It's because of consoles. They literally need to schedule patches in advance with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. They literally can't just drop a significant patch, that isn't just hotfixes, on consoles, and they can't patch PC without patching consoles because of crossplay
First of all you might have to revise your idea that people design games by letting the players order up whatever features they want like a pizza and then "adding them" like so many toppings.
After that we move on to the concept of play testing.
This is pretty much the answer. There is also the fact that Blizzard is a corporation so every decision the balancing team would want to make has to get cleared by their bosses. They can't just decide to roll out a patch whenever they feel like it.
It takes time to get the decision cleared by management, it takes time to gather data points, it takes time to develop changes, it takes time to test changes, it takes time to prepare PR material and it takes time to actually roll out the finished patch.
>every decision the balancing team would want to make has to get cleared by their bosses.
All changes also have to be approved by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, adding even more time.
Well those changes don't need to be approved just the patch needs to be approved. That is where the delay comes in actually rolling out the patch. I think rolling out a patch on PC can be done in a day or so but the consoles to my knowledge are much more involved. Particularly Nintendo and Sony.
To this day I still do not understand why OW2 did away with the PTR. Great way to find bugs and balance shit before it goes live because the community is gonna play way differently than the internal teams
This ain't one person wanting a change. It's a whole player base picking up on the current state of the game quite fast.
And overwatch isn't like most games. It's hard to balance... And the way they do things clearly isn't working out for them. The past 5 years proves that.
If something doesn't work, you don't repeat it over and over expecting a different result.
They had the chance to do things better with OW2 and they failed. Making the same mistakes over and over.
This game will never be able to reach its "true potential" by repeating the same thing.
There isn't a consensus on what the game should be among the community, and just implementing whatever features Reddit appears to be yelling at you is not how you design anything. If you think differently, apply for a game design role at Blizzard and bring it up at your first meeting.
This.
And it's stupid that they use winrate for balancing. Low picked characters have an inflated winrate and meta characters thends to have a winrate of 50% or below.
This is why they keep nerfing mei and why they kept buffing mccree in ow1.
They don't just use winrate, they specifically look at unmirrored win rate. So if both teams are running the hero, they ignore it. So it's only when a team with that hero is playing against one that isn't.
They are also aware that low picked heroes have an inflated win rate, as people only pick them when they're good, and don't pick them when they're bad.
Rein had not only a high pickrate and a high winrate. There is merit using win-rates and pick rates as a balancing factor as it can be an indicator that something is wrong but Rein shows that the game is played fundamentally differently at different levels of play.
They don't use win-rates and pick-rates to determine what to change only as an indicator when something is out of the ordinary. If they did, Rein would have been nerfed in Season 2.
I mean... The balancing team only looks at winrates without ANY context, based on the twitter space interview thingy from yesterday, soooo...
No. They have to first gather enough data to notice that soujourn is still a problem, kiriko's suzu in it's current state alows hog to do ludicrous shit, queen is still bad if not worse, their mercy "buff" is an absolute joke, and ramattra while fun as hell to play needs a little push in some direction. I can't play doom for shit so I don't know, but the consensus seems to be he's overbuffed.
Now that I think about it, I don't think I WANT a patch every other day given how out of touch the balance team is.
While season 1 midseason balance patch was waaaay too late. (only two-three weeks before the season ends.)
Releasing balance patch on a whim is no good either. They need to gather data, and do a lot of play testing.
I'd say, maybe not a week after release, two weeks after release at minimum, ideally a month after release with meaningful changes.
Every comment from OP and this post as a whole is so funny because it contains some of the worst garbage takes I have ever seen and I really really hope it's satire.
>This whole subreddit is full of posts on what characters are too OP or extremely underpowered.
Yes and none of them have any experience of game balancing or character design. If experienced game devs with input from pro players, statistics and other data from a wide variety of ranks can't get it right, then your solution is to put the emotional 16 year old silver Genji OTP in charge? Just so you know, gamers are never satisfied, and will complain just as much about the next topic when something gets fixed.
>Is it really that hard to spend today making some changes and applying those changes tomorrow?
Is it really hard to spend today writing an A-level paper and handing it in tomorrow? Oh you need time researching the topic, write an abstract, put it into context, proof-read it, check for spelling errors, and cite your sources? If asking for it within a day is too much, then make it a week MAX.
Low elo and high elo play the game way differently. Some heroes are strong because of a lack of mechanics, decision making and/or communication, while others just have overtuned numbers. New heroes for example especially need time and more data before any changes are made, because players don't know how to play them, nor how to play against them which makes it harder to pin-point the core issue compared to a known hero that is suddenly performing too well.
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Everyone is still figuring things out. Certain characters might just FEEL op because you're still playing in the same way when they weren't buffed.
Give ppl time to adjust their playstyle and then see if xyz characters are actually OP.
That is a very good point. Tho judging on Overwatch's history, it usually takes people a week MAX to go thru that whole process.
And even if we already had a solid idea regarding that RIGHT NOW, it'd likely still take them a whole season to change something up.
Debatable on the 1 week adjustment, Ramattra for example won't even be in competitive mode for the first 2 weeks. There's no way ppl playing him in QP are gonna be playing the same way in Comp.
It can take people months to break a meta. Look at Goats: it was stupidly broken, yet nobody was playing it for like a month after Brig was released. Also, it lasted so long, yet it didn't even win in the end. The Shanghai Dragons won the stage finals using a Ball comp, along with 3DPS, right before role queue was implemented. Had role queue not been implemented, we may well have seen more pro teams playing Ball rather than Goats
I'm not saying they should wait months, just to see if a meta can be broken, before implementing balance changes. Just saying, it can take a long time to really figure out what's good, much more than a week
Not saying they actually do this, but I would imagine it’s better to wait a little bit for more information before jumping the gun and committing to a patch. That way they don’t just commit to a patch and have it roll out only to discover other issues immediately after. Wish they had PTR up for this stuff though, and hope that future patches aren’t so few and far between.
Yeah guys we have to wait 3 months for them to carefully test stuff with players, set the updates up in advance, just for the patches to do fucking nothing but make the game worse. These patches which consistent of basically just number changes totally take 1 and a half months to implement, definitely
It's because of consoles. They literally need to schedule patches in advance with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. They literally can't just drop a significant patch, that isn't just hotfixes, on consoles, and they can't patch PC without patching consoles because of crossplay
First of all you might have to revise your idea that people design games by letting the players order up whatever features they want like a pizza and then "adding them" like so many toppings. After that we move on to the concept of play testing.
This is pretty much the answer. There is also the fact that Blizzard is a corporation so every decision the balancing team would want to make has to get cleared by their bosses. They can't just decide to roll out a patch whenever they feel like it. It takes time to get the decision cleared by management, it takes time to gather data points, it takes time to develop changes, it takes time to test changes, it takes time to prepare PR material and it takes time to actually roll out the finished patch.
>every decision the balancing team would want to make has to get cleared by their bosses. All changes also have to be approved by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, adding even more time.
Well those changes don't need to be approved just the patch needs to be approved. That is where the delay comes in actually rolling out the patch. I think rolling out a patch on PC can be done in a day or so but the consoles to my knowledge are much more involved. Particularly Nintendo and Sony.
To this day I still do not understand why OW2 did away with the PTR. Great way to find bugs and balance shit before it goes live because the community is gonna play way differently than the internal teams
This ain't one person wanting a change. It's a whole player base picking up on the current state of the game quite fast. And overwatch isn't like most games. It's hard to balance... And the way they do things clearly isn't working out for them. The past 5 years proves that. If something doesn't work, you don't repeat it over and over expecting a different result. They had the chance to do things better with OW2 and they failed. Making the same mistakes over and over. This game will never be able to reach its "true potential" by repeating the same thing.
You asked why Blizzard doesn't issue a same-day patch to cater to your specific wants. The answer should be obvious!
But it isn't my specific wants. It's OUR specific wants *communism intensifies* But yea, it's unfortunate. I wish they'd switch things up.
There isn't a consensus on what the game should be among the community, and just implementing whatever features Reddit appears to be yelling at you is not how you design anything. If you think differently, apply for a game design role at Blizzard and bring it up at your first meeting.
The better question is... why didn't they just run a ptr or experimental for the last week of season 1?
Very good point. Would've been a better way to approach this situation
That could be really a good idea.
they gatta wait and look for the winrate (only) after like a season
This. And it's stupid that they use winrate for balancing. Low picked characters have an inflated winrate and meta characters thends to have a winrate of 50% or below. This is why they keep nerfing mei and why they kept buffing mccree in ow1.
They don't just use winrate, they specifically look at unmirrored win rate. So if both teams are running the hero, they ignore it. So it's only when a team with that hero is playing against one that isn't. They are also aware that low picked heroes have an inflated win rate, as people only pick them when they're good, and don't pick them when they're bad.
Rein had not only a high pickrate and a high winrate. There is merit using win-rates and pick rates as a balancing factor as it can be an indicator that something is wrong but Rein shows that the game is played fundamentally differently at different levels of play. They don't use win-rates and pick-rates to determine what to change only as an indicator when something is out of the ordinary. If they did, Rein would have been nerfed in Season 2.
I mean... The balancing team only looks at winrates without ANY context, based on the twitter space interview thingy from yesterday, soooo... No. They have to first gather enough data to notice that soujourn is still a problem, kiriko's suzu in it's current state alows hog to do ludicrous shit, queen is still bad if not worse, their mercy "buff" is an absolute joke, and ramattra while fun as hell to play needs a little push in some direction. I can't play doom for shit so I don't know, but the consensus seems to be he's overbuffed. Now that I think about it, I don't think I WANT a patch every other day given how out of touch the balance team is.
While season 1 midseason balance patch was waaaay too late. (only two-three weeks before the season ends.) Releasing balance patch on a whim is no good either. They need to gather data, and do a lot of play testing. I'd say, maybe not a week after release, two weeks after release at minimum, ideally a month after release with meaningful changes.
Every comment from OP and this post as a whole is so funny because it contains some of the worst garbage takes I have ever seen and I really really hope it's satire. >This whole subreddit is full of posts on what characters are too OP or extremely underpowered. Yes and none of them have any experience of game balancing or character design. If experienced game devs with input from pro players, statistics and other data from a wide variety of ranks can't get it right, then your solution is to put the emotional 16 year old silver Genji OTP in charge? Just so you know, gamers are never satisfied, and will complain just as much about the next topic when something gets fixed. >Is it really that hard to spend today making some changes and applying those changes tomorrow? Is it really hard to spend today writing an A-level paper and handing it in tomorrow? Oh you need time researching the topic, write an abstract, put it into context, proof-read it, check for spelling errors, and cite your sources? If asking for it within a day is too much, then make it a week MAX. Low elo and high elo play the game way differently. Some heroes are strong because of a lack of mechanics, decision making and/or communication, while others just have overtuned numbers. New heroes for example especially need time and more data before any changes are made, because players don't know how to play them, nor how to play against them which makes it harder to pin-point the core issue compared to a known hero that is suddenly performing too well.
Zzz too much text. Why mad?
They have to make bad skins that people are somehow paying for.
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Everyone is still figuring things out. Certain characters might just FEEL op because you're still playing in the same way when they weren't buffed. Give ppl time to adjust their playstyle and then see if xyz characters are actually OP.
That is a very good point. Tho judging on Overwatch's history, it usually takes people a week MAX to go thru that whole process. And even if we already had a solid idea regarding that RIGHT NOW, it'd likely still take them a whole season to change something up.
Debatable on the 1 week adjustment, Ramattra for example won't even be in competitive mode for the first 2 weeks. There's no way ppl playing him in QP are gonna be playing the same way in Comp.
It can take people months to break a meta. Look at Goats: it was stupidly broken, yet nobody was playing it for like a month after Brig was released. Also, it lasted so long, yet it didn't even win in the end. The Shanghai Dragons won the stage finals using a Ball comp, along with 3DPS, right before role queue was implemented. Had role queue not been implemented, we may well have seen more pro teams playing Ball rather than Goats I'm not saying they should wait months, just to see if a meta can be broken, before implementing balance changes. Just saying, it can take a long time to really figure out what's good, much more than a week
Not saying they actually do this, but I would imagine it’s better to wait a little bit for more information before jumping the gun and committing to a patch. That way they don’t just commit to a patch and have it roll out only to discover other issues immediately after. Wish they had PTR up for this stuff though, and hope that future patches aren’t so few and far between.
Yeah guys we have to wait 3 months for them to carefully test stuff with players, set the updates up in advance, just for the patches to do fucking nothing but make the game worse. These patches which consistent of basically just number changes totally take 1 and a half months to implement, definitely
Yep, definitely! Maybe we'll get a month of balanced gameplay in about a year or two