A madman's rantings

Forewarning, I'm going to get a little bit bitter here.  When it comes to one tricks its a personal battle not just for me but for some of my friends as well.  We all went through a lot of harassment and other shit on a daily basis so cut me a little slack as I get this out. So happening right now? The community is starting a small revolt on the forums and on the ladder to get rid of hero pools.  All of a sudden players that have hated one tricks, tried to get us banned with false reports, who have thrown 25% of my games and who constantly griefed us are changing their tune awfully fast because the hero pool system is working as its intended.  More to the point, its not working as they want it to. It's starting to ban the over tuned hit-scan heroes and they feel its unfair to ban their way of playing the game. Throughout Overwatch's history people have hated one tricks, specifically off-meta one tricks.  Blizzard has created multiple systems and each time...

Few have been keeping track but I never got around to talking about the hero pools for the past 3 weeks.  Luckily, unified hero pools hit 3 weeks ago so I figured its a good time to talk about it. I'm conflicted about unified hero pools but probably not for the same reasons anyone else is.  Originally I loved the idea of separate hero pools, simply because blizzard could pick a set of heroes to ban and then gather data in competitive mode on how to balance the game.  It didn't matter how odd or weird the hero pools were, it wasn't effecting OWL so whats the problem?  We saw the peak of this system work when all hit scans were banned and immediately got changes to Ashe and Phara because of the data generated.  This was only possible because Blizzard saw what the heroes were having issues with in an environment where both heroes could co-exist and not get crushed by the stronger heroes. Week after week they banned specific heroes to learn more about the game, ...

This isn't really a good post but I'm seeing a lot of discussion that 250hp DPS heroes are becoming an issue.  This isn't the case, 250hp heroes are balanced by being close range heroes and/or have high inconsistency at range when compared to 200hp heroes.  Since all 250hp heroes are close range they have extra abilities to help them mitigate damage to close the gap.  Its this extra sustain that's mandatory for close range heroes because of the insane burst all line ups have that the community isn't understanding.  I'll list them all out just to make it incredibly obvious. Mei has wall to help close the distance and ice block to deal with burst, she excels at close range but inconsistent at long range when compared to hit scan. Torb has overload to deal with burst and close the distance.  He's only good at close range with overload active because of the nerfs on his shotgun.  At longer ranges he's more inconsistent than hit scan.  Torb is heavily d...

I have to apologize for taking so long to get this post out.  I've been fighting with the idea of one massive post to talk about all my points, but I've decided to break it apart into two posts.  The flow of this post is a little different so I'm sorry ahead of time.  I'll state each point that hero pools attempts to solve and provide a little background on it.  Then I'll state what I believe is the reasoning behind each point.  At the end I'll talk about how it was executed and if its implementation worked.  I'm writing it this way because in the end all the points are related and its easier to see their relation when quickly consumed instead of taking time and explaining one by one. So what is blizzard attempting to accomplish with hero pools?   Firstly, Hero pools are there to force the meta to change on a weekly basis. By banning out specific heroes Blizzard can immediately change how the game is played.  Small or even large balan...

Some big news today which we need to go over first because it directly relates to how I feel about this week's bans. First of all, Map pools are now done.  The oddest part of this idea is that one of their main concepts was to give each season a different feeling.  I understand what they are saying but in practice no one will remember the seasons because of the map pool.  When i think back to any season i never think of the map pools, new maps, old maps or anything like that.  The only thing that I personally remember, and what i think most are, is the meta.  We remember GOATs, we remember double sniper and moth meta.  No one cares what maps are being played but players and people will more likely remember something they hate rather than something they like.  Its akin to the resturant analogy when it comes to customer service.  You can do something right a thousand times but one bad experience will make them never come back.  I enjoy Kings ...

This weeks bans. Hammond, Mercy and Hanzo. This will be a short post this week because as much as I think about it i can't figure out too many data points to gather with this ban pool.  There is one hero I see that's gaining a lot from this ban pool, Widowmaker. I see her as the big winner because she won't have to deal with Hammond, who's good at harassing her up close and Hanzo who's good at putting some pressure at long range.  Mercy is an interesting pick because it removes the main advantage of having a sniper, taking someone out before the fight even starts and without mercy you now have no way to undo that advantage.  Outside of that there could be some relation to the heroes that just got changed in the latest patch.  You want Mei to be played so you can judge her nerf but at the same time you don't want her played just to deal with ball, even with her nerfs she'll still deal with him quite well.  With hammond removed we'll now see Mei play...

Before i get into what i'm looking for with this week's bans I want to say that with this week's hero pool i'm more confident than ever that blizzard is using hero pools as i originally thought - to gather data on heroes and how to better balance the game.  The issue with any experimental card or PTR data is that we don't get a lot of players playing on it and; lets finally agree, people don't try as hard in other game modes.  We need to see what the best players do and how players of all ranks play when faced with specific challenges.  It provides much more useful data that we can act on.  They mentioned aggressive patching, we haven't seen anything that resembles that or any patches that target meta heroes, which Jeff mentioned in his developer update.  My only guess is that we're going to get a large patch after all of the hero pool information is gathered.  I'm hoping for the best. It's easy to talk about this weeks bans, its targeted at hi...

The second week of ladder bans have been heavily switched up.  Much to Blizzard's promise originally, they were not kept to banning 1 tank, 2 DPS and 1 support.  This week's bans are Reinhardt, Reaper, Ana and Moira.  The immediate response has been wonderfully ironic.  Many of the players who wanted this feature are now on the forums and heavily questioning hero bans.  It seems like it was a great idea to the community who all said "they won't ban my hero" and then their hero got banned.  More importantly, this significantly changes up the game, which Blizzard has stated is its primary feature. Working as designed. To me what the hero pool provides more than anything is data. The community relies too much on feelings and not enough on reality.  What data are we going to get confirmation on this time? Firstly, with Reinhardt out what will the tank lineup be?  Historically we have two main compositions without Reinhardt; dive and double shi...

Just a quick post before I finish my overall thoughts on hero pools. As bad as it looks I do have some hope. This week Winston, S76, Sombra and Lucio are banned. On the tank front, not too big of an impact with Winston being taken out of the pool. The first thought is that this may protect enemy widows a little bit more but with the current state of widow in OWL is that if shes viable, the only way to deal with her is with another widow.  I don't see any team going full dive with their tank line to deal with widow so overall, no real loss here. The DPS bans are even worse.  With widow, mei and mccree in the pool there is little to no use for Soldier 76.  Make no mistake, Soldier is still very strong, he's just weak when compared to the meta heroes.  This is why the latest patch is a little concerning, no nerfs on the DPS line up.  Sombra is in the same state, few teams are running her against the current meta line up.  While she has utility she lacks ...

A little discussion about Jeff Kaplans dev post.