I just wish their was more of a emphasize on giving hero's kits that reward a deep understanding of their abilities. Characters like orisa, moria and bastion, anyone can pick these characters and play at about 70% capacity with no extra thought
Yeah I too wish that more heroes included more skill expression in their kit. Unfortunately, as a part of the goal that the game needs to appeal to less skilled and average players, it's sort of inevitable that the game needs to have simpler and easily accessible heroes.
@@Casual314there is nothing wrong in having easy heroes, but when you see moiras in top500 there is something wrong. Easy heroes shouldn't be top tier stable picks.
Well yes and no, u will stagnate with those heroes if you don’t improve, if it was as easy as you say everyone would pick these characters and climb, healbotting on Moira is not how u actually play her
@@anthonyfarias5076I personally dont agree. Even if Moira's kit is simplistic and easy to use, I dont think that discounts the time and effort people in top500 put into the game to reach top500
anyone who thinks balance is easy has never done any gameplay modding work and watched as changing one number by a single point completely and totally breaks everything
I'm not involved in any game development myself, but this is especially true once you also have to account for profitability. Making the game "fun" is often not going to make the game "balanced".
You don’t even need to know about modding or game dev. You just need a lot of experience in gaming across multiple titles that can develop a meta. I have never modded anything in games and I’m not a game dev but I know it isn’t easy. In certain cases it isn’t possible
Riot games just listens to good players and they have one of the best games for over a decade, I think they should just listen to good players instead of going off of the lowest percentages of players for the "casual" experience
I have some disabilities and horrible aim, so "easy" heroes like rein, moira, mercy are the only characters that I can enjoy playing. Playing Reinhart feels so horrible now, every ability cancels rein, and when I can enjoy playing the enemy team becomes full counter. Imo, inst that every character is overpowered (I mean, some are), but there are so many ways to counter a single character that becomes frustrating to play
You can thank blizzard for removing a tank for that one, you always had characters that have the checks and balances of rein in their pockets whether it be Zarya or dva. This game went from being 5D chess to rock, paper, scissors or gun basically where gun would be mauga and would just kill everything
@@GaaraFPS I usually play open queue to play with my friends, wich we play 2 tanks, 1 dps, 1 heal and 1 random player because we play in 4, but yeah, it usually is ram and orisa on the enemy team When blizzard finally decides to add pick ban I will never see orisa again
One thing I'm starting to consider is that this video sort of points towards is that TeamFour probably *knows* the type of balance changes people want but choose not to do them for their own internal reasons. E.g. a 6v6 Quickplay Hacked probably isn't being attempted because players will love the changes regardless of whether or not it's good for the game, as the problem with queue times still exists. At the same time I think stuff like the lack of a tank anti-debuff passive or the presence of immortalities are inexcusable at this point, when every player has come to express their opinions and the ideas haven't even been attempted. And the hero design philosophy definitely needs to be looked at.
Overwatch is not just about balancing a hero's kit. There's team play, communication, aim, smart cooldown usage, proper positioning, game knowledge of hero interactions, map knowledge, min/maxing map objectives and these are all at play at the same time. Some people will do well in one area of their play and poorly in others. What works in one game, doesnt work in the next and sometimes it has nothing to do with a heroes kit and has more to do with your own personal play style. It's up to the player, more than hero balancing, to adjust their approach to the game, whether that's taking a better position, being more defensive, more aggressive, more communicative, smarter cooldown usage, improving their aim, etc. This is what I love about Overwatch. It's a very dynamic game and should never be catered to one trick players. People that are vocal about balancing are either one trick players, or people that have had success in a certain meta and havent been able to adjust when the meta changes.
True, the game does allow you to switch heroes in game so technically the game is "balanced" sort of by definition since every player has access to the same tools. Although sometimes I do think the effectiveness of countering could be toned down, particularly for the tank role.
In my experience its the opposite. The people complaining are the ones who hate one tricking but have to in order to be considered not throwing. E.g when brig came out and she was so strong that it was throwing not to pick her
There is also one factor. The lower you go on ranking, the more counter picking becomes important if you wanna climb. I. Ranks like bronze, silver and gold, you better be prepared to counter everything, because you can't count on your teammates to help you, nothing works as it's supposed to.
Season 9 was the closest thing to balance imo. The only thing that needed to be changed were select tanks and some supports but I agree, its impossible to perfectly balance any game.
S9 was the most balanced season in OW2 by far And then the middle season patch came and fucked shit up by making Mauga the most ridiculously busted shit ever
OW's issue is the abilities. The heros are "Ability first" heros that just so happen to also have a gun. Rather than a person with a gun that also has an ability. So if you counter an ability it makes the hero useless and forces a swap or they will lose. Because the guns arent strong enough. Rainbow Six Siege is very similar as far as being an ability based hero shooter. But in siege someone can "counter pick" you and it barely affects anything. Because a majority of your power comes from your gun. So the counter pick makes it like 15% harder on you, but you can still pop off. In OW if I pick doomfist and they pig Hog, i lose because his ability counters me. Our guns have nothing to do with the exchange.
This is the case with MOBAs in general. However, in games like LoL or DOTA, there's a wide range of heroes to choose from and play around your counters. OW simply doesn't have the hero pool to give you options to play around counters while sticking to a playstyle. You either continue to play doom suboptimally or choose a different archetype.
The game was meant to be like that from the beginning. It was a hero shooter where counterpicking was a core part of the game. This does have some issues, mainly the fact that it stops people playing the hero they want to play if they have to switch to avoid a counterpick or to counterpick themselves. It also has benefits like encouraging players to play a wider range of characters and introducing more team dynamics, such as "go Winston dive comp to counter that widow". In my experience, people only switched off their preferred character to counterpick if the enemy was a big problem, e.g a cracked widow. That was before they tried to reduce counterpicking for some reason by doing some wacky balance changes. To be honest with you, I play the characters that are less kit/cooldown dependent such as cass and soldier because I don't usually like playing around cooldowns and just waiting to be useful, I'd rather have consistent value to add. That being said, I do find characters like zarya and ana rewarding and fun to play, because those cooldows feel very satisfying to get good at, and you still have value as a damage absorber/healer whilst on cooldowns. So essentially, the counterpicking is a core part of the game, but I agree that less kit focused counterpicky characters are generally more fun for me, although I think all characters can be made to be fun regardless of that. I didn't really have a problem with it in 6v6 personally
@nade5557 yes, but picking a close range character to counter a sniper is different. You're countering someone based on their gun skill ability. Just like a shotgun in close quarters counters a sniper in every other shooter with the exception of a quick scope which makes the sniper act like a shotgun. I'm talking about a hero ability that shuts down an entire character. Like old sombra to wrecking ball. Where if someone simply picked sombra then you had to switch or your be reported for throwing. You'd be better off shooting from spawn. Gun skill can almost always be countered by good play. Some abilities can only be countered by going to the persons house and stealing their keyboard so they cannot click E. That hurts the game in my opinion.
@tgs5725 the main reason for picking Winston over any other dive char vs widow is the jump allows him to both close the distance and get to high ground because widow will inevitably be there with her grappling hook. If widow was just running around like solider she wouldn't be much of a threat, her ability to relocate gives her excellent access to high ground, sightlines and backline picks so I would argue that her kit is the important part. But I agree about some abilities (cough suzu cough immortality field). Some characters and abilities need to straight up be removed because they are unabalancable. Also, some people's gun skill is so cracked that it doesn't matter how you play. And the more the game focuses on gun skill rather than abilities, the more it just turns into a tactical shooter where the way to win every engagement is to see the enemy first and shoot the enemy first, and have better gun skill
Another factor that can complicate balance is differences between console and PC. I remember there being some significant differences in some heroes' pick rate and win rate between the two in overwatch's history. I recall mercy being (maybe still is) much more popular on console. And many people on console complained about Pharmercy since pharah wasn't nerfed much on a controller, but hitscans were.
I think OW doesn't need to be perfectly balanced. It's okay to have characters that are great at low elo and mediocre at high elo and vice versa. They could balance heroes in fonction of the skill level they're the most played at, but it would still cause chaos, like idk imagine widow is played a lot in GM, but she gets stomped everytime so they buff her, then she becomes a freaking monster at lower elos because players there are less effective at killing widows, same with the opposite, imagine genji is played a lot in like gold ranks, but he's hard to play so they buff him, then in GM genji becomes an absolute monster because people in GM are way better with genji
In my opinion (another comment, I know), there's a false dichotomy with characters either needing to be high skill or low skill. There are some of characters with low skill floors and high skill ceilings: Reinhardt, Lúcio, Soldier 76, and I'd argue Ramattra/Sigma. What most of these characters offer is a combination of "safe but weak" options (barriers, healbotting) and "strong but difficult/risky" options (charge, melee, hyperspheres, rock, wallriding), making these characters easy to use but hard to master. In the case of characters like soldier, they offer a reliable damage output that is pretty much proportional to level of aim. If designs like these were better respected, balancing low and high levels would be a lot easier. EXAMPLES: - Shift power away from Sojourn's railgun and onto her primary fire (hello Samito) - Make lifegrip something that must be aimed like hog hook, keep autoaim primary fire - Replace Cardiac Overdrive with a more skillful ability (hello if you remember me from the Mauga video comment section) - Lower Rein's barrier HP while buffing his stats elsewhere (although I still maintain that low ranks wouldn't even describe him as powerful) - Tighten Bastion's spread but reduce his DPS - Reduce Mercy's damage boost significantly but give her the ability to amplify it with interact, locking the beam to the target for a few seconds to increase damage boost but with a cooldown. - Remove Suzu invulnerability but keep it for direct hits on allies, lower its CD
For Bastion, here's what I suggest: Lower turret DPS to 240 from 360, but give it a 10% slow effect on hit like Mei, as a sort of suppression mechanic. Replace 50 of his health with armor, so that in turret mode he has 300 effective health with armor stacking with his passive. Increase recon mode's base walk speed and remove grenade's self damage.
Casual You are wrong about one fact. I do not care that Reinhard may or may not have a good win rate in lower elos. Im a silver/gold tank and the experience is miserable. Orissa is just dumb. He absolutely doesnt dominate. Doesnt matter if his win rate is good, if the experience is bad, then the game is bad.
The problem with this approach is that in tring to please everyone, you usually end up pleasing nobody. Not attempting to balance the game because it's "impossible", and also not nearly as much as the raw numbers make it out to be, can only lead to disaster in the end.
and yet 90% of the OW meta feel the exact same.2 73k matchups and I think i've seen like 4 of them, because if you pick off meta hero WHY ARE YOU THROWING DJ MAN?
The voice of reason cometh to tell you why your opinion is wrong in the nicest way possible!. Excellent video, I was actually think about this the other day its okay really to not be balance as long as we are never left in any 1 state of balance for a year at a time again.
I am a game developer/designer and I believe the OW design team lost themselves between balancing and fun aspect of the game. They somehow lost the the identity of their game. Sometimes they say it's a competitive game, but another time saying it's a fun hero game, another time they say it's a shooter game so DPS should be powerful ! Recently they are pushing that it's a competitive game at core, but it's not! Overwatch is really cannot be a competitive game due to design philosophy. A game with such different abilities cannot ever be truly competitive as you mentioned it, cannot be ever balanced! Other hero games such as LOL or Dota they have same abilities for everyone and there are abilities specific to heros but the most important one is the shop items and powerups which is accessible for all players in the game. The roles are also defined better and very similar overall. In overwatch We have tanks that are fast, tanks with machine guns and tanks with or without shield ! We have low range dps and long range sniper dps, we have DPS supports and Healbot supports! We have characters that fly, that blink, that go invisible! We have characters that can or cannot heal themselves for some reason. This game can never be balanced, and therefore can never be truly competitive ! It can be fun though.
You can answer every question with, the devs are incompetent and uppermanagement is horrible. It isn't just a development problem, its not just an uppermanagement problem. People will say one or the other, its both.
I feel like balancing around the skill tier with the most playtime would be the most rational move ; yes there are a very few players in high Elo, but they also put in much more hours into the game that the same number of low ELO players do. That would skew the balance a bit over the average player, which could also motivate them to improve at the game. And no, I'm not just trying to find a way to balance the game around my Elo, being mayelf a very average gold player 🤓
I think they are in a bit of a dilemma. If they make Tracer, Genji, or Winston meta they will make some of the “lower skill” heroes a throw pick A huge part of the player base mains Mercy/LW, and if they can’t get value they’d rather stop playing than swap
For me the balance issues are players skills. I have been in so many high gold and low plat games where the DPS on my team are playing like silver or bronze and the enemy are playing like diamond.
Subset tank has 12 elements and choosing 1 = 12 Combo 1 Subset dps has 17 elements and choosing 2 = 17 Combo 2 Subset support has 10 elements and choosing 2 =10 Combo 2 Total # of ways to produce unordered groups of tank AND dps AND support = tank AND dps AND support = (12 C 1)*( 17 C 2)*(10 C 2) = 73,440 total team comps... consisting of 1 tank, 2 dps AND 2 supports Side note: The possibility you chose the perfect, ideal, god team comp *_before the match starts_* ... regardless of rank, skill, experience, maps or active players is: P(tank,dps,support) = 73,440 ÷ 575,757 = 0.128 =12.8%
Thank you for being reasonable! I’ve always felt the same way about the game. This applies to bugs as well - I’m a frontend developer for a living, and even on the web app I work on, it’s impossible to account for everything. I’ll get bug tickets that have extremely specific requirements to replicate, or push work that has a small impact on an area of the site that nobody thought to check. The bigger a game or app gets, the more challenging it becomes to make perfect fixes or design new features without running into conflicts with other parts. Of course, consumers don’t know this, so they throw the word “incompetent” at any team that isn’t perfect, even if that team did their absolute best to avoid causing problems during development. You can’t know what you can’t know until it happens, and the deadlines and silo-like nature of development means you can’t get every single developer’s input. Sometimes the only way to know that something needs improvement is to make it public and iterate on it after receiving feedback.
I don’t ever think the game will be fully "balanced". But they absolutely can improve the balancing, the balance this season is so bad it’s almost comical. All we wanted pre-season 9 was universal damage and healing nerfs. But in true blizzard fashion, instead of addressing these problems head on, they instead dance around the problems and add things in that just make the problem worse. We didn’t ask for larger health pools, and we definitely didn’t ask for larger projectile sizes. And the reasoning behind Season 9’s changes directly contradict themselves. They added larger health pools to help you survive longer, and to fight against burst damage. But with the larger projectile sizes, you still get melted and tons of damage is still getting thrown at you since people are hitting more shots. And instead of nerfing healing, they introduce the DPS Passive. Which despite it being nerfed in the midseason patch, is still ass to play against. Again, especially on tank, since damage has not been nerfed, and people are hitting more consistent shots, and the DPS passive reduces healing by 15%, it makes playing the role so much worse. I mean, did they even think about how it would feel to play against when they added it into the game? On tank, you’re getting shot by DPS for 90% of the game since… ya know… YOU’RE THE TANK. So if anyone is willingly queueing for Tank they have to be masochists.
I don't think tank is unbalanced. It just requires a new play style. Before you could almost play it like a tankier Dps. Positioning is now more important than ever.
I think what they should do is that from Venture onwards they should ban about a third of the roaster between patches and increase the number of bans as they add more heroes to the game, thus making the game at least a bit easier to balance
I think the Damage role is big and popular enough to split in two if it would make balance easier. Maybe into one that does suppression and map control (eg Soldier, Mei) and one that looks for a kill (eg Widowmaker, Reaper).
And balance has multiple aspects, some of which are subjective. Not only do different groups of people want different things out of the game and have different design philosophies, but there are different skill groups. Ignoring ranks, there are still beginners, casuals, veterans, and professionals. Each of those groups play differently in a vacuum and within their team.
If we compare basketball to overwatch, at the lower levels (pee wee) what kind of rules do they play by? Exactly, barely any. As the kids get more skilled they start taking into account more stuff. It's why people don't like nba is because they have too many rules, the same thing would happen to overwatch at the highest level if we let the highest skilled players dictate the balancing. They honestly could have multiple dev teams working on balancing for each division because they are in that divison. Idk I'm just thinking
Yah, this is pretty much what I feel about balance in video games. It's just an extremely poorly defined objective once you look past the initial description and start trying to nail down what "balanced" actually entails. The order of freedom for the overwatch system is high enough to properly tune the game to play how you want given infinite foresight, the problem is simply deciding where to tune the game in the first place. The problem with balance is not actually doing it but deciding what it is in the first place.
I always thought people complaining about the balance not being 100% perfect were the same people complaining about things like the puddle physics in elden ring. Good God, game devs are only human
Honestly, throw in hero bans like other games. Ban 1 hero for each role. Then make it you can't switch off heroes mid match like DotA and LoL. Whatever comp your team picks, is the team comp you have the remainder of the round, til the next round, you can change comps next round. This way, people acutally work together when picking comps. Last but not least, bring back 6v6. That way, counters aren't a massive difference with the hero bans. (Comp btw)
I think because people like Awkward exist, some people are moving to the opposite extreme of considering the game should not be balanced around higher ELOs. I think the game should be balanced around all ELOs with a slight bias towards higher ELOs because Overwatch's goal is to be treated as a competitive game. There's also the issue of knowledge; authority is by no means a validator of someone's opinion but it *informs* their judgements. Players at higher ELOs may have a more in-depth understanding of the game and thus listening to their perspectives is helpful. I think there is also confusion as to what low rank players actually want. As a Gold-Plat range player hearing the "Rein is strong in lower ELOs" argument for the 400th time is starting to drive me insane. Rein is by no means a powerful character, he's just a low skill-floor character and thus easy to pick up (same as Soldier 76). It's incredibly easy-arguably even easier than in high ELOs-to just pick Bastion and make Rein's day absolutely miserable, and while my opinion may be biased I can't see s single reason people would suggest he's dominating lower ELOs apart from stats, which in Overwatch especially tend to not indicate very much due to the complex environment. I'd argue for the most part in OW2 high-rank metas tend to move downstream into lower ranks due to the fact the game has gotten a lot more simple. Any problems I can hear being described by high skill players are extremely evident in my regular games, especially when playing tank. While I think all voices must be considered I personally think there are valid reasons to listen to some of the higher ranked players.
Was ext500 most of overwatch 1 and GM1 and 2, now im a dad with multiple jobs and extremely casual when it comes to my play time but regardless my skill never went away and when I came back to overwatch 2 to play the game I felt like I was washed and bam magically I’m landing every shot again and Where players praise some of these changes they’re just in such a echo chamber of being happy over these hitbox changes that they forget their are better players that didn’t need these changes and when they get rolled they don’t understand what went wrong.
This is part of the reason I think Blizzard updates the game too often. It’s not like balance is actually going to be achieved, so imo it would be better to give time for people to really figure out the meta and develop based on a relatively unchanging game. For example, I’m a fan of counter-strike and that game generally only has significant gameplay changes every couple years or so. However, it’s very frequent that huge changes in the meta still happen even if there hasn’t been any sort of gameplay update. Simply having more time to strategize and explore different possibilities in a version of the game allows for a dynamically changing meta. Heck pros didn’t even use the aug or sg553 for many years before later finding out that they were actually the best guns in the game. It also gives a nice benefit that I’d be able to still understand how the game works after not playing for a few months. I don’t like how every time I come back to overwatch my favorite characters all play a bit differently.
I'm surprised this isn't common knowledge. Trying to balance 30+ heroes with more maps and modes on the way is impossible. It's much more fun and realistic to give each hero their time in the spotlight instead of nitpicking every single flaw with every other hero only for all the work to go down the drain the moment a new update happens.
I am someone who's only play Overwatch for roughly 30 hours in total (Which I know isn't a lot) but after Mauga's nerfs that he received I could already tell Overwatch had a massive unbalanced scales. Lets just some simple hero's compare to the complicated hero's we have so far simple compare Hanzo, and Widow these two are so far from the scale I can tell which one is the better pick but I can still understand the reason why people pick the other. Hanzo (If headshot) leaving you at Hp 1 isn't enough his second arrow/your team will easily clean up for you. Its not hard to heal off the damage as long you know to stick to a healer or know a Hanzo is around the corner but compare to Widow where your skill to be able to get a headshot will simple reward you with massive amount of damage. Do I feel like Hanzo just needs a Damage Drop depending on both his bow draw, and distance I do because than it makes a better match up to have Hanzo as that Risk/Reward Character his Scatter shots are pretty beefy too so just trying to find that balance is tough but this is what I came up with. These two though aren't the only ones possibly sooner/later the whole character roaster will be like this.
Ow need to make these changes: - reduce Moira attack range - buff McCree tankness when rolling - nerf Mauga damage - fix Doom bugs - reduce Roadhog self healing 👍 Done
Literally just played it for the first time matchmaking put me in with people teamed up whilst I’m solo, game felt massively imbalanced as all hell and just not a fair game for new players
You are correct! OW can't be balanced ever! It's due to the variety of abilities and Ults. They are all different and have a different kind of power lvl! Cause the spectrum is so wide it's impossible to make all heroes relevant! OW is still very good and S9 did make an incredible leap regarding the balancing of all roles! Every role feels meaningful now instead of previous seasons where Support just felt stupidly broken and OP!
They treat the heroes like smash Bros characters. They're fun and unique but too wildly different to balance against each other. I thought they were going to do what street fighter 6 did, instead of balancing the characters you balance the fundamental game mechanics that every character has access to. They were going to do that through the role passives and removing a tank so characters have more agency. It seems like they're not using the role passes as much as I thought they would. I think that was the right direction to have a more balanced experience. That plus a simple philosophy of " more skill to use= more value, less skill to use = less value". But it seems like they're dead set in their ways of balancing with encouraging counter picking and not wanting to upset fans of certain characters.
My argument for the first half of this video in hypotheticals, even if yes a meta will always form, there are certain things that should have never been a thing in overwatch and overwatch 2. At the start of overwatch 2 they made a TON of changes that should have already been in the game. Sombras hack could've been conditional where she has to shoot you first, and only make it interruptable if she gets hit by a certain amount of damage, and only turn of CERTAIN ULTS, like why does it turn off winstons ult? another example is doomfist should've always been a tank/off tank, Ana's nade defined whole metas (goats) when her normal shots could have applied anti heal to enemies she hit then if they're hit by the nade turn off healing, Mercy should have to at least aim closer to her target to get great healing, I could go on but yeah make the impactful part of a characters kit more conditional.
The main issue is that fps games are never balanced because they are ever changing Even if we got the formula just right right now A new hero will come out and throw a wrench in all of that perfect balance Thats the issue with balancing this game No matter how balanced it manages to get As it evolved with new heros and large changes to the game Like the larger pools of health, dps passive, etc The game shifts drastically and with it soe does the meta Wrecking ball was horrible for so long and after the health changes ball was suddenly S tier meta with no meaningful changes to him specifically Its not realistic to be able to balance everything perfectly unless you make a stale game that never changes and only balance the game for a long time
I think people who have problems with the 'easy' heroes basically have a problem with their value ceiling. The value ceiling of a Moira should not be higher than Ana, as her skill ceiling is also comparatively lower, essentially making Ana an objectively worse pick. Having low skill ceiling heroes is fine as long as they are strictly weaker than high skill heroes in most situations. But I guess that would make them less fun and Blizzard's bank account would not like that
Moira wouldn't be that bad if she wasn't so forgiving at the same time. Fade CD is just too low and she shouldn't be able to fade during her ult. That used to be the one time she had to be smart about her surroundings but nope. We can't have moira needing to think in this day and age.
I thought it was a good video overall, but you missed a key component: The developers. Their incompetence or unwillingness to balance a game, is the primary reason games become unbalanced. It is not simply because it is hard, or because there's a certain hero has mechanics that can never be balanced across skill levels. The developers design the heroes. They design the map, the items, everything about the game, actually. Including whether to put any effort in and maintain skill expression, rather than just go the route of full on pay to win. And it just so happens that the big companies nowadays, care about money first, good, skill expressive game, second. But if they aren't an eastern game company, they won't shamelessly make it pay to win. Instead, they will do things like deliberately make new, popular, or heroes for which they're releasing or making a skin for, unbalanced. This is the true utilitarian approach they're utilizing. It isn't exactly an accident that most streamers are able to predict if some newly released hero, or hot balance change, will result in balance or not with 90% accuracy. The answer is because the devs most likely don't care, or are persuing different goals. Outside of greed, there's designer ego, sunk cost fallacy, prioritizing casual "fun" over skill expression, and so much more.
What balance is is easy. Every hero has a legitimate reason to be played. Some heroes cancel others but non are so weak they don't have a good matchup or so strong they cancel everything else. A hero not being strong or beinf strong in a meta doesn't mean its unbalanced. Soldier is strong right now but you can choose heroes that punish his offangles to challenge him. Sojourn is op. She can take offangles but also immediately switch and get out without issue and switch to more poke. You can't challenge that.
Honestly if you wanna balance the game rein, Winston, echo, genji, tracer the best characters because they’re neutral into everything and they aren’t oppressive like the hitscans to certain types of heroes and if these characters are meta other characters can be viable in every situation as well, last but not least they should revert to 6v6
Balance is never the biggest issue. Matchmaking is. I quit ow2 because I realized the devs will always be too stupid to fix it. Btw, I have five accounts in total, two GM, one hard stuck diamond, one hard stuck plat, one hard stuck gold. Matchmaking is a joke. In my gold account, I consistently die 5x less and kill 2x or 3x times more than the other dps. Everyone in the lobby says I do not belong here. Guess what, after I win a few super easy games, immediately I get matched with a leaver or thrower in my team in the next few matches. So your performance does not matter. Your rank is predetermined and then they just force a 50% win rate at that rank. Even if not intentionally, but the overall outcome of their stupid algorithm simply behaves like that. I am a experienced programmer myself. I can tell that the programmers currently working on this at Blizzard is a POS and single-handedly ruined this game and should be responsible for more than 50% of the player base and revenue loss. Quit this game ASAP if you do not have a 5 stack.
Text wall just to say "don't play unless you're 5 stacked" if people say you don't belong there and it's blatantly obvious, you should climb out of it whether or not it's a 50/50. Like GM to Gold isnt comparable
My argument for balencing around top level players is that skilled matchmaking should mean that players a placed proportionately to the level anyway. The balence of the game doesn't result in changes to gameplay expirence to the same degree in lower levels beucase people enjoy playing what makes them win and if they wanna win playing the easy heros then that makes the game more enjoyable for those people. If u wanna play play tracer for an hour every second weekend your expirence of those games will feel the same reletive to people who play everyday beucase u will be placed against other players who are equally as bad as u.
as someoene that has played both ow1 and ow2. i think that it is goodd for the game to change every so often that way the meta doesnt get stale but it their is such thing as to much change. i think what we all aim to see as veteran players from ow1 is that golden/glory day of that one october patch in ow1 where it felt amazing to play where nothing felt annoying or to strong and it also felt like that on the opposite end of where nothing felt to weak or useless but my problem with this is this. if it stayed that way for a long time would people be as invested into it. no way of telling but i would like to see major meta shifts like when they added that damage passive where it shakes up playstyle/team comps/the core mechanic of the game/and overall how the game feels to play. i know league of legends gets alot of hate for the way they balance their game but they arent afraid to hotfix any core issue with the update even with how often the game updates. i think this would be an intresting way to take it because it can make it feel fresh and new every 2 weeks instead of every month andd a half or mid season. this is just my opinon though. i like 6v6 more tho lol. way more fun and intresting as far as skill floor/cieling and how far each one can go. that was what made ow a beautiful game.
Designing around having as close to perfect balance as possible was, and will always be, a mistake. The game should be designed around how fun and/or frustrating each hero is to play as or against, not around having a higher or lower winrate. After all, if everyone's having the time of their life, who cares what the balance is?
I studied computer science which had a bit of math. The most "advanced" math courses I've taken are only intro to multivariable calculus, intro to linear algebra, and intro to probability which is where my fairly elementary understanding of combinatorics comes from.
My only desire when comes to balanced is make the counterplay interactions against tanks less effective. Some would say "go back to 6v6" but I think we could still find a better spot lowering the counterplay style (or the "f*ck you tank", as I like to call) on 5v5 Some changes that I have in mind is like D.va being able to mitigate some damage from beams like sym, mei and Zarya. Doom block not being completly cancelled by Hog hook and Orisa javalin. Or even make a passive where tanks recive a lower time on the effect of debuffs, idk Then if tanks become too agressive by lower the counterplay, ajust their numbers, make them do less damage, have less armor and this type stuff On the end of the things, we would still have the 50% winrate across the tanks like before, but I promise that the FEELING of playing tank would feel so much better than before.
I have to disagree, because while i cannot say what someone elses fun is, i can tell you why we shouldnt prioritize their fun. Lower ranked players are like babys, theyll play whatever is the easiest, i highly doubt anyone is out there excited to play torb specifically, which means you can probably inject some skill into him and players wont mind, the ones who genuinely love his design probably wont be upset to get a rework that makes him more engaging, like maybe give him a second or 3 mech options, like a drone or what have you, and change his identity back to an engineer rather than tank buster since i also think weakening tank busters would make the hame feel more balanced as well. But also no ones asking for the complete harmonization of the skill curves, theyre asking for more similar ones to ease balance so its not such a whip lash between sojourn and the meta thats been in silver and gold for a decade almost now of torb, bastion, moira and orisa so when we get another sojourn it doesnt ruin the game for months just so the lower ranks can enjoy her abit. And my past point (sorry for the rant) is that the skill floor is only as inaccessible as the easiest to abuse hero, if you were to remove torb, those players will default to the next easiest and now the baseline easiest hero changes and this is because even a baby can have fun in dark souls solo, and the same applies to an online game with skill based match making, so if we just keep the feel of heros but increase their skill floors and than lower the skill ceiling as well like we did with season 9 and bam, you got much closer skill teirs now without the game being to easy or to hard, like were just asking for it to be closer so the games easier to balance as a whole, and if the skill ceiling takes a hit, i think its onky fair the floor does too lol
I think a big part of the motivation for creating heroes with different skill-curves is simply to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, which is a typical goal for profit-driven game design. I agree that equalizing the skill curves would make the game easier to balance, but it's never going to happen for any game that needs to make as much money as possible.
@@Casual314 while that's probably true as the shareholders will take it as the safest bet, it doesnt mean its actually the safest, since when mauga dropped so did the games playerbase, no one liked mauga and I just gotta wonder how many maugas before people move on? Because if you removed mauga rn no one would complain but you try 3 or 4 months from now and I bet you'll make some people mad, people always hate these heros than a small community slowly likes them and I just dont think moving so far away from the core hero philosophies of stuff like rein, winston and mercy is a good idea, creating heros with the goal of making players not need to try will catch up with them eventually.
@@Casual314 they also keep changing the format to try and find easier ways of balancing but if you look at what the format changes have done, theyve actually done the opposite, because in 6v6, easy heros had more of a place in the game, the game itself was more decision heavy giving all heros more decisions to make while 5v5 is more death match like, where youre more on your own with more 1v1s happening, and people will obviously hate easy heros more when the game has more interacts like small 1v1s. Than you now have the increase of hp and bullets, and while this definitely fixed the game, it fixed the game inna way where it made dive meta, and everything easier to hit, it like evened it out but what happens when they now balance the game into a slow sustain meta again? Were gonna have heavy healing with hogs orisas and maugas running around and everyone aims less now which I think will feel worse inna sustaine meta so this fixation on trying to make everything playable might just be shooting themselves in the foot when they could just simply bring skill curves closer and than people wont mind the mauga and sustain metas as much. Because one of these times theyll walk the game into a corner like s8 and the s9 patch wont be a success and than I wonder what happens then.
I believe Orisa underperforms in terms of win rate across all ranks, and so that's the main reasoning. Whether that's justified, most people would say no just due to how unfun she is to play against.
There is no excuse for bad balancing because blizzard has failed to even reach step one which is communication. Trying to speak to blizzard is like trying to speak to a brick wall. Nothing they do is reasonable and should not be excused because they refuse to talk to us.
At the start of season 9 the game was balance they just need to Nerf Ashe Cassy Moira and Lucio that where too strong and buff genji rein hog and ana that were in a low key that's all
Not perfect balance, but lets say skillful hero vs nonskillful hero, skillful should have the upper hand because why is it fair someone less skilled can hop in and kill you with minimal aim, if u want to play someone that is easy that's fair, but it shouldn't be such a free easy kill on someone who takes skill
it is balanced when you play the right characters. don’t play the broken characters and the game is balanced. simple. why we need to add a ban system so these boosted as mfs will be forced to play real characters.
It will never be balanced cause people complain about every little detail and th devs feel they need to fix everything which in turn just makes it even more unbalanced. Even if these RUclipsrs who think they can fix the game will end up in the same place. They think they have the perfect patch, then someone exploites something that's op, and then everyone complains. You can't fix it lmao
If you keep updating the game it’ll never be balanced. Like Hearthstone could’ve just been one and done and it would live forever like Chess but with updates it’s in a different category entirely yes it will “live” “forever” but not like Chess
Yeah, the need for a constant stream of new content is another major reason that games are so difficult to balance. Every new hero that's introduced will inevitably introduce balance issues. And coupled with the fact that updates are fairly infrequent, there isn't enough time to experiment with changes before the next hero is released.
The balance of the game matters, yes, but even if Overwatch were to be balanced, then what? The game lacks the adrenaline of tac shooters, or BRs, so why bother?
I just wish their was more of a emphasize on giving hero's kits that reward a deep understanding of their abilities. Characters like orisa, moria and bastion, anyone can pick these characters and play at about 70% capacity with no extra thought
Junkrat is an example of easy but really complex character, junkrat takes the more skill to play the more enemies are better
Yeah I too wish that more heroes included more skill expression in their kit. Unfortunately, as a part of the goal that the game needs to appeal to less skilled and average players, it's sort of inevitable that the game needs to have simpler and easily accessible heroes.
@@Casual314there is nothing wrong in having easy heroes, but when you see moiras in top500 there is something wrong. Easy heroes shouldn't be top tier stable picks.
Well yes and no, u will stagnate with those heroes if you don’t improve, if it was as easy as you say everyone would pick these characters and climb, healbotting on Moira is not how u actually play her
@@anthonyfarias5076I personally dont agree. Even if Moira's kit is simplistic and easy to use, I dont think that discounts the time and effort people in top500 put into the game to reach top500
I'm convinced Casual is just an Overwatch plant. He seems to always be the voice of reason for the game
I was sent from another planet to attempt to bring balance to the Overwatch community
Yeh he a plant to provide therapy lol….. he s our overwatch therapist
@@Casual314the Avatar
anyone who thinks balance is easy has never done any gameplay modding work and watched as changing one number by a single point completely and totally breaks everything
I'm not involved in any game development myself, but this is especially true once you also have to account for profitability. Making the game "fun" is often not going to make the game "balanced".
You don’t even need to know about modding or game dev. You just need a lot of experience in gaming across multiple titles that can develop a meta. I have never modded anything in games and I’m not a game dev but I know it isn’t easy. In certain cases it isn’t possible
Riot games just listens to good players and they have one of the best games for over a decade, I think they should just listen to good players instead of going off of the lowest percentages of players for the "casual" experience
@@CreamYankie that just makes it worse. Why only cater to a minority of players?
I have some disabilities and horrible aim, so "easy" heroes like rein, moira, mercy are the only characters that I can enjoy playing. Playing Reinhart feels so horrible now, every ability cancels rein, and when I can enjoy playing the enemy team becomes full counter. Imo, inst that every character is overpowered (I mean, some are), but there are so many ways to counter a single character that becomes frustrating to play
You can thank blizzard for removing a tank for that one, you always had characters that have the checks and balances of rein in their pockets whether it be Zarya or dva.
This game went from being 5D chess to rock, paper, scissors or gun basically where gun would be mauga and would just kill everything
@@GaaraFPS I usually play open queue to play with my friends, wich we play 2 tanks, 1 dps, 1 heal and 1 random player because we play in 4, but yeah, it usually is ram and orisa on the enemy team
When blizzard finally decides to add pick ban I will never see orisa again
One thing I'm starting to consider is that this video sort of points towards is that TeamFour probably *knows* the type of balance changes people want but choose not to do them for their own internal reasons. E.g. a 6v6 Quickplay Hacked probably isn't being attempted because players will love the changes regardless of whether or not it's good for the game, as the problem with queue times still exists.
At the same time I think stuff like the lack of a tank anti-debuff passive or the presence of immortalities are inexcusable at this point, when every player has come to express their opinions and the ideas haven't even been attempted. And the hero design philosophy definitely needs to be looked at.
Overwatch is not just about balancing a hero's kit. There's team play, communication, aim, smart cooldown usage, proper positioning, game knowledge of hero interactions, map knowledge, min/maxing map objectives and these are all at play at the same time. Some people will do well in one area of their play and poorly in others. What works in one game, doesnt work in the next and sometimes it has nothing to do with a heroes kit and has more to do with your own personal play style. It's up to the player, more than hero balancing, to adjust their approach to the game, whether that's taking a better position, being more defensive, more aggressive, more communicative, smarter cooldown usage, improving their aim, etc. This is what I love about Overwatch. It's a very dynamic game and should never be catered to one trick players.
People that are vocal about balancing are either one trick players, or people that have had success in a certain meta and havent been able to adjust when the meta changes.
True, the game does allow you to switch heroes in game so technically the game is "balanced" sort of by definition since every player has access to the same tools. Although sometimes I do think the effectiveness of countering could be toned down, particularly for the tank role.
In my experience its the opposite. The people complaining are the ones who hate one tricking but have to in order to be considered not throwing. E.g when brig came out and she was so strong that it was throwing not to pick her
There is also one factor. The lower you go on ranking, the more counter picking becomes important if you wanna climb. I. Ranks like bronze, silver and gold, you better be prepared to counter everything, because you can't count on your teammates to help you, nothing works as it's supposed to.
Season 9 was the closest thing to balance imo. The only thing that needed to be changed were select tanks and some supports but I agree, its impossible to perfectly balance any game.
Some DPS also fell to obscurity in s9, most notably junkrat who has no use without 2-shot
@@Thispersonisrealgood 😂
tank feels awfukk
@@Thispersonisreal I was getting into Rat but then they just killed him :(
So much more fun than just point and click with Cass or Soldier
Doesn't help ppl can't see how much skill Rat can take.@@Thispersonisreal
S9 was the most balanced season in OW2 by far
And then the middle season patch came and fucked shit up by making Mauga the most ridiculously busted shit ever
OW's issue is the abilities. The heros are "Ability first" heros that just so happen to also have a gun. Rather than a person with a gun that also has an ability. So if you counter an ability it makes the hero useless and forces a swap or they will lose. Because the guns arent strong enough. Rainbow Six Siege is very similar as far as being an ability based hero shooter. But in siege someone can "counter pick" you and it barely affects anything. Because a majority of your power comes from your gun. So the counter pick makes it like 15% harder on you, but you can still pop off.
In OW if I pick doomfist and they pig Hog, i lose because his ability counters me. Our guns have nothing to do with the exchange.
This is the case with MOBAs in general. However, in games like LoL or DOTA, there's a wide range of heroes to choose from and play around your counters. OW simply doesn't have the hero pool to give you options to play around counters while sticking to a playstyle. You either continue to play doom suboptimally or choose a different archetype.
@@yogran1 yeah you're right about that.
The game was meant to be like that from the beginning. It was a hero shooter where counterpicking was a core part of the game.
This does have some issues, mainly the fact that it stops people playing the hero they want to play if they have to switch to avoid a counterpick or to counterpick themselves. It also has benefits like encouraging players to play a wider range of characters and introducing more team dynamics, such as "go Winston dive comp to counter that widow".
In my experience, people only switched off their preferred character to counterpick if the enemy was a big problem, e.g a cracked widow. That was before they tried to reduce counterpicking for some reason by doing some wacky balance changes.
To be honest with you, I play the characters that are less kit/cooldown dependent such as cass and soldier because I don't usually like playing around cooldowns and just waiting to be useful, I'd rather have consistent value to add. That being said, I do find characters like zarya and ana rewarding and fun to play, because those cooldows feel very satisfying to get good at, and you still have value as a damage absorber/healer whilst on cooldowns.
So essentially, the counterpicking is a core part of the game, but I agree that less kit focused counterpicky characters are generally more fun for me, although I think all characters can be made to be fun regardless of that. I didn't really have a problem with it in 6v6 personally
@nade5557 yes, but picking a close range character to counter a sniper is different. You're countering someone based on their gun skill ability. Just like a shotgun in close quarters counters a sniper in every other shooter with the exception of a quick scope which makes the sniper act like a shotgun.
I'm talking about a hero ability that shuts down an entire character. Like old sombra to wrecking ball. Where if someone simply picked sombra then you had to switch or your be reported for throwing. You'd be better off shooting from spawn. Gun skill can almost always be countered by good play. Some abilities can only be countered by going to the persons house and stealing their keyboard so they cannot click E. That hurts the game in my opinion.
@tgs5725 the main reason for picking Winston over any other dive char vs widow is the jump allows him to both close the distance and get to high ground because widow will inevitably be there with her grappling hook. If widow was just running around like solider she wouldn't be much of a threat, her ability to relocate gives her excellent access to high ground, sightlines and backline picks so I would argue that her kit is the important part.
But I agree about some abilities (cough suzu cough immortality field). Some characters and abilities need to straight up be removed because they are unabalancable.
Also, some people's gun skill is so cracked that it doesn't matter how you play. And the more the game focuses on gun skill rather than abilities, the more it just turns into a tactical shooter where the way to win every engagement is to see the enemy first and shoot the enemy first, and have better gun skill
Boromir: Overwatch has no balance. Overwatch needs no balance.
Boromir ❤
Another factor that can complicate balance is differences between console and PC. I remember there being some significant differences in some heroes' pick rate and win rate between the two in overwatch's history. I recall mercy being (maybe still is) much more popular on console. And many people on console complained about Pharmercy since pharah wasn't nerfed much on a controller, but hitscans were.
I think OW doesn't need to be perfectly balanced. It's okay to have characters that are great at low elo and mediocre at high elo and vice versa. They could balance heroes in fonction of the skill level they're the most played at, but it would still cause chaos, like idk imagine widow is played a lot in GM, but she gets stomped everytime so they buff her, then she becomes a freaking monster at lower elos because players there are less effective at killing widows, same with the opposite, imagine genji is played a lot in like gold ranks, but he's hard to play so they buff him, then in GM genji becomes an absolute monster because people in GM are way better with genji
In my opinion (another comment, I know), there's a false dichotomy with characters either needing to be high skill or low skill.
There are some of characters with low skill floors and high skill ceilings: Reinhardt, Lúcio, Soldier 76, and I'd argue Ramattra/Sigma.
What most of these characters offer is a combination of "safe but weak" options (barriers, healbotting) and "strong but difficult/risky" options (charge, melee, hyperspheres, rock, wallriding), making these characters easy to use but hard to master. In the case of characters like soldier, they offer a reliable damage output that is pretty much proportional to level of aim.
If designs like these were better respected, balancing low and high levels would be a lot easier.
EXAMPLES:
- Shift power away from Sojourn's railgun and onto her primary fire (hello Samito)
- Make lifegrip something that must be aimed like hog hook, keep autoaim primary fire
- Replace Cardiac Overdrive with a more skillful ability (hello if you remember me from the Mauga video comment section)
- Lower Rein's barrier HP while buffing his stats elsewhere (although I still maintain that low ranks wouldn't even describe him as powerful)
- Tighten Bastion's spread but reduce his DPS
- Reduce Mercy's damage boost significantly but give her the ability to amplify it with interact, locking the beam to the target for a few seconds to increase damage boost but with a cooldown.
- Remove Suzu invulnerability but keep it for direct hits on allies, lower its CD
Wait this balancing philosophy kinda cooks
For Bastion, here's what I suggest:
Lower turret DPS to 240 from 360, but give it a 10% slow effect on hit like Mei, as a sort of suppression mechanic.
Replace 50 of his health with armor, so that in turret mode he has 300 effective health with armor stacking with his passive.
Increase recon mode's base walk speed and remove grenade's self damage.
Casual You are wrong about one fact. I do not care that Reinhard may or may not have a good win rate in lower elos. Im a silver/gold tank and the experience is miserable. Orissa is just dumb. He absolutely doesnt dominate. Doesnt matter if his win rate is good, if the experience is bad, then the game is bad.
The problem with this approach is that in tring to please everyone, you usually end up pleasing nobody. Not attempting to balance the game because it's "impossible", and also not nearly as much as the raw numbers make it out to be, can only lead to disaster in the end.
and yet 90% of the OW meta feel the exact same.2 73k matchups and I think i've seen like 4 of them, because if you pick off meta hero WHY ARE YOU THROWING DJ MAN?
This is so well written and so well voiced. I enjoyed the gameplay and the music too! I am surprised you don’t have more subscribers!
The voice of reason cometh to tell you why your opinion is wrong in the nicest way possible!.
Excellent video, I was actually think about this the other day its okay really to not be balance as long as we are never left in any 1 state of balance for a year at a time again.
Isn't it funny how nice correction can come across?
I am a game developer/designer and I believe the OW design team lost themselves between balancing and fun aspect of the game. They somehow lost the the identity of their game.
Sometimes they say it's a competitive game, but another time saying it's a fun hero game, another time they say it's a shooter game so DPS should be powerful ! Recently they are pushing that it's a competitive game at core, but it's not! Overwatch is really cannot be a competitive game due to design philosophy. A game with such different abilities cannot ever be truly competitive as you mentioned it, cannot be ever balanced!
Other hero games such as LOL or Dota they have same abilities for everyone and there are abilities specific to heros but the most important one is the shop items and powerups which is accessible for all players in the game. The roles are also defined better and very similar overall. In overwatch We have tanks that are fast, tanks with machine guns and tanks with or without shield ! We have low range dps and long range sniper dps, we have DPS supports and Healbot supports! We have characters that fly, that blink, that go invisible! We have characters that can or cannot heal themselves for some reason.
This game can never be balanced, and therefore can never be truly competitive ! It can be fun though.
you really derailed from kinda sensical to flat out parrot non sense lol by your logic q competitive game sounds like the most boring slop ever made
I concur with the October 2020 patch.
You’ve quickly become my favorite OW2 content creator, Casual. Thank you for the high quality videos and i’m looking forward to the next one!
You can answer every question with, the devs are incompetent and uppermanagement is horrible. It isn't just a development problem, its not just an uppermanagement problem. People will say one or the other, its both.
I worry a voice of reason won't be popular in the community but it's a welcome addition😊
I feel like balancing around the skill tier with the most playtime would be the most rational move ; yes there are a very few players in high Elo, but they also put in much more hours into the game that the same number of low ELO players do. That would skew the balance a bit over the average player, which could also motivate them to improve at the game. And no, I'm not just trying to find a way to balance the game around my Elo, being mayelf a very average gold player 🤓
I think they are in a bit of a dilemma. If they make Tracer, Genji, or Winston meta they will make some of the “lower skill” heroes a throw pick
A huge part of the player base mains Mercy/LW, and if they can’t get value they’d rather stop playing than swap
Been a long time since ive seen genji meta. If hes ever good they make sure it doesnt last long.
Hey this script is Chat Gpt
For me the balance issues are players skills. I have been in so many high gold and low plat games where the DPS on my team are playing like silver or bronze and the enemy are playing like diamond.
Once they remove genji, Ill be happy
Subset tank has 12 elements and choosing 1 = 12 Combo 1
Subset dps has 17 elements and choosing 2 = 17 Combo 2
Subset support has 10 elements and choosing 2 =10 Combo 2
Total # of ways to produce unordered groups of tank AND dps AND support
= tank AND dps AND support
= (12 C 1)*( 17 C 2)*(10 C 2)
= 73,440 total team comps... consisting of 1 tank, 2 dps AND 2 supports
Side note:
The possibility you chose the perfect, ideal, god team comp *_before the match starts_* ... regardless of rank, skill, experience, maps or active players is:
P(tank,dps,support)
= 73,440 ÷ 575,757
= 0.128
=12.8%
Thank you for being reasonable! I’ve always felt the same way about the game. This applies to bugs as well - I’m a frontend developer for a living, and even on the web app I work on, it’s impossible to account for everything. I’ll get bug tickets that have extremely specific requirements to replicate, or push work that has a small impact on an area of the site that nobody thought to check. The bigger a game or app gets, the more challenging it becomes to make perfect fixes or design new features without running into conflicts with other parts.
Of course, consumers don’t know this, so they throw the word “incompetent” at any team that isn’t perfect, even if that team did their absolute best to avoid causing problems during development. You can’t know what you can’t know until it happens, and the deadlines and silo-like nature of development means you can’t get every single developer’s input. Sometimes the only way to know that something needs improvement is to make it public and iterate on it after receiving feedback.
Overwatch actually can be balanced. They just need to stop releasing new heroes for the game.
I don’t ever think the game will be fully "balanced". But they absolutely can improve the balancing, the balance this season is so bad it’s almost comical. All we wanted pre-season 9 was universal damage and healing nerfs. But in true blizzard fashion, instead of addressing these problems head on, they instead dance around the problems and add things in that just make the problem worse. We didn’t ask for larger health pools, and we definitely didn’t ask for larger projectile sizes. And the reasoning behind Season 9’s changes directly contradict themselves. They added larger health pools to help you survive longer, and to fight against burst damage. But with the larger projectile sizes, you still get melted and tons of damage is still getting thrown at you since people are hitting more shots.
And instead of nerfing healing, they introduce the DPS Passive. Which despite it being nerfed in the midseason patch, is still ass to play against. Again, especially on tank, since damage has not been nerfed, and people are hitting more consistent shots, and the DPS passive reduces healing by 15%, it makes playing the role so much worse. I mean, did they even think about how it would feel to play against when they added it into the game? On tank, you’re getting shot by DPS for 90% of the game since… ya know… YOU’RE THE TANK. So if anyone is willingly queueing for Tank they have to be masochists.
I don't think tank is unbalanced. It just requires a new play style. Before you could almost play it like a tankier Dps. Positioning is now more important than ever.
@@danielkim9997 hiding behind cover half of the game is boring, thats the problem
Yea if I want that experience I'd play CS @@Vinicius9515
I think what they should do is that from Venture onwards they should ban about a third of the roaster between patches and increase the number of bans as they add more heroes to the game, thus making the game at least a bit easier to balance
I think the Damage role is big and popular enough to split in two if it would make balance easier.
Maybe into one that does suppression and map control (eg Soldier, Mei) and one that looks for a kill (eg Widowmaker, Reaper).
And balance has multiple aspects, some of which are subjective. Not only do different groups of people want different things out of the game and have different design philosophies, but there are different skill groups. Ignoring ranks, there are still beginners, casuals, veterans, and professionals. Each of those groups play differently in a vacuum and within their team.
If we compare basketball to overwatch, at the lower levels (pee wee) what kind of rules do they play by? Exactly, barely any. As the kids get more skilled they start taking into account more stuff. It's why people don't like nba is because they have too many rules, the same thing would happen to overwatch at the highest level if we let the highest skilled players dictate the balancing. They honestly could have multiple dev teams working on balancing for each division because they are in that divison. Idk I'm just thinking
Yah, this is pretty much what I feel about balance in video games. It's just an extremely poorly defined objective once you look past the initial description and start trying to nail down what "balanced" actually entails. The order of freedom for the overwatch system is high enough to properly tune the game to play how you want given infinite foresight, the problem is simply deciding where to tune the game in the first place.
The problem with balance is not actually doing it but deciding what it is in the first place.
I always thought people complaining about the balance not being 100% perfect were the same people complaining about things like the puddle physics in elden ring.
Good God, game devs are only human
Honestly, throw in hero bans like other games. Ban 1 hero for each role. Then make it you can't switch off heroes mid match like DotA and LoL. Whatever comp your team picks, is the team comp you have the remainder of the round, til the next round, you can change comps next round. This way, people acutally work together when picking comps. Last but not least, bring back 6v6. That way, counters aren't a massive difference with the hero bans. (Comp btw)
I think because people like Awkward exist, some people are moving to the opposite extreme of considering the game should not be balanced around higher ELOs. I think the game should be balanced around all ELOs with a slight bias towards higher ELOs because Overwatch's goal is to be treated as a competitive game. There's also the issue of knowledge; authority is by no means a validator of someone's opinion but it *informs* their judgements. Players at higher ELOs may have a more in-depth understanding of the game and thus listening to their perspectives is helpful.
I think there is also confusion as to what low rank players actually want. As a Gold-Plat range player hearing the "Rein is strong in lower ELOs" argument for the 400th time is starting to drive me insane. Rein is by no means a powerful character, he's just a low skill-floor character and thus easy to pick up (same as Soldier 76). It's incredibly easy-arguably even easier than in high ELOs-to just pick Bastion and make Rein's day absolutely miserable, and while my opinion may be biased I can't see s single reason people would suggest he's dominating lower ELOs apart from stats, which in Overwatch especially tend to not indicate very much due to the complex environment.
I'd argue for the most part in OW2 high-rank metas tend to move downstream into lower ranks due to the fact the game has gotten a lot more simple. Any problems I can hear being described by high skill players are extremely evident in my regular games, especially when playing tank.
While I think all voices must be considered I personally think there are valid reasons to listen to some of the higher ranked players.
Was ext500 most of overwatch 1 and GM1 and 2, now im a dad with multiple jobs and extremely casual when it comes to my play time but regardless my skill never went away and when I came back to overwatch 2 to play the game I felt like I was washed and bam magically I’m landing every shot again and Where players praise some of these changes they’re just in such a echo chamber of being happy over these hitbox changes that they forget their are better players that didn’t need these changes and when they get rolled they don’t understand what went wrong.
This is part of the reason I think Blizzard updates the game too often. It’s not like balance is actually going to be achieved, so imo it would be better to give time for people to really figure out the meta and develop based on a relatively unchanging game.
For example, I’m a fan of counter-strike and that game generally only has significant gameplay changes every couple years or so. However, it’s very frequent that huge changes in the meta still happen even if there hasn’t been any sort of gameplay update. Simply having more time to strategize and explore different possibilities in a version of the game allows for a dynamically changing meta. Heck pros didn’t even use the aug or sg553 for many years before later finding out that they were actually the best guns in the game.
It also gives a nice benefit that I’d be able to still understand how the game works after not playing for a few months. I don’t like how every time I come back to overwatch my favorite characters all play a bit differently.
In a world of clickbait and dumb, super-polarized takes, we still have this man as a bastion (Bastion?) of hope.
I'm surprised this isn't common knowledge. Trying to balance 30+ heroes with more maps and modes on the way is impossible. It's much more fun and realistic to give each hero their time in the spotlight instead of nitpicking every single flaw with every other hero only for all the work to go down the drain the moment a new update happens.
Im sorry but are you shooting with SPACE AND LEFT SHIFT?!?!?!?!?! (oh wait didnt see the hand cam ive never seen lefty gameplay)
Yeah spacebar is primary fire, and for Mauga shift is secondary fire, because I don't like clicking/holding down the mouse buttons while I'm aiming.
I am someone who's only play Overwatch for roughly 30 hours in total (Which I know isn't a lot) but after Mauga's nerfs that he received I could already tell Overwatch had a massive unbalanced scales. Lets just some simple hero's compare to the complicated hero's we have so far simple compare Hanzo, and Widow these two are so far from the scale I can tell which one is the better pick but I can still understand the reason why people pick the other. Hanzo (If headshot) leaving you at Hp 1 isn't enough his second arrow/your team will easily clean up for you. Its not hard to heal off the damage as long you know to stick to a healer or know a Hanzo is around the corner but compare to Widow where your skill to be able to get a headshot will simple reward you with massive amount of damage.
Do I feel like Hanzo just needs a Damage Drop depending on both his bow draw, and distance I do because than it makes a better match up to have Hanzo as that Risk/Reward Character his Scatter shots are pretty beefy too so just trying to find that balance is tough but this is what I came up with. These two though aren't the only ones possibly sooner/later the whole character roaster will be like this.
Ow need to make these changes:
- reduce Moira attack range
- buff McCree tankness when rolling
- nerf Mauga damage
- fix Doom bugs
- reduce Roadhog self healing
👍 Done
Cass already has 75% dmg reduction on roll lol
@@tamooz6649 I know but he still feels bad to play and buffing his damage could become a problem
good opinions i always at least partialy agree but what is this aspect ratio???
A perfectly balanced game would also feel boring and stale. Changing metas and adapting to them is more fun and another way if skill expression imo!
Literally just played it for the first time matchmaking put me in with people teamed up whilst I’m solo, game felt massively imbalanced as all hell and just not a fair game for new players
You are correct! OW can't be balanced ever! It's due to the variety of abilities and Ults. They are all different and have a different kind of power lvl!
Cause the spectrum is so wide it's impossible to make all heroes relevant!
OW is still very good and S9 did make an incredible leap regarding the balancing of all roles!
Every role feels meaningful now instead of previous seasons where Support just felt stupidly broken and OP!
They treat the heroes like smash Bros characters. They're fun and unique but too wildly different to balance against each other. I thought they were going to do what street fighter 6 did, instead of balancing the characters you balance the fundamental game mechanics that every character has access to. They were going to do that through the role passives and removing a tank so characters have more agency. It seems like they're not using the role passes as much as I thought they would. I think that was the right direction to have a more balanced experience. That plus a simple philosophy of " more skill to use= more value, less skill to use = less value". But it seems like they're dead set in their ways of balancing with encouraging counter picking and not wanting to upset fans of certain characters.
Why does your right click say lshift if you never press lshift?
October 2020, the game was balanced.
It isn't possible anymore because of 5v5
My argument for the first half of this video in hypotheticals, even if yes a meta will always form, there are certain things that should have never been a thing in overwatch and overwatch 2. At the start of overwatch 2 they made a TON of changes that should have already been in the game. Sombras hack could've been conditional where she has to shoot you first, and only make it interruptable if she gets hit by a certain amount of damage, and only turn of CERTAIN ULTS, like why does it turn off winstons ult? another example is doomfist should've always been a tank/off tank, Ana's nade defined whole metas (goats) when her normal shots could have applied anti heal to enemies she hit then if they're hit by the nade turn off healing, Mercy should have to at least aim closer to her target to get great healing, I could go on but yeah make the impactful part of a characters kit more conditional.
The main issue is that fps games are never balanced because they are ever changing
Even if we got the formula just right right now
A new hero will come out and throw a wrench in all of that perfect balance
Thats the issue with balancing this game
No matter how balanced it manages to get
As it evolved with new heros and large changes to the game
Like the larger pools of health, dps passive, etc
The game shifts drastically and with it soe does the meta
Wrecking ball was horrible for so long and after the health changes ball was suddenly S tier meta with no meaningful changes to him specifically
Its not realistic to be able to balance everything perfectly unless you make a stale game that never changes and only balance the game for a long time
I think people who have problems with the 'easy' heroes basically have a problem with their value ceiling. The value ceiling of a Moira should not be higher than Ana, as her skill ceiling is also comparatively lower, essentially making Ana an objectively worse pick. Having low skill ceiling heroes is fine as long as they are strictly weaker than high skill heroes in most situations. But I guess that would make them less fun and Blizzard's bank account would not like that
Moira wouldn't be that bad if she wasn't so forgiving at the same time. Fade CD is just too low and she shouldn't be able to fade during her ult. That used to be the one time she had to be smart about her surroundings but nope. We can't have moira needing to think in this day and age.
I thought it was a good video overall, but you missed a key component: The developers. Their incompetence or unwillingness to balance a game, is the primary reason games become unbalanced. It is not simply because it is hard, or because there's a certain hero has mechanics that can never be balanced across skill levels. The developers design the heroes. They design the map, the items, everything about the game, actually. Including whether to put any effort in and maintain skill expression, rather than just go the route of full on pay to win.
And it just so happens that the big companies nowadays, care about money first, good, skill expressive game, second. But if they aren't an eastern game company, they won't shamelessly make it pay to win. Instead, they will do things like deliberately make new, popular, or heroes for which they're releasing or making a skin for, unbalanced. This is the true utilitarian approach they're utilizing. It isn't exactly an accident that most streamers are able to predict if some newly released hero, or hot balance change, will result in balance or not with 90% accuracy. The answer is because the devs most likely don't care, or are persuing different goals.
Outside of greed, there's designer ego, sunk cost fallacy, prioritizing casual "fun" over skill expression, and so much more.
What balance is is easy. Every hero has a legitimate reason to be played. Some heroes cancel others but non are so weak they don't have a good matchup or so strong they cancel everything else.
A hero not being strong or beinf strong in a meta doesn't mean its unbalanced. Soldier is strong right now but you can choose heroes that punish his offangles to challenge him.
Sojourn is op. She can take offangles but also immediately switch and get out without issue and switch to more poke. You can't challenge that.
We can't even balance 1v1 fighting games. How do you expect to balance a 5v5 fighting game?!
Does balance really matter? In other games people dont mind chosing between the best options and the fun options.
Honestly if you wanna balance the game rein, Winston, echo, genji, tracer the best characters because they’re neutral into everything and they aren’t oppressive like the hitscans to certain types of heroes and if these characters are meta other characters can be viable in every situation as well, last but not least they should revert to 6v6
Balance is never the biggest issue. Matchmaking is. I quit ow2 because I realized the devs will always be too stupid to fix it. Btw, I have five accounts in total, two GM, one hard stuck diamond, one hard stuck plat, one hard stuck gold. Matchmaking is a joke. In my gold account, I consistently die 5x less and kill 2x or 3x times more than the other dps. Everyone in the lobby says I do not belong here. Guess what, after I win a few super easy games, immediately I get matched with a leaver or thrower in my team in the next few matches. So your performance does not matter. Your rank is predetermined and then they just force a 50% win rate at that rank. Even if not intentionally, but the overall outcome of their stupid algorithm simply behaves like that. I am a experienced programmer myself. I can tell that the programmers currently working on this at Blizzard is a POS and single-handedly ruined this game and should be responsible for more than 50% of the player base and revenue loss. Quit this game ASAP if you do not have a 5 stack.
Text wall just to say "don't play unless you're 5 stacked" if people say you don't belong there and it's blatantly obvious, you should climb out of it whether or not it's a 50/50. Like GM to Gold isnt comparable
Just a reminder that the only reason overwatch is balanced for sweats is Bobby Kotick. You are pushing his ideas ❤
Ive only been play OW since season 2 and only booked over 2000 hrs, but the most fun ive had is when its unbalanced.
My argument for balencing around top level players is that skilled matchmaking should mean that players a placed proportionately to the level anyway. The balence of the game doesn't result in changes to gameplay expirence to the same degree in lower levels beucase people enjoy playing what makes them win and if they wanna win playing the easy heros then that makes the game more enjoyable for those people. If u wanna play play tracer for an hour every second weekend your expirence of those games will feel the same reletive to people who play everyday beucase u will be placed against other players who are equally as bad as u.
Idk how or why but you sound like you recorded this on 0.5x speed and then sped it up later in editing
hmm interesting, I don't edit the speed of my voice so not sure why it might sound like that
THE NUMBES MASON TELL USE THE NUMBERs
as someoene that has played both ow1 and ow2. i think that it is goodd for the game to change every so often that way the meta doesnt get stale but it their is such thing as to much change. i think what we all aim to see as veteran players from ow1 is that golden/glory day of that one october patch in ow1 where it felt amazing to play where nothing felt annoying or to strong and it also felt like that on the opposite end of where nothing felt to weak or useless but my problem with this is this. if it stayed that way for a long time would people be as invested into it. no way of telling but i would like to see major meta shifts like when they added that damage passive where it shakes up playstyle/team comps/the core mechanic of the game/and overall how the game feels to play. i know league of legends gets alot of hate for the way they balance their game but they arent afraid to hotfix any core issue with the update even with how often the game updates. i think this would be an intresting way to take it because it can make it feel fresh and new every 2 weeks instead of every month andd a half or mid season. this is just my opinon though. i like 6v6 more tho lol. way more fun and intresting as far as skill floor/cieling and how far each one can go. that was what made ow a beautiful game.
Bro, just erase Sombra, Tracer, Mercy and Wrecking Ball and then this game is playable!
i know this isn’t related to the video but how does your game look so good??
If 6v6 is back, there's a chance it will be
No it's not, because all you mfs were STILL complaining about balance when 6v6 was a thing AND before role lock. Stop being delusional lol
Designing around having as close to perfect balance as possible was, and will always be, a mistake.
The game should be designed around how fun and/or frustrating each hero is to play as or against, not around having a higher or lower winrate.
After all, if everyone's having the time of their life, who cares what the balance is?
The less players there are, the harder it is to balance
Is Casual left handed? Or is his web cam mirrored?
These are the same people whose idea of tanking is to solo into the opposing team and then crybabout heals...
99% of ppl will watch this video and still not get it.
Took applied combinatorics in college so this was rlly interesting. Did you study math?
I studied computer science which had a bit of math. The most "advanced" math courses I've taken are only intro to multivariable calculus, intro to linear algebra, and intro to probability which is where my fairly elementary understanding of combinatorics comes from.
I am high Diamond Made a new Account. Now i am silv 1 with a 17 loose streak. Very very insane matchmaking
My only desire when comes to balanced is make the counterplay interactions against tanks less effective.
Some would say "go back to 6v6" but I think we could still find a better spot lowering the counterplay style (or the "f*ck you tank", as I like to call) on 5v5
Some changes that I have in mind is like D.va being able to mitigate some damage from beams like sym, mei and Zarya. Doom block not being completly cancelled by Hog hook and Orisa javalin. Or even make a passive where tanks recive a lower time on the effect of debuffs, idk
Then if tanks become too agressive by lower the counterplay, ajust their numbers, make them do less damage, have less armor and this type stuff
On the end of the things, we would still have the 50% winrate across the tanks like before, but I promise that the FEELING of playing tank would feel so much better than before.
Closest game I've seen a game come to perfect balance is Deep Rock Galactic, but that is a PvE game. Not feasable to compare to Overwatch in any way
This game is just an RGB screen test
I have to disagree, because while i cannot say what someone elses fun is, i can tell you why we shouldnt prioritize their fun.
Lower ranked players are like babys, theyll play whatever is the easiest, i highly doubt anyone is out there excited to play torb specifically, which means you can probably inject some skill into him and players wont mind, the ones who genuinely love his design probably wont be upset to get a rework that makes him more engaging, like maybe give him a second or 3 mech options, like a drone or what have you, and change his identity back to an engineer rather than tank buster since i also think weakening tank busters would make the hame feel more balanced as well.
But also no ones asking for the complete harmonization of the skill curves, theyre asking for more similar ones to ease balance so its not such a whip lash between sojourn and the meta thats been in silver and gold for a decade almost now of torb, bastion, moira and orisa so when we get another sojourn it doesnt ruin the game for months just so the lower ranks can enjoy her abit.
And my past point (sorry for the rant) is that the skill floor is only as inaccessible as the easiest to abuse hero, if you were to remove torb, those players will default to the next easiest and now the baseline easiest hero changes and this is because even a baby can have fun in dark souls solo, and the same applies to an online game with skill based match making, so if we just keep the feel of heros but increase their skill floors and than lower the skill ceiling as well like we did with season 9 and bam, you got much closer skill teirs now without the game being to easy or to hard, like were just asking for it to be closer so the games easier to balance as a whole, and if the skill ceiling takes a hit, i think its onky fair the floor does too lol
I think a big part of the motivation for creating heroes with different skill-curves is simply to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, which is a typical goal for profit-driven game design. I agree that equalizing the skill curves would make the game easier to balance, but it's never going to happen for any game that needs to make as much money as possible.
@@Casual314 while that's probably true as the shareholders will take it as the safest bet, it doesnt mean its actually the safest, since when mauga dropped so did the games playerbase, no one liked mauga and I just gotta wonder how many maugas before people move on? Because if you removed mauga rn no one would complain but you try 3 or 4 months from now and I bet you'll make some people mad, people always hate these heros than a small community slowly likes them and I just dont think moving so far away from the core hero philosophies of stuff like rein, winston and mercy is a good idea, creating heros with the goal of making players not need to try will catch up with them eventually.
@@Casual314 they also keep changing the format to try and find easier ways of balancing but if you look at what the format changes have done, theyve actually done the opposite, because in 6v6, easy heros had more of a place in the game, the game itself was more decision heavy giving all heros more decisions to make while 5v5 is more death match like, where youre more on your own with more 1v1s happening, and people will obviously hate easy heros more when the game has more interacts like small 1v1s.
Than you now have the increase of hp and bullets, and while this definitely fixed the game, it fixed the game inna way where it made dive meta, and everything easier to hit, it like evened it out but what happens when they now balance the game into a slow sustain meta again? Were gonna have heavy healing with hogs orisas and maugas running around and everyone aims less now which I think will feel worse inna sustaine meta so this fixation on trying to make everything playable might just be shooting themselves in the foot when they could just simply bring skill curves closer and than people wont mind the mauga and sustain metas as much. Because one of these times theyll walk the game into a corner like s8 and the s9 patch wont be a success and than I wonder what happens then.
Legitimate question. Why do they keep buffing orisa, didn’t we learn from ow 1 how power creep ruined the game
I believe Orisa underperforms in terms of win rate across all ranks, and so that's the main reasoning. Whether that's justified, most people would say no just due to how unfun she is to play against.
@@Casual314Orisa is unfun to play against, with and as. Most boring hero in this game.
@@batatannaZarya is unfun and so is Sigma. Then this community moans about Orisa.
There is no excuse for bad balancing because blizzard has failed to even reach step one which is communication. Trying to speak to blizzard is like trying to speak to a brick wall. Nothing they do is reasonable and should not be excused because they refuse to talk to us.
the sky is blue………..
At the start of season 9 the game was balance they just need to Nerf Ashe Cassy Moira and Lucio that where too strong and buff genji rein hog and ana that were in a low key that's all
You said Moira and yet no Tracer. Thumbs down to u.
no, i might make a response video
sure I would love to hear some other opinions in the community
the video is up, i don't think i can put links in comments @@Casual314
Not perfect balance, but lets say skillful hero vs nonskillful hero, skillful should have the upper hand because why is it fair someone less skilled can hop in and kill you with minimal aim, if u want to play someone that is easy that's fair, but it shouldn't be such a free easy kill on someone who takes skill
it is balanced when you play the right characters. don’t play the broken characters and the game is balanced. simple. why we need to add a ban system so these boosted as mfs will be forced to play real characters.
It will never be balanced cause people complain about every little detail and th devs feel they need to fix everything which in turn just makes it even more unbalanced. Even if these RUclipsrs who think they can fix the game will end up in the same place. They think they have the perfect patch, then someone exploites something that's op, and then everyone complains. You can't fix it lmao
April 1st update fixes this
If you keep updating the game it’ll never be balanced. Like Hearthstone could’ve just been one and done and it would live forever like Chess but with updates it’s in a different category entirely yes it will “live” “forever” but not like Chess
Yeah, the need for a constant stream of new content is another major reason that games are so difficult to balance. Every new hero that's introduced will inevitably introduce balance issues. And coupled with the fact that updates are fairly infrequent, there isn't enough time to experiment with changes before the next hero is released.
The balance of the game matters, yes, but even if Overwatch were to be balanced, then what? The game lacks the adrenaline of tac shooters, or BRs, so why bother?
I just dislike mercy for the rez. I can deal with all the other BS
Balls?
WE DONT CARE ABOUT BALANCE WE WANT FUN!!
Balance is subjective anyway
why the fuck do you shoot with space and left shift
Bro stop being logical. I need fuel to continue spewing out hate and misinformation. Shit like this just makes me a more rational person😔.
My bad, I'll try to be more illogical next time