The point of balancing in Overwatch is simply to cut down the outliers.
I would argue that nothing in the game is nearly as broken as some of the “fun” things of launch, with McCree being the best example, but that doesn’t mean that we should be okay with things like Hanzo or Mercy in their current state.
Whether you choose to buff or nerf is largely irrelevant to where you balance around. It all comes down to what has the potential to screw things up more.
You buff Dive to deal with Snipers in their current state, and we end up in a meta where literally no immobile hero can compete.
You nerf Snipers so Dive can deal with them easier, and while Snipers might not be as meta as they once were, Dive heroes, who are already very strong, aren’t buffed to god tier and more heroes can compete.
Whether you buff or nerf is all about the complications each of those choices have. There’s nothing stopping you from balancing around the high end AND buffing weak heroes, though when you’ve got a couple standouts, nerfing them is typically less complex.
And Riot do typically balance around more skilled players:
We take into account the impact of changes at all levels of play, but that doesn’t mean we pretend all players fit one mold. Skilled players make decisions with greater information and execute on those decisions with greater precision. We’re comfortable saying that we look closely at these players to best understand the metagame and balance of League of Legends. We believe balancing around a skillfully - but not perfectly - played game creates the best competitive experience for everyone. It also encourages mastery. Sure, Twisted Fate is challenging to play, but as we better learn his kit, we realize what he’s capable of and start pulling off crazy plays. It feels good and makes the investment well worth it.
Unless you’ve got anything more relevant, I don’t see how that disproves my point, that Riot prefer to primarily balance around people who know what they’re doing, without breaking the game for other levels of play.
Here’s another one.
Now I’m not saying they ONLY balance around pro-play. But I’d also be incredibly surprised if they balanced at anything below Diamond (which is statistically the equivalent of about GM in OW).
They certainly don’t balance around the average player, who typically sits in Silver.
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I love hooking on top of the first pillar cluster on Illios, and it sends me flying into a light post letting me waste 8 (10) seconds of critical positioning time. It might lose us the fight.
By this logic, Tracer needs buffs. She’ve always been pretty trashy below Masters so we cannot balance the game around 1%, right?
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Tracer’s ult seriously does need to be reverted. It feels so worthless now.