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 challenge but be at a disadvantage, this makes the game more interesting. Which brings us to a decision, conceptually, do you want to play a hero that can take a fight anywhere and win most the time or a hero that can only win slightly more in its niche area and lose everywhere else. Just on this alone i believe you would always pick the hero that has a higher chance to win in multiple locations as fights rarely take place in one location. The professional meta and ladder have proven this. What makes niche design worse is that its compounded by map design. Most maps have three paths at an objective, meaning you have three different areas that you can attack and defend from. If a hero's niche can be completely avoided by map design then there is no longer any reason to play them. A hero can have a strength but they all need to be playable in most areas, else no one will ever use them.
Secondly, the concept of counters does not factor in that the game is offense vs defense. Balance doesn't just happen in theory, you need to see the application of what you've designed. In OW this means how the objective types are designed. Most of the maps are centered around the concept of offense vs defense. If you fully believe in counters, which it seems the developers do, then you would have to assume the defense would always lose. Why? The offense is able to change their hero selections at the start with little to no negative impact, the defense cannot. The offense can simply scout and figure out their lineup and then change to what the enemy team's weakness is. If this isn't the case then you're breaking the "counter" circle which means by design there is a final answer to OW. Eventually this perfect answer will be figured out and the meta will grow stale.
Thirdly, map design does not favor niche heroes. While not said explicitly we will have to infer from this statement.
My assumption from this statement is that they planned for different maps to use the strengths of different heroes. This would allow for the wanted hero variety that everyone is looking for. A good idea but it was not put into action at all. If this was true then we should have seen maps that heavily favor mei, torb, sym, junkrat, phara or any non-meta hero. Each of these heroes do not have a map or specific point where they are so strong you should always use them. We would have seen them accepted in the community and played on ladder or in OWL if that was the case. Again this is a fault on the developers. If you create a hero that excels at "X" but never allow "X" to exist in the map pool then you cannot help but either not play the hero or play the hero where they're not strong, which questions the want of niche heroes.
The last point is what all of the previous issues stated have lead us to.
This is where i believe we as a community have failed the developers and have gone in the wrong direction. Somewhere along the path that is overwatch we've lost our creativeness, our wonder and most importantly our stubbornness. It's not on the developers to tell us how to play the game! it never was. It's the developers job to give us tools and for the community to explore what is possible with them. If we find ways to play that they didn't want, they will patch it. Mutually, if the community believes to have found something with no answers then we need to inform the developers but at no point should we just give up like we have now. We need to keep breaking the game and finding new ways to play. To say that we know all the answers is the same as saying we know everything about the game and as a result have set unreasonable expectations for each other on how to play.
As a community we need to move away from these expectations and answers. We cannot complain about the meta and simultaneously enforce rules and expectations on each other. It's impossible to break out of a way of thinking if you reprimand thinking. Its no wonder jeff has said on stream that the team doesn't understand what the community wants, the community has no idea either!
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 challenge but be at a disadvantage, this makes the game more interesting. Which brings us to a decision, conceptually, do you want to play a hero that can take a fight anywhere and win most the time or a hero that can only win slightly more in its niche area and lose everywhere else. Just on this alone i believe you would always pick the hero that has a higher chance to win in multiple locations as fights rarely take place in one location. The professional meta and ladder have proven this. What makes niche design worse is that its compounded by map design. Most maps have three paths at an objective, meaning you have three different areas that you can attack and defend from. If a hero's niche can be completely avoided by map design then there is no longer any reason to play them. A hero can have a strength but they all need to be playable in most areas, else no one will ever use them.
Secondly, the concept of counters does not factor in that the game is offense vs defense. Balance doesn't just happen in theory, you need to see the application of what you've designed. In OW this means how the objective types are designed. Most of the maps are centered around the concept of offense vs defense. If you fully believe in counters, which it seems the developers do, then you would have to assume the defense would always lose. Why? The offense is able to change their hero selections at the start with little to no negative impact, the defense cannot. The offense can simply scout and figure out their lineup and then change to what the enemy team's weakness is. If this isn't the case then you're breaking the "counter" circle which means by design there is a final answer to OW. Eventually this perfect answer will be figured out and the meta will grow stale.
Thirdly, map design does not favor niche heroes. While not said explicitly we will have to infer from this statement.
"with the thought that players would switch in situations where those characters weren’t as viable."
The last point is what all of the previous issues stated have lead us to.
Overwatch is dependent on answers.
The developers have publicly stated that they wanted specific heroes be played on specific points. With niche hero design they've lead us to believe that specific heroes have correct answers to counter them. Since each map has an answer as does each hero then isn't OW designed to be played one way? When a player runs into an issue they are told to lookup the answers blizzard have given us. Its these heavy handed answers that have lead the community to believe so heavily in "throwing". The definition of throwing that I've gotten from the community is that a player knows the correct answer to the situation but are refusing to do it. In other words throwing is when you're not playing properly according to the community. Which is based on the communities understanding of what the developers have intended.This is where i believe we as a community have failed the developers and have gone in the wrong direction. Somewhere along the path that is overwatch we've lost our creativeness, our wonder and most importantly our stubbornness. It's not on the developers to tell us how to play the game! it never was. It's the developers job to give us tools and for the community to explore what is possible with them. If we find ways to play that they didn't want, they will patch it. Mutually, if the community believes to have found something with no answers then we need to inform the developers but at no point should we just give up like we have now. We need to keep breaking the game and finding new ways to play. To say that we know all the answers is the same as saying we know everything about the game and as a result have set unreasonable expectations for each other on how to play.
As a community we need to move away from these expectations and answers. We cannot complain about the meta and simultaneously enforce rules and expectations on each other. It's impossible to break out of a way of thinking if you reprimand thinking. Its no wonder jeff has said on stream that the team doesn't understand what the community wants, the community has no idea either!