on Brigitte and META
A single tweet is all it took for me to be reminded that most of the community, or at least the vocal ones don't know some of the inherent flaws in OW. I posted my thoughts on this blog before, highlighting the issues with niche heroes and the concept of counters. I went over this blogpost in a video you can reach here. Video Discussion
The long and short of it is that if a hero is too strong in their niche it will feel overpowered and broken. This was how OW was thought of at first. You're required to go a specific answer(counter) to deal with a specific strength. This type of gameplay feels unfair because it wasn't execution that defeated you, it was someone making a choice. The root of this issue is that when a hero has an advantage over another it is inherently skilless. You did nothing to earn that advantage outside of selecting a hero. It is easier to play Winston into the Genji, Phara into the Junkrat or McCree into Tracer. This is how Overwatch and role based games work but in a FPS you want there to be more execution involved. Here's my first blog from 2017 calling out why OW was created this way in better detail.
Since we don't want a hero overpowered in a role the developers lower their strength so its only an advantage in their niche. Now it's possible to outplay them at their strength and you start to ask the question, if a hero has to limit themselves to a specific strategy/location and can still be outplayed in their niche why pick that hero at all? It would clearly be better to pick a generalist and get skilled enough to beat all specialists. This issue is compounded when you see that specialists have more obvious and harder counters. Opening them up to easier strategies and more of them. We saw this exact issue in Overwatch with the transition away from specialists with heroes such as Bastion, Torb, Sym, and Junkrat. This is why at the highest level of play, where we're most concerned about this, those heroes were very rarely played.
So what do niche answers have to do with Brigitte? Simply put she's so strong in her niche that it stops entire strategies(dive) by herself. While she follows Overwatch's core design of countering, player's got comfortable with dive strategy and hate the new strategy she forces. I want to be clear that by player's I mean the vocal minority. Know that these same players didn't complain about Brigitte when Genji got buffed, which they should have because Brigitte still excelled in her niche. Its very strange that she could still stop dive as a whole but as Genji players started to have better ladder games the complaints about her stopped. Almost as if a majority of the vocal players don't care about the balance of Overwatch, just the balance of their games. The truth is these players don't hate the Brigitte buff, they hate that Brigitte is being played because the buff makes her seem more viable. Its the existence of Brigitte that's their primary issue. While I don't agree with their complaining its important to know where you're audience is coming from so that we can properly address what they feel.
This is where everyone needs to be as unbias as possible. It doesn't matter if its Brigitte, Genji, dive, double shield or GOATs. Players will always get upset if they're forced to pick a specific strategy that doesn't fit their own style or what they believe the "answer" to be. This is why I disagree so much with the Brigitte hate crowd. If dive is done for and you're forced to play double shield, so what? From the view of players who want to play double shield wasn't being forced to play dive just as bad? Jeff Kaplan talked a little bit about this point himself in this article quoting
“Players will always want to play optimally,” Kaplan said. That means that either Blizzard would have to put in “some arbitrary system that forces the meta to change,” or rebalance the game with the idea of changing the meta."
What Jeff is speaking about is conceptually identical to a recent tweet I got called out about balance that stated "To also say that every hero needs to be equally viable is not true or doable". If we decide who is and who is not viable then we're deciding what is optimal. Notice that we're in the same spot as before and have to ask why is it that what you want has to be viable and what everyone else wants designed not to be viable? In the end we're just taking turns with the buff/nerf hammer which solves nothing. This is why I believe Blizzard was so content with keeping GOATs around, it was more about picking your poison than anything else. Blizzard had data that GOATs wasn't the META for lower ranks and only effected the top ranks where you'll always have a META anyways. So why pick a side?
If we start asking what makes something right and another wrong you'll often hear "fun" thrown around. "Fun" is a problematic word, since it's extremely subjective. Even if we went off of fun then who do we listen to? If we take all of the players above 3500 SR where the Brigitte meta is supposedly effecting the game it would only account for 3% of the total population of Overwatch and what they believe "fun" is. Which is ironic seeing that fun takes a backseat to winning with competitive gaming at the highest levels. So let's cut the chase and get to the actual issue. The real question isn't who's answer is correct, it's how can we allow multiple answers to exist and stop a single dominate answer.
"What about maps?" the community asks! That doesn't matter too much either. We still fall into the same dilemma where offense has to run X and defense has to run Y. Players shouldn't enter a game, see the map and say "its Numbani, we have to run dive, they run bunker and its about who executes the answer better". The talk should be more around what their skill set is and how to make it work instead of a pre-loaded answer. There is no difference between pick/ban, hero pools and meta if we're forced to play a specific way on each map, even if its different on each map it's still not true diversity.
Where does this leave us at the end of the day? Like most philosophy the issue is in attempting to implement it. As mentioned before even if we perfectly balanced the game strategies would emerge that are perceived to be the best and that's what would be ran most often. We can still attempt to balance the game to the point where the players skillset will determine what they do instead of any META influence. I still think that a majority of players train in similar ways so we'll still see a shift to a single meta eventually. Is there a cure-all for this?
Firstly, we need to move specialists closer to generalists and make strong generalists weaker in a way that opens them up to more strategies. No amount of maps nor new systems can replace good old fashion balanced heroes. New heroes such as Ashe and Sigma are examples of strong generalists that need more weaknesses - not just making their weaknesses greater like with what we've seen recently with Widowmaker's HP change. On the opposite we've already moved most specialists to be more generalists (Sym,Torb,Junkrat,Bastion). I want to be clear, I'm not advocating for all generalists. There is a sweet spot where you can have a niche but still be good overall.
The main reason we have to make such drastic changes from OW's core idea is because while other games can keep niche heroes they also provide methods that allow them to be picked in an environment where they're guaranteed to be strong.(Something the OW community wouldn't allow: see Brigitte) MOBAs use a pick/ban system which allow teams an option to line up a niche hero pick at the end where the enemy team has little response to it. They call it being "out-drafted" and you'll notice it has the same feeling as when a hard counter appears in Overwatch. The most important detail about other genres is that they have more points of balance and when an out-draft happens. They can attempt to recover by skill/talents/items specialization where as heroes in OW are skills/talents/items. Refer to my other blog post where I go into detail on that topic. Because OW doesn't have these multiple balancing points like most other games you're going to have issues reaching a perfect balance but that doesn't mean we give up on attempting to do so.
The second answer is difficult and incomplete but from what I've played/researched with other games is that deception is needed in Overwatch. Games with incomplete information such as Starcraft: Broodwar have a natural cycle of meta. This happens in a macro and mirco sense meaning it happens in best of 3s and then overall in a tournaments and even larger than that, the ladder. A simplistic view of the cycle is that when a counter is found for a specific strategy it becomes less viable but at a certain point it becomes so rare and forgotten that it can work because its unexpected. This can only happen in an environment where incomplete information is natural and strangely enough lines up with what games AI has a difficult time playing.
Nearly all RTS games have a fog of war that stops you from knowing exactly what's going on, while in OW we have the exact opposite. After a brief period of time we see all the heroes the enemy is running and because OW is meant to be simplistic, we almost always know what they're going to do. It's not like you can do something crazy with Widowmaker, you're going to get shot in the head - maybe from the side but that's about it. Same can be said for most other heroes, there's a few surprising things they can do in game as you have all the pieces of information in front of you.
As of now I only have a few ways to introducing deception into OW, the first and most obvious is to get rid of heroes on the score screen. The second is to have fully covered flanks with multiple exits on more maps. Currently most maps have an open and closed flank to each point, the far flank is often open while the close flank is closed. While the open flank has some cover it often allows you moments to see the enemy so you know what's going on, I believe this was introduced to give longer ranged heroes opportunities and to keep the games theme of simplicity going to help lower level players be less surprised by flanks. There are fears that this may make all maps feel the same but most maps already follow theme as stated above so that's not a concern . I will go into map design in a future post.
It's coincidental that I have another post lined up to talk about deception which I plan to look at more but I believe I've identified an issue with how the META develops in Overwatch. The sad part is that at the end of the day it doesn't matter what META is dominate. Some players will love it and others will hate it, as far as developers are concerned you're screwed either way so why pick a side? Neither dive nor double shield are looked favorably upon by everyone so do we take a vote or do we try to implement ways for the META to develop on it's own? I'm firmly in the belief that we need to start looking at ways to change Overwatch at it's core to support more varied compositions and not play favorites. This doesn't mean we give up on balancing, we need attempt to make more heroes viable but to blatantly hate a hero that's fine in 99% of the games thinking that its going to solve all our issues is not the right way to go. The increased hate does nothing for the game and only lowers overall viewership in some childish tantrum until Blizzard gives into the vocal minority. If you're hero isn't viable in the current META do what the rest of us do, keep playing and find a way around it.