Let me elaborate. When you buff or nerf damage for any specific hero ability from 75% to 50%, you don’t really want to find that sweet spot, you’re not truly trying to find that correct balanced number, let’s imagine it’s 63.5% as an exmaple.
When you sway the balance pendulum this far wide in either direction, 33% up or down, do you know what that is really doing? It’s actually conditioning us the gamers, and leaving the door open for endless 50>75 or 75>50 changes in the future. It’s an indirect message that “we don’t really want to find a sweet spot and leave it there”.
Not sure if I’m explaining myself right or not, but if you get it you get it. They don’t balance Overwatch to find the sweet spot, they do this on purpose so they can continue to do this forever and have control over how the game is played, what metas, etc.
This isn’t a complaint thread btw, as I actually think the game is in a pretty sweet spot right now. Just an observation on Blizzard’s balancing philosophy.
But I don’t think this is a bad thing. Obviously people are going to love some patches, and utterly hate others. Can’t please everyone!
But I think “balance” is next to impossible given all of the variables they have to consider (hero, ability, map, mode, so on). So the moving goal posts and controlling the narrative is definitely a good option.
Game is definitely in a reasonable place right now, and from what I have seen from number, player base is up atm. Only slightly, but it is up.
First, I’m sure the perfect sweet spot doesn’t exist, there’s no such thing as perfect balance. Second, people want change.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume Blizzard finds the perfect values for every hero and leaves it there. Even then, there will be some team composition/meta that will be “the best” in terms of reliability and familiarity. You play with 5 randoms, you ideally want to have everybody else a rough idea of what to do; if there’s a meta that works well enough, there’s not much reason to experiment.
Dive was the meta in the earlier seasons, and while many people think it’s a better meta than all the others, back then, players grew tired of playing the same stuff over and over again.
So, Blizz looks at the hero pick rates and tries to change it so that the less played heroes become interesting again; you do that by either nerfing their perceived(!) counters or buffing them.
So yes, Blizzard doesn’t really want a perfect balance, and I think that’s actually a good thing. It prevents the game from getting stale. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to go overboard and make some hero completely OP; I think they’re doing a much better job now than years ago. For example, previously hero changes were tested on PTR, and they were basically only looking for bugs, and didn’t really react to feedback (although not many players actually played PTR, so the value of the feedback was also really limited and skewed towards the hardcore players).
Nowadays, with Experimental, they actually sometimes listen to feedback, like ThiccCree (250 HP), Cree mid air roll not making it live or the recent soldier change where they nerfed his damage a bit compared to experimental.