A madman's rantings

Just a quick reference to Overwatch's damage and how a hero's damage compares with and without reloading.  Why does this make a difference?  Some heroes such as Junkrat are said to have high shield break but are actually #8 in DPS when accounting for reload.  Another example is that Ashe and mercy have the same DPS with their primary fire.  Ashe's reload lowers her consistent DPS quite considerably but the greatest difference is Doomfist.  Doomfist has burst damage comparable to reaper but because of his long reload it appears closer a support. Name Role DPS w/ Reload DPS w/o Reload Difference Bastion Sentry DPS 405 500 -95 reaper DPS 204 280 -76 Hanzo DPS 167 167 0 symmetra (Max) DPS 159 181 -22 tracer DPS 152 240 -88 Dva Tank 147 147 0 zarya (Max) Tank 129 170 -41 Junkrat DPS 126 185 -59 roadhog Tank 120 176 -56 Bastion Recon DPS 119 160 -41 soldier DPS 118 173 -55 Baptiste Support 117 124 -7 sigma Tank 73 73 0 Echo DPS 112 155 -43 torbjorn M2 DPS 110 156 -46 ...

I've had the skeleton of this post written for a while, never got the chance to finish it.  What inspired me to finalize it was this podcast  by Artosis.  Artosis is half of the greatest esport commentator duo out there.  There's a lot of talk about what to do with the RTS genre, specifically because so many devs, designers, and managers split of from Blizzard to form Frost Giant studios to make the next generation of RTS gaming.  More can be found in this podcast with Artosis and the Frost Giant team. In the first video Artosis said a couple of reasons why he believes other games are more popular and one of the reasons was "it's easier".  This threw another commentator into a small fit and while I agree with Artosis, there are better ways to put it.  I'm going to expand on why the latest games are trending towards casual, team based play and the primary reasons behind it. A note about this post, I know all of the ideas I'm covering can be expanded on ...

Video A bit of the same story, I wanted a shorter post but I've decided to include some elements from other historic issues I've seen within the OW community to provide some context and irony/hypocrisy.  I'm looking to outline the new priority pass system and my thoughts on that but more importantly I'm going to tie in how the community is reacting, how this relates to private profiles, and how assbackwards this is from a couple years ago. Final Edit: While I consider this blog done I'm not happy with its results but it's still a good discussion.  The video will go over it in better detail. Let's start off with something objective.  Priority Pass is a system that allows players to queue up competitively in a new flex queue.  This queue will put you into the role that's needed most.  If you queue up this way you'll get 2   passes on a loss and 6 passes on a win. You can save up to 40 of these passes and can spend one at a time to by-pass the long time...

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....

Video           I want to open this up by giving credit to Blizzard.  When Jeff mentioned balance a while back he said he thought Overwatch was in a good spot everyone thought he was crazy, but it's the truth.  There's a single fact that constantly reminds me of this, with enough skill you can get to top 500 with any hero, at times top 100.  Some heroes are easier to climb with (this isn't a shot at low skill floors, it's a shot at meta) but that doesn't change the fact that it's still possible. The way I think of it is that after a 7 year development cycle the only issue is that a heroes numbers of off by 10%, that's pretty damn good.  At the top 1% of games you can still run most heroes. The community needs to face it, Blizzard hit their scope and now its about fine tuning.  Overall we complain too much in this community, some of it is constructive but that's rare.  In either case it does give feedback to the developers on how the...