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It's true, Jeff Kaplan wants the game to be bad and unpopular.
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Aug 15, 2017 22:15
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He wants it to be popular, at the cost of any other design consideration, which is why it often changes for the worse.
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Aug 15, 2017 22:16
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If you take any game to it's extreme top level, it no longer resembles the fun thing that people like to do. I assume that is why the word "meta" even exists. There is a pedantic metagame on top of the actual rules engine in which people compete at the optimal level. Competitive hot dog eating is a good example for comparison. Can you really consider shoving waterlogged hotdogs down your throat eating? I think it makes sense for Kaplan to speak to the gold/plat level and let the rest sort itself out. The metagame will emerge from whatever rules are put in place at the median level of play.
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Aug 15, 2017 22:32
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You should never balance around players being unable to do something because of their own inadequacies; that's a good way for more heroes to become trash tier and higher-end metagames becoming more stale, which is the opposite of what blizzard wants. After all, they're investing however millions of dollars into the Overwatch League, and if it's the exact same strategy over and over again, then the game will not take off as an e-sport. If you balance around top-tier, you'll get a healthy metagame, and people will still do whatever the gently caress they want in plat through bronze comp queue, except the game will be healthier across all tiers. Pro player Jake does a really good job of explaining this phenomenon. I'd recommend giving it a read berenzen fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Aug 15, 2017 |
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Aug 15, 2017 22:47
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headcase posted:If you take any game to it's extreme top level, it no longer resembles the fun thing that people like to do. In good games, the extreme top level is itself fun and good. In fact, a competitive game where top level play turns into a mess is, by definition, degenerate.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:11
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headcase posted:If you take any game to it's extreme top level, it no longer resembles the fun thing that people like to do. Oh for sure, that's why pro sports are so unpopular. No Wave posted:It's true, Jeff Kaplan wants the game to be bad and unpopular. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with what Jeff Kaplan personally wants, my point is that the community loves to laud him for being this straight-shooting game designer who's so in touch with the game and it's players but a lot of the poo poo he says is mealy-mouthed and disingenuous in the way people are when they aren't actually interested in offering transparent explanations so much as cherry picking numbers to make them look better. I'd actually have more respect for Kaplan if he stopped doing dumb poo poo like that and just said "we don't actually care about stats or feedback, we're just going to go off gut feelings and whatever pissed us off this week."
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Aug 15, 2017 23:21
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It's pretty straightforward. High-level play isn't very important to the devs. He can't come out and say this for obvious reasons. And he's calling all of the plat and below players on the b.net forums who complain about a "stale meta" and "dive" delusional, which they are.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:27
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Delusional right up until they watch a tourney and go "oh hey, these are the same heroes over and over again". Shame this game isn't trying it's hardest to have people watch without getting bo- oh.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:38
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High level play is so unimportant to the Overwatch team that they've gone out of their way for over a year to try and force Overwatch to be the hottest new esport on the block. I mean I'm sure that Kaplan himself probably doesn't give much of a personal poo poo about high level play because he isn't a high level player himself, but Blizzard very clearly wants enough people to take high level Overwatch seriously and balancing around the gold/plat bracket runs contrary to that.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:39
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I mean if League of Legends can position itself as a legitimate esport then it's probably possible to do it to Overwatch no matter how bad high-level balance gets, it's just that it's going to mainly be an image / marketing thing. I'm not against it for fear of the game failing, I'm against it purely for the ~AESTHETIC~ love of good game design.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:40
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:In good games, the extreme top level is itself fun and good. In fact, a competitive game where top level play turns into a mess is, by definition, degenerate. Agreed, but is it not fun at that level currently? I'm just saying that there will always be an optimal way to play. It makes sense to set the rules at platinum and let people optimize. There will always be 6 best picks. Let's just be glad it's not a stationary bastion behind 3 layers of shields.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:48
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Kai Tave posted:High level play is so unimportant to the Overwatch team that they've gone out of their way for over a year to try and force Overwatch to be the hottest new esport on the block. I mean I'm sure that Kaplan himself probably doesn't give much of a personal poo poo about high level play because he isn't a high level player himself, but Blizzard very clearly wants enough people to take high level Overwatch seriously and balancing around the gold/plat bracket runs contrary to that.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:48
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headcase posted:There will always be 6 best picks. This is not true. It's fatalism at best and sour grapes at worst. It's not even a theoretical question in Overwatch's case, the meta was in a pretty good place right before the Hog nerf, with two extremely different comps in play and each of those with slight internal variations.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:50
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No Wave posted:A blizzard card game called Hearthstone has a million dollar esports prize pool. This does not mean anyone in charge of game design cares about comoetitive. Its also been demonstrated that Blizzard can and will make changes based around competitive play but only when their noses get rubbed in it, see "hero stacking is an integral part of the Overwatch experience" until pro players and casters alike told them that it was actually garbage, so they quietly instituted 1HL and then eventually did so even in quickplay. Delusional plat and down players aren't the only ones who complain about stale metas and bad balance decisions, pro players and highly visible high-skill streamers do it all the time. I think it's fair to say that Blizzard cares more about Overwatch than Hearthstone, and if their insistence on making balance decisions based solely on the average/below-average segment of their playerbase begins to have any sort of negative impact on their ability to push Pro Overwatch as a thing people should take at all seriously then something will have to give. Regardless of anything related to esports, it's dumb as gently caress to balance a game around bad players and it's dumber to pretend doing so is smart by cherry picking numbers and stats out of context.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:56
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When people talk about a metagame, they aren't talking about solo-queue, or they barely touch on it. That's because solo queue doesn't matter because there's such a wide variety in skill in any given game that it's impossible to balance for it, particularly when you're talking about low level players. One person could be in plat because their game sense is poo poo, another could have godly game sense but poor positioning, and a third person could have really good positioning and game sense, but their mechanical skill is lower than the other two. So which person are you balancing around in your hypothetical 'balance around plat' strategy?
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Aug 15, 2017 23:58
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No Wave posted:A blizzard card game called Hearthstone has a million dollar esports prize pool. This does not mean anyone in charge of game design cares about comoetitive. Which I find almost as amusing as competitive Super Smash Bros. I think competitive Smash wins though because of all the rules. berenzen posted:When people talk about a metagame, they aren't talking about solo-queue, or they barely touch on it. That's because solo queue doesn't matter because there's such a wide variety in skill in any given game that it's impossible to balance for it, particularly when you're talking about low level players. One person could be in plat because their game sense is poo poo, another could have godly game sense but poor positioning, and a third person could have really good positioning and game sense, but their mechanical skill is lower than the other two. So which person are you balancing around in your hypothetical 'balance around plat' strategy? I assure you people in solo play still like to follow whatever the pros are doing.
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Aug 16, 2017 00:28
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berenzen posted:When people talk about a metagame, they aren't talking about solo-queue, or they barely touch on it. That's because solo queue doesn't matter because there's such a wide variety in skill in any given game that it's impossible to balance for it, particularly when you're talking about low level players. One person could be in plat because their game sense is poo poo, another could have godly game sense but poor positioning, and a third person could have really good positioning and game sense, but their mechanical skill is lower than the other two. So which person are you balancing around in your hypothetical 'balance around plat' strategy? That is not what you are balancing? Maybe one of those attributes rises in rank and others don't. I don't get your point.
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Aug 16, 2017 00:31
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Duck and Cover posted:I assure you people in solo play still like to follow whatever the pros are doing. Sure, but a lot of people in solo queue are also going to play whatever the hell they feel is fun, and so you end up with a vastly more diverse metagame than what you see at pro-level play like at Apex. This will happen no matter what the pro-tier scene is. So balance around top tier play and the meta reports that come of it and ignore any bitching by players; because by-and-large players are bad at the game and the things they want are likely exceptionally harmful to the longevity of the game.
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Aug 16, 2017 01:18
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headcase posted:That is not what you are balancing? Maybe one of those attributes rises in rank and others don't. I don't get your point. His point is that players at the level Blizzard ostensibly wants to balance the game around have so much variance in their grasp of even basic fundamental gameplay mechanics that it's extremely difficult if not outright impossible to separate meaningful data about how over/undertuned something is from the constant background noise of people simply being bad in a variety of ways, from poor gamesense to bad positioning to poor aim. Looking at gold/plat doesn't give you any useful insights into things like character balance because that level of play is the one where Symmetra is still capable of terrorizing people because their aim/positioning/whatever is bad enough that they can't effectively deal with the jumping Indian lady and her laser chainsaw. As soon as you reach a level where hitting a target whose only defensive capability is "jumping on a predictable trajectory" is no longer considered an exceptional feat, her ability to run rampant drops sharply, but if Blizzard took the word of gold/plat players to heart Symmetra should be nerfed into the ground. The second point, springing off the first, is that balance changes tuned around bad players become degenerate once they filter up to more skillful levels of play. In the hypothetical example of a Symmetra tuned around the average gold/plat level, nerfing her might make players at that level feel better but it would mean that the character was so laughably undertuned that she would never see a single iota of play beyond that level because she's already a situational, niche pick at best in higher ranks. Pharah is another good example of a character that dunks on bad players but sees less use the higher you rise in ranks to the point where she actually winds up being sort of a niche pick herself (less so than Symmetra), and balancing her around low level play would essentially remove her from higher level play altogether. There's a flipside to this as well, such as the Bastion rework where Blizzard wound up making the character more frustrating at lower levels of play (passive DR, healing while mobile) but higher level players largely shrugged after the initial 24 hours of hype because he's still a big, immobile target in an environment where people can aim and coordinate. tl;dr balancing around bad players A). doesn't, and never will, address the most fundamental problem they face which is their own lack of skill (and their willingness to blame their losses on everything but that) and B). generally winds up making the game worse for everybody else, including bad players who aspire to become better.
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Aug 16, 2017 01:19
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Doesn't that basically show that Symettra and Torbjorn significantly outstrip everyone else in terms of success at all levels of play? Symettra significantly so?
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Aug 16, 2017 01:25
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Kokoro Wish posted:Doesn't that basically show that Symettra and Torbjorn significantly outstrip everyone else in terms of success at all levels of play? Symettra significantly so? Win/loss ratios are calculated oddly. If you play symmetra, but you lose the point and swap, then lose the game, it only counts it as 1/3rd of a loss. Whereas if you full hold with symmetra, it counts as a full win if you win it. So you end up seeing a higher than normal win rate with heroes that generally swap off on a first point loss (the builders).
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Aug 16, 2017 01:31
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berenzen posted:Win/loss ratios are calculated oddly. If you play symmetra, but you lose the point and swap, then lose the game, it only counts it as 1/3rd of a loss. Whereas if you full hold with symmetra, it counts as a full win if you win it. So you end up seeing a higher than normal win rate with heroes that generally swap off on a first point loss (the builders). And it would be cool if Blizzard/Jeff Kaplan would acknowledge this during one of their "stats don't give you the whole picture!" pep talks instead of leaving it to be one of those things that filters through the playerbase via osmosis and the telephone game. It would be kind of nice too if there was a different way of tracking character winrates that didn't lead to obviously skewed results such as this that lead to people needing to ask why Symmetra has a 61% winrate if she isn't all that great in the first place, though I freely admit that the fact that you can switch heroes however often you want per game is probably going to make things less clear-cut than a game where you're locked into a character for the duration. It would at the very least be interesting to see "winrates by character for games where the players never switched off" versus "winrates by character for games where players switched off at least once" among the various other axes.
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Aug 16, 2017 01:51
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Kai Tave posted:His point is that players at the level Blizzard ostensibly wants to balance the game around have so much variance in their grasp of even basic fundamental gameplay mechanics that it's extremely difficult if not outright impossible to separate meaningful data about how over/undertuned something is from the constant background noise of people simply being bad in a variety of ways, from poor gamesense to bad positioning to poor aim. Looking at gold/plat doesn't give you any useful insights into things like character balance because that level of play is the one where Symmetra is still capable of terrorizing people because their aim/positioning/whatever is bad enough that they can't effectively deal with the jumping Indian lady and her laser chainsaw. As soon as you reach a level where hitting a target whose only defensive capability is "jumping on a predictable trajectory" is no longer considered an exceptional feat, her ability to run rampant drops sharply, but if Blizzard took the word of gold/plat players to heart Symmetra should be nerfed into the ground. Balance around making the game fun for people who are trying to have fun. The high end is going to make themselves miserable no matter what. If there is even a .01% difference between effectiveness, it will get found and the better of the two comps will get chosen. The point is for a few people to be really good at the thing that the masses are doing. The point is not for the masses to be really bad at the perfectly balanced wonderland of the top 500, and struggling to deal with the ubertorb that is a result of that idea.
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Aug 16, 2017 01:58
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headcase posted:Balance around making the game fun for people who are trying to have fun. The high end is going to make themselves miserable no matter what. If there is even a .01% difference between effectiveness, it will get found and the better of the two comps will get chosen. Except this isn't true, because a well-balanced game will allow for play and counterplay around certain compositions, so there isn't one true strategy, and if turns out that there's degeneracy that forces one particular composition above everything then you depower that composition slightly. Instead of nerfing the gently caress out of heroes like Hog because people are bad and can't help standing still out in the open when in line of sight to the roadhog. It wasn't that roadhog is broken, it's that the players were loving bad at counterplaying the roadhog. If a hero is legitimately overpowered, go ahead and nerf him, but 99% of the bitching is people just bad at the game. berenzen fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Aug 16, 2017 |
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Aug 16, 2017 02:07
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headcase posted:Balance around making the game fun for people who are trying to have fun. The high end is going to make themselves miserable no matter what. I mean if your argument is predicated on the fundamental assumption that getting good at something makes it a joyless miserable slog and nobody outside of plat actually enjoys playing the game then that sounds more like a personal problem than anything else. headcase posted:The point is for a few people to be really good at the thing that the masses are doing. The point is not for the masses to be really bad at the perfectly balanced wonderland of the top 500, and struggling to deal with the ubertorb that is a result of that idea. The masses are already really bad though, that's why they're in gold and maybe plat. Making changes to the game based on them isn't going to make them less bad, they will continue to be bad and the game will get worse for people who aren't. Balancing around high level play doesn't require the "ubertorb" or whatever dysfunctional straw version of the game you're envisioning at the bottom of some slippery slope where the only possible outcome you can get from not balancing a game around bad players is an elite of joyless accountants on one end and the oppressed masses on the other.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:17
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Like, the people who are vastly more likely to complain about someone playing Sombra and rage out about it aren't top 500/pro players, they're lower ranked players. Meanwhile the higher level of play has come around on the character and she now sees more use and people are less likely to knee-jerk about a Sombra on their team being an excuse to throw the game while spouting slurs into the mic.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:21
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headcase posted:Balance around making the game fun for people who are trying to have fun. Contrary to popular thought, people who try to be good at games usually have fun playing them.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:21
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IronicDongz posted:So, everyone. There are people at every level of any game who are miserable but lol if you don't think gold/plat isn't chock full of people ready to flame out over each and every loss because this character is broken bullshit/my teammates are garbage/Elo hell/etc. The idea that gold/plat is where all the funhavers hang out and everybody above that is increasingly joyless is absurd.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:24
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Kai Tave posted:Like, the people who are vastly more likely to complain about someone playing Sombra and rage out about it aren't top 500/pro players, they're lower ranked players. Meanwhile the higher level of play has come around on the character and she now sees more use and people are less likely to knee-jerk about a Sombra on their team being an excuse to throw the game while spouting slurs into the mic. Actually, pro-level players are starting to realize that Sombra might just need a slight nerf to her ult charge, considering it's not hard to get her ult up every 30 seconds.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:26
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Kai Tave posted:There are people at every level of any game who are miserable but lol if you don't think gold/plat isn't chock full of people ready to flame out over each and every loss because this character is broken bullshit/my teammates are garbage/Elo hell/etc. The idea that gold/plat is where all the funhavers hang out and everybody above that is increasingly joyless is absurd. Also the idea implicit in these conversations that there's a sudden break at some higher SR level where balance suddenly whips around and becomes bizarro universe, as opposed to the reality where plat / diamond hero winrates and pickrates are basically just a less drastic version of what happens in GM, and balancing for high-level play is good for at least half the playerbase even if it isn't precisely tailored to them.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:32
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berenzen posted:Actually, pro-level players are starting to realize that Sombra might just need a slight nerf to her ult charge, considering it's not hard to get her ult up every 30 seconds. And they'd be far more likely to be the ones to know than people in gold trying to make a high skill cap and coordination-dependent character work amidst uncoordinated teams of bad players who are prone to seeing her in the lineup and instantly writing the game off.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:32
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IronicDongz posted:So, everyone. I wouldn't argue that point, but they generally don't say "I'm going to go with junkrat today because he nice change of pace and i don't really care if it's an optimal pick." In any game played at a high level, the min/max matters and only one choice is the right choice. Why worry about it? In general, I like blizzard's method of shaking up the roster and seeing what sticks. Let the meta figure it out after that. That's all I'm trying to say.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:47
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headcase posted:I wouldn't argue that point, but they generally don't say "I'm going to go with junkrat today because he nice change of pace and i don't really care if it's an optimal pick." In any game played at a high level, the min/max matters and only one choice is the right choice. Why worry about it? I mean I could show you videos of high level streamers and pro players doing precisely what you say they don't do but at this point it feels like you've already got your mind made up about this mythical fun/self-improvement divide. Also "In any game played at a high level, the min/max matters and only one choice is the right choice" is completely wrong too but see the above. Blizzard's method of "shaking up the roster" involves making dumb, shortsighted changes then weakly tossing out lame excuses and doing everything they can to not actually address the issues they themselves caused. "The meta" will indeed figure it out and already has, which is why Roadhog's pickrates and winrates are now in the toilet. I would prefer it if Blizzard stopped actively trying to make their game shittier to placate people who'd rather blame their shortcomings on external factors than admit that they aren't temporarily embarrassed grandmasters.
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Aug 16, 2017 02:54
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I haven't played since the beginning, has any other (intentional) nerf hit a character as hard as the Roadhog one? Most of the other balance tweaks Blizzard has made seem decent to me, but I wasn't around year 1
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Aug 16, 2017 03:00
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headcase posted:I wouldn't argue that point, but they generally don't say "I'm going to go with junkrat today because he nice change of pace and i don't really care if it's an optimal pick." In any game played at a high level, the min/max matters and only one choice is the right choice. Why worry about it? Actually, known pro-player Harbleu commonly will play junkrat at high-level play because he likes having fun with the trash-rat. More often than not, top-500 play is just as memey as anywhere else, except people generally don't get as mad when they pick those heroes because there's the expectation that they're good at them.
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Aug 16, 2017 03:03
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headcase posted:I wouldn't argue that point, but they generally don't say "I'm going to go with junkrat today because he nice change of pace and i don't really care if it's an optimal pick." In any game played at a high level, the min/max matters and only one choice is the right choice. Why worry about it? It's not true that only one choice is the right choice, though. Maybe A > B > C > A. Which one is best then? Maybe A is "optimal" in that it has the highest combined winrate across all matchups, but if you exclusively play A you're giving your opponents an exploitable opening to consistently beat you with C, so you need to be able to play things other than A. You can have a stable, "solved" meta and still have some diversity.
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Aug 16, 2017 03:03
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wyoak posted:I haven't played since the beginning, has any other (intentional) nerf hit a character as hard as the Roadhog one? Most of the other balance tweaks Blizzard has made seem decent to me, but I wasn't around year 1 Widowmaker. I mean it was well-deserved but they overshot pretty badly.
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Aug 16, 2017 03:03
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wyoak posted:I haven't played since the beginning, has any other (intentional) nerf hit a character as hard as the Roadhog one? Most of the other balance tweaks Blizzard has made seem decent to me, but I wasn't around year 1 In terms of sheer blatant "we've decided we want this character to suck now" writing on the wall, not really. They've made balance changes that have resulted in characters going from frequent/must-picks to wallflowers before though...Widowmaker and McCree were the first to see that sort of drastic shift, Mercy experienced it as well back when they initially nerfed her ult charge so that she couldn't get rez as quick but before they gave her the other buffs like her regen speed and invulnerability when rezzing. Soldier 76 experienced a noticeable dropoff after they removed his original spread that meant good players could burst fire with pinpoint accuracy (also you could just mouse macro it) as well. In most cases the changes weren't really an attempt to fundamentally change a character's core identity or schtick to the degree that they decided they wanted to "reinvent" Roadhog, no. berenzen posted:Actually, known pro-player Harbleu commonly will play junkrat at high-level play because he likes having fun with the trash-rat. More often than not, top-500 play is just as memey as anywhere else, except people generally don't get as mad when they pick those heroes because there's the expectation that they're good at them. I can't remember which team it was during the dominance of triple tanks + Ana who decided, at a pro tournament no less, to make a deliberate and conscious effort to play as off-meta as possible because A). they felt like it and B). they were all individually good enough at their chosen characters to make it work for them. This was back when you had Ana, Lucio, Rein, D.Va, Soldier, and then like a Roadhog or maybe a Zarya, and these guys were bringing Widowmaker, Tracer, I think Mercy, etc.
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Aug 16, 2017 03:15
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berenzen posted:Actually, known pro-player Harbleu commonly will play junkrat at high-level play because he likes having fun with the trash-rat. More often than not, top-500 play is just as memey as anywhere else, except people generally don't get as mad when they pick those heroes because there's the expectation that they're good at them. So what is this discussion about? Balance is good at all levels. All players are pickable if you are good at them. We're all having fun. Jeff has done it once again! (Except that everyone is butthurt about Roadhog)
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Aug 16, 2017 03:19
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headcase posted:So what is this discussion about? You're the one who keeps making fallacious arguments, maybe you should try and make your points better if you actually have any.
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Aug 16, 2017 03:23
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