Skill requirement does NOT equal balance

General Discussion
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I always hear from people that certain characters, like Hanzo and Doomfist are balanced because they require skill. That is not true at all. If skill translate into balance, then the following would be true:

Mercy 1.0 would be severely underpowered because of her low skill ceiling. Brig would also be weak because of the same reason. Soldier 76 would be less favorable than other picks in a fight because his kit is simple and not very special or interesting.

And yet, none of these are true. Just because Hanzo needs aim to be effective with doesnt mean he is a Well balanced hero. Not in the slightest. He is good at every range, can oneshot, has high burst damage, and outclasses every other DPS in the game.

Doomfist has mind numbingly painful CC abilities that make tanking a concentrated dose of anti fun.

So please, stop saying that certain characters are balanced because of thier skill ceiling.

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They don’t have to be balanced. They have to have effective counters.

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Yeah a self declared competitive game, doesn’t need to be balanced.

LEL

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The idea is to make it as imbalanced as possible. In a nutshell, the game was meant to be a rock paper scissors game. In order to do that, you need to make heroes both OP and “troll picks”, depending on who your opponent is.

Balancing might be a bad terminology for this case. What TRON refers to with balancing is making the game symmetrical. Overwatch is an asymmetrical game where you’re forced to adapt. Balancing heros in the wrong way would lead to the game being symmetrical.

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Eh, you’re all kind of right, except your present your opinions as absolutes which isn’t right.

A perfectly balanced game is rock/paper/scissors, which is boring.
A perfectly skill based game is something like Unreal Tournament deathmatch where everyone has the insta-gib rifle, which is boring.

You need rock/paper/scissors elements in the game, but not have the entire game become nothing but countering.
There will naturally be differences in potential skill expression in heroes, and it’s okay to reward higher skill based heroes by having them be a bit more powerful, but ideally you want to keep things balanced there too. Rather than say “Oh, I’ll reward this hero with massive damage because he/she requires skill to play”, it’s a much better thing to say “Oh, well I’ll try to inject more potential skill expression into this kit so that it’s brought more in line with the others”.

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Very good description. Thank you.

Heros don’t have to be balanced in 1v1. Team fights have to be balanced. Since teams can pick the exact same set of heros the game is more or less balanced.

The fact that some OPTs regularly and sometimes unavoidably lose games is their fault. They want to nerf the counters of their favourite heros instead of learning how to counter them (sometimes with other heros).

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Actually, that opinion is absolute.

In this article, an interview is mentioned where Jeff Kaplan stated that hero switching is a “core part of it”. The game was designed to make you switch during the game. The game was designed to be rock-paper-scissors in a nutshell.

Keep in mind that I say rock-paper-scissors in a nutshell. It’s an overgeneralization. In reality, the game tries to give heroes advantages and disadvantages against specific other heroes, providing with both soft counters and hard counters. This means that you can still beat them if you are skilled enough. For example, I’m able to kill Brigitte as Mercy because I understand Brigitte’s kit and learned her weaknesses. Widowmaker can still beat Tracer, even though Tracer has the advantage. Doomfist is one of those heroes who lack hard counters, the only one being Sombra and possibly Orisa, due to her CC negate ability.

However, Overwatch is no ordinary FPS. I remember an Overwatch video about tactical suicide. Where you kill yourself to choose a better hero. It can be used to trick the enemy so they think you are switching, leading the player to switch themselves.

Mechanical skill is important in a shooter. However, Overwatch’s core mechanic allows you to shine with tactics and strategy making. That’s the nature of asymmetric shooters. You fight and you adapt.

The problem with balancing Overwatch is finding the golden ratio between skill impact and strategy impact. You can’t make every mechanical skill-based hero the best ones because it would destroy the asymmetry but you can’t make “noob” heroes into effective counters against skill-based heroes because then the game feels cheap.

People underestimate how difficult it is to balance an asymmetrical game. Most suggestions by players make the hero symmetrical, which is not the path Blizzard want’s to take. Nevertheless, Blizzard themselves struggle with balancing because one mistake either breaks the whole game or the core mechanic.

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Noone says, or should say, that skill requirements are part of balance. What most people mean is that for example Widowmaker requires a lot of skill to consistently get head shots, and when she’s at that level everybody else should be good enough to know how to counter her. If a plat widow is pure terror, then your team is just bad, plain and simple, as that widow is very bad.

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It’s part of blizzard games, wow is the same.

There is always “its “balanced” with 3 vs 3 in mind” kind of application for Overwatch, it’s “balanced” with 6 vs 6 in mind ( I did write 5vs5)

The only point to play higher skill floor heroes which don’t exceed in their class is to hard counter the enemy, otherwise you’re seen as a burden, unless you excel in playing them and would be useless otherwise.

You end up as a high skill floor hero, genji/ tracer for example who are hard countered by Baguette, who is very low skill floor hero. It is imbalanced because some heroes hard counters are low skiller floored heroes, so their job is easier than maybe it is to hard counter them.

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If you are countered by Brigitte, switch to Pharah. Problem solved.

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H of the game.

You side tracked on that one.

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Not sure what you mean by that. Perhaps you misunderstand. I’m referring to comments like this:

Which is an absolute. He’s saying that the heroes don’t have to be balanced, they just have to have effective counters, which isn’t how game design works because doing that just ends up with rock/paper/scissors which is, like I said… boring.

You instead strike for a balance between rock/paper/scissors, skill requirement and every other game design/balance consideration, and brew the soup that is balance/good game design. :yum: This is what I’m saying, it’s not so simplistic as making rock/paper/scissors, and you don’t want to have that be too strong a factor otherwise the game will become boring because you will literally just constantly switch to counter whatever the enemy is playing.

You can read into what Jeff means when he says the game is based on R/P/S, but I highly doubt he meant it as an absolute, and if he did he is just plain wrong. Jeff can’t and wouldn’t be so foolish to claim that you can base the entire game on R/P/S. He knows there’s much more to it than that, and so do you. You’ve already proven that with your post. :yum:

As I said, most people in this thread are correct. You only fumble when you start using absolutes. Game design just isn’t that simplistic and that’s kind of what makes it interesting. When designing a game, the moment you start adding in extra variables, you lose that perfect balance, but once that imbalance has been achieved, you can then try to wring it back with other mechanics. You’ll never achieve that perfect R/P/S balance again, because it’s impossible. There are already too many variables and those variables aren’t even static, as they become conditional. But anyway, this chaos is a good thing! It’s what generates the fun. All you can do is push in the general direction of balance, but find more creative ways to do it than to solely try and pull the game back towards that R/P/S system, because while that’s inherently perfectly balanced, it is also boring.

For example, you can say “Oh, Soldier counters Pharah”, but great game design allows Pharah to beat Soldier too. Sure you can push things into the Soldiers favour, and that’s fine, but you don’t want an absolute 100% guarantee that the Soldier will win, because… boring.

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13

fair enough, but with limited heroes at the moment, the rock paper scissors system will get boring real fast, some heroes can counter others more, while weaker heroes will lose play as time goes on.

(Birgitte, for instance, can hard counters almost all tanks as well as any dive heroes, but only junk and phara are a hard counter to Brigitte playstyle)

in addition, to switch heroes and counter them is at the moment a good strategy, but it won’t last.
it might change once overwatch enter 30/40 heroes or more, balance at that point will fall if every hero can be picked at random times and become a chaotic mess, so heroes might be locked once you have piked them to rebalance it.

even now people are asking for more tank and support characters, for the sheer amount of dps there are in the game.

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People get bored of everything and OW doesn’t seem to be in the “real fast” category. The players levels and the accompanying playtime disproves this statement. For gods sake, you are level 1000+, what are you talking about?

Just learning the maps and the heros on a basic level takes at least 100 levels of gameplay and up until that point the game provides a lot of novelty. That’s a lot of playtime compared to most other games that are left much earlier by their players.

It’s true that countering isn’t the only factor but many people here go to the other extreme: they don’t even acknowledge that countering is a significant part of the game and want to “balance it” accordingly.

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As a person who formerly played fighting games competitively at highest levels, I agree that skill requirement should not factor into character balance. By this I mean that a character shouldn’t be allowed more powerful abilities simply because the character is more difficult to play. There will always be some crazy japanese who will pull it off, and then that person will be overpowered.
Characters should be balanced regardless of skill requirement.

But there needs to be difficult characters to satisfy people like me. Devs can’t simply dumb it down either. Game needs to feel rewarding.

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yes, and in comp, it was either G.O.A.T.S 70% of the time or a Brigitte, doomfist in every match to counter triple tank.
just look at ow league, its constant the same team comp.

and i have,
i played the game since the beginning and used to spend hours playing because it used to be fun,
now i get bored or frustrated because the gameplay of most heroes has become stressful and boring at the same time.
any fun gameplay mechanic that there were, has either been nerfed or removed for balance reasons and some i agree where strong and needed to change but other i find complicity unreasonable.

and don’t get me wrong the game is amazing,
but its come to a point where the gameplay value has diminished away from enjoyment to balance, and what’s the point of playing a game if it is not fun or exiting to play.
and this mentality about rock paper scissors is fine, but it gets real old real quick.

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My original comment belongs to the “game is boring” part. Someone with level 1000 can’t really say that the game is boring.

Pro players extract the maximum not only from individual heros but also from the possible compositions. They play in stable teams that have synergy and practised the use of those compositions. Their gameplay is very optimised.

Those pro techniques are often irrelevant when it comes to silver/gold/plat gameplay with random teams of players. I quite often see teams failing when they try to mimic the pros. I’ve seen a lot of GOAT failures too - people were often forced to flex to heros they couldn’t play.

It’s also a bit silly when lower rank people on this forum try to overuse the “meta” word just to seem competent. I’d reserve that word for discussions about pro matches.

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It’s pretty difficult to determine if OW has gotten boring for a large % of the player base as blizzard do not release statistics of such things.

It should get better in time with more heroes/combinations but as of now it’s a very repetitive game and a lot of people find repetition boring. (Same comp, lack of variation in matches)