The inherent flaws of niche design and why it creates a toxic community, in response to jeff kaplan
I went over this in my first post in 2017 and wanted to specifically call it out after seeing jeff kaplan's recent post . To summarize it, he states they didn't expect maining and one tricking to be so dominate. They expected players to be comfortable only playing torb on defense and never on offense. This expectation sets the stage for why overwatch is so heavily toxic, why the meta is in such a bad place and why the game has all the balance problems it currently does. I will be specifically avoiding concepts such as player/gamer mentality and hero loyalty that happens in other games for this blog. The first issue is that the post means they double downed on niche design, which is the same as fully committing to the concept of counters. As stated before niche heroes are inherently a flawed design in OW. This is because if a hero can win 100% of the time in its niche, then it's overpowered. Heroes are weakened in their niche to a point that other heroes can still c