Why are low ranks ignored?

Why is it that everytime i watch a tip video of heroes on yt or when jeff is talking, ppl are always focusing on higher ranked players.

I believe Jeff even said that you have to blame yourself for being in such a low rank as well.

Like it’s very clear that the most players in overwatch is in platinum or lower, so shouldn’t Jeff and his team focus more on making it better in lower ranks since there is where most of the players are??

Like take GOATs for example, they only fixed reaper so he could counter them…BUT in low ranks guess what…I’ve NEVER seen ppl play GOATs, never even once so i don’t understand.

Doesn’t Jeff and his team want a better player experience for EVERYONE? Sure you can’t make everyone happy BUT he has himself to blame if he starts to loose money etc because of his stupid mistakes.

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I’ll have to agree on this. The only time I’ve seen GOATs played at a low rank is when I literally played in a 6-stack with the sole purpose of playing GOATs and see how effectively we could utilise the comp. All the changes being made are seemingly based on ESports Competitive (I.e OW League, Contenders and World Cup) as well as the higher-end of the game like Top 500 and GM. Yet down at the lower ranks comps like GOATs are nowhere to be found, DPS is literally everywhere and characters that are harder to optimise at higher level like Reaper and Bastion are rarely effectively countered.

The argument could be made that people in lower ranks should just learn to deal with the threats, but when Reaper walks up to my back line of healers and Ana and Zen are too busy panicking to Sleep Dart or headshot him, nerfing Defense Matrix and giving said Reaper a buff is not going to assist me in peeling back and helping my healers. Nerfing armour is not going to better allow Reinhardt to smack that Mcree away after he rolls behind the shield - it’s just gonna make that Fan The Hammer hurt even more.

I think the idea that lower ranks don’t matter when it comes to balance changes because they don’t understand the meta or can’t use the meta comps or whatever is kinda foolish and a little rude to the majority of the playerbase. Lower ranked players want to have fun too.

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because you can’t balance a game around people who don’t know how its played properly.

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Yeah… people keep on calling Goats “low skill”, while it only gets played in M and GM. Yet we get the new Hanzo that’s effective at spamming without skill, McRightclick that has no skill and now the immortal Reaper.
But ok, who cares about the lower 70% of the player base?

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Yeah but it is hard to “just deal with it” because you are in lower ranks, that’s not an acceptable excuse for Jeff or anyone of his team to say to us players. It’s just straight up rude.

They just focus on the high ranks all the time making us in low feel like we don’t want to play anymore, like in EVERY new upcoming patch all i’ve seen are reaper updates and buffs…Like what!?! Why only focus on reaper when he’s so hard to counter still and doesso much dmg. I even heard once that his ult was going to go through shields O.O

This is just so messed up.

That is false. It is low skilled and is not only played in M and GM. The only true meta, that did that was Dive, this was the only meta to only work at M and GM.

Goats is effective everywhere provided you can simply play together, that is it. You need close to no skill or team play, just dont run off alone basically. It is run everywhere, but it isn´t run all the time. One of the many reasons that it isn´t run as much even in the highest tiers is, that it is so boring to play, no one really enjoys it. So all the low ranked DPS only players don´t want to swap to the most effective strategy over their fun and interactive DPS plays.

This is why you look at good players and pros, they show, what you need to do and, why you need to do it. Goats is completely out of control in terms of pickrate in the pro scene and any theoretical counter comps are useless because of how effective the goats are and how favorited they are in terms of close quarters and having only active points you have to keep on following, instead of some big maps with multiple of objectives etc, where Goats would be more easilly countered.

But they still need to focus more on where most of the players are at, like there are more of players in low ranks and if Jeff and his team continue to fu*k it up they will loose more players and that will make the game fall out of popularity etc.

Like he can’t focus on top ranked players and THEN BLAME low ranks that it’s their fault for being so bad at the game.

He’s giving the game more of a bad rep that way and it’s not good for the company.

Those players wouldn´t be facing the “Low ranked issues” if they actually improved and became better. Since it clearly shows no signs of those problems existing, where the higher players resides. You would rather listen to the general public on health issues than a doctor or the hooligans over the professional football player and his coach ?

You see, the pros shows us, what we need to know at the most utilized play in the game. If things work here, it would work everywhere in the game, provided players either improve or accept, that the problems they face is their lack of wanting to improve.

If a game is balanced around the majority playerbase (aka something like brigitte was, a hero released for everyone to play, being easy to play for even the worst of the players in the game) you have a huge balancing mess on your hands. This results in players leaving in mass, people might think they just want fun, but there is nothing fun about a game not being properly balanced.

So if you balance around plat i means that you have plat being balanced, everything under that is as it is now for plat and everything above it is horribly unbalanced, cause peoples skills far exceed, the capabilities of the balancing norm.

Then comes another problem, what are people to strive for, when playing a “competetive mode”, when they are already playing a game tuned for their mediocre skill level. The better they get, the worse the game is gonna be, because they now leave the “balanced” part of the game.

You know there are ppl out there who tries their best to improve but just can’t get better?? There are ppl out there who also have issues, let’s say autism like me but a little worse…They have issues and maybe can’t rank up because of that.

You can’t just go around and say that you should improve, it might be easy for you but everyone needs to think about others too.

In this case i would rather listen to the people than Jeff because he tells us it’s our fault for being in a low rank, becausr most of ow’s players are in low ranks.

That is not true because those ppl are pros and focus more on the high ranks and what you need to learn from there, i’ve neber seen tips in low ranks. And it’s easy for you to say that you can become better BUT that’s not the case here, i’ve been playing in 1 and a half years and i’m still in silver or gold.

I’ve been trying to improve but nothing has worked.

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I’m mostly in for bad aim.
This is not meant to be negative or offensive, but in plat + a widow player will land shots on reaper.
= reaper is completely useless.
He can’t get into the fight.

Lower ranked widows don’t hit, and reaper can close the distance and wreck havoc.
= reaper op
= Widow useless and needs buffs.

Thats also imho why theres more bastion played in lower ranks, the ability to counter him are limited there.

Or just look at Torbjörn, once there was a graph how torbs turret performed in each rank.

Below gold, torbs turret was a big threat.
Through gold and platin his value sank drastically.
Above diamond, his turret is literally one of the worst abilities. As it’s shutdown immediately.

But this would’ve mean that we needed to buff his turret, since in gm it was useless and never used. This would’ve killed the lower ranks.

Btw i was 10 seasons below platin, but somehow as brig got released i climbed higher to high platin. I played tons of qp with friends who are higher ranked, comp was later pretty much a joke, as my skill level has increased dramatically.

(i was playing with diamond friends, which led to a team sr of high plat)
Guess what, 2.8k is where I’m again having trouble.

I can really recommend to play with better players, so you basically become a better player.

If bronze, play with high silver / low gold = should bring you to a mid/high silver niveau.

But I’m not sure if that works for everyone.

Edit:
A lot of low ranked players don’t know what they do wrong.
I had a crazy high dpi on my mouse, went 1.4k
Now I’m used to a way lower dpi, 2.8k (after a hard time in gold)

Also i saw players shooting in salves (as tracer…)
Ppl standing still against sniper / flanker.
Sometimes questionable plays.

Or they play the hero completely wrong, example? Long range tracer…

“Can´t”, aka don´t want to. Many people have autism or some mental disability and stil kick ass in gaming. What do you want to do instead. Make the game dumbed down so that disabled people have an easier time, this just ends up making the game worse and in worst cases fail. Surely there are people, who have a harder time and might need to work harder than others. That does not mean we can do anything about that. It is a competition, that is what competetive means. Here you can´t just give out extra priviledges etc, that would make it problematic.

okay so you dont want to listen to jeff, what about the 100s of pro players, their whole staffs and coaches etc. The teams and organisations that say the same thing. The majority of the development team etc. All of those are just ignored as well.

This is a lack of actually putting the effort in and we have hard proof of that. Some pro tank players were platinum, when they started the game look, where they are now. Fissure was one of those players etc.

Just because you feel you have played the game enough doesn´t always mean you have. 1 and a half years ? I have been playing FPS games competetively and in teams etc since i started out at the age of 5-6 years. My best friend and i played everyday, every weekend and he is now a renowned pro of the best e-sports team in the world. Does this mean that i should be pro as well, i mean we played about the same amount, always together etc and to this day still am friends and do play and see each other. Yet he is pro i am not, why is that, i mean i played exactly as long as he did. Quite simply i didn´t put as much effort into that specific game he turned pro in.

If you balance around low ranks, you break the game for high ranks because all buffs that make the life of a low rank better will turn into an exploit for high ranks, making the game stale and unenjoyable.

By balancing around high tiers, the devs can find out which attributes are actually exploitable. If something is exploitable for low ranks but not for high ranks, then it means that the low ranked player lacks skill and knowledge to deal with the problem.

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Because Blizzard is putting all its effort into the E-sport of the game and ignoring all the casual players. They don’t even make new stuff for events anymore all the money and time flows into the Overwatch League.

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You cannot balance the game around people who don’t know how to play optimally.

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Not sure where you people got that … you can search US forums[because I’m too lazy to find you links] and find out they’ve said a few times that they try to do balancing against all ranks.

I mean, when you have ranks, and you match players by rank - you can’t do balancing according to best players only. When you don’t have ranked matching - you can.
If you balance only for high ranks you risk losing low level players. Because of ranked matching they now must make sure that gameplay in every rank is somewhat balanced. Some changes will be made to make certain heroes stronger/weaker in high ranks, some changes will be made to make heroes stronger/weaker in lower ranks, as they see fit …

They also need to think of balance in various modes they added in last years, like 3vs3, or DM, or TDM, or they risk players stop playing these modes.

It does make sense to balance heroes on every rank but remember that you are always looking for another factor in each rank.

  • It is beneficial to balance around low tiers to grant accessibility, making heroes easy to learn.
  • They also need to look at mid tier players, to see if there is progression performance wise, tweaking the heroes to make them hard to master.
  • High tier players are capable of playing heroes at their fullest potential. They are a good source of finding exploits, making it easier to balance heroes out to be worth mastering without being exploitable.

Basically, look at low tiers for acessibility; Look at mid tiers for progression; Look at high tiers for perfection.

The reason you are getting no new items and stuff is cause of activision, the e-sport scene is a huge side business that make its own money and trust me, with all the teams having paid some 20-30m dollars to get in. I doubt that Blizzard is seeing a loss from OWL.

Activision-Blizzard clearly balances for high rank players, and especially the pro scene. I hate it, but it makes all the sense.

When you balance for lower ranks you get an abomination like Brigitte. You ruin the entire pro scene because you make easy to use heroes too powerful to ever justify picking high risk high reward heroes.

As I said, you should balance for people who can play the game optimally. This is where I get into a contradiction with myself, because the developers are balancing for the pro scene, but I dislike that, since they play in an environment that is in stark contrast with even the highest elos of ladder.

Everything is op in low rank, whats the problem?

Dude, if in your games reaper can easily get into your backline without being noticed, it is impossible to balance the game around such players, they can’t deal with a basic things

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