Honestly curious, how do you decide a hero is “received well” to play against and its ok that they are left top tier or receive buffs when they are doing better than half the cast, but “poorly received” heroes are left to rot for years on end?
It just seems like blind favoritism on the developers part and is REALLY starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth and many others. Further buffs to Mcree just seems completely tone deaf and leaves those that main heroes that are doing FAR worse than him extremely jaded and rightly so I might add.
The problem is that Overwatch has a ton of Heroes in it, some of them aren’t easily balanced, and there are those in the community who admittedly care more about getting new content then they do about balancing Heroes.
Furthermore, the community at large is extremely fickle, and will complain regardless of who receives attention, arbitrarily accuse the developers of favoritism, and boldly state that the Heroes who did receive tweaks either didn’t need it, or otherwise didn’t need it as badly as another Hero did.
It’s impossible to please everyone, so Blizzard tends to aim for the lowest common denominator by prioritizing working on Heroes with higher pick rates. It may not be fair, but it makes more sense for them to work on the more popular Heroes first, and save the least popular Heroes for later.
It’s impossible to please everyone, so Blizzard tends to aim for the lowest common denominator by prioritizing working on Heroes with higher pick rates.
Geoff Goodman basically said it himself during that interview ML7 and SVB. That’s how characters ended up getting reworked or barely buff because of not being liked. Geoff Goodman didn’t directly say it but it was implied. ML7 said “Oh that explains the Doomfist rework.” Geoff Goodman nodded a little to confirm in a way.
It’s always the niche hero mains with these type of replies.
That don’t understand that it’s not about these type of heroes damage numbers needing buffs, it’s that the heroes designs are the issues.
Yes some need reworks. The problem is how slow those reworks come. Sometime with years of nothing happening. Leaving some heroes to rot where they are.
Pretty sure they confirmed as much in their last interview with ML7.
They said they “tried making Torb meta for a season despite his unpopularity”, and their player feedback was still negative, so they agreed not to make him meta again. (paraphrasing)
They’re very concious about making “fun” heroes good in many situations and “unfun” heroes more niche.
This is actually something they talked about on the SVB/ML7 dev stream. Bastion was to receive some buff’s, and the community overwhelmingly came out against the idea of Bastion being Meta.
Bastion is not fun to play against, because you have to build a comp to take advantage of his weaknesses, and even then in ranked getting 6 people organized is not fun. Bastion is not fun playing with, because you have to build a comp around him to mitigate his weaknesses, you basically have to baby sit him, and again getting people to do something together in ranked is not often a great experience.
Hog I think could also be an example, and why the game is often not fun to play right now. Hog is not fun to play with because he usually just does his own thing with not much regard to his team. Hog is not fun to play against because you need to punish him as a team, and his hook combo can just end a fight with little you can do about it.