Why is Blizzard adding heroes that make the game less fun?

Competitive Discussion
1

Sombra, Doomfist, and now Brigitte.

These heroes disable you from playing the game and are nothing but frustrating to play against. You could say that it is also unfun to play against a good widow or hanzo, but these heroes take an incredible amount of skill to play (debatable with hanzo’s recent patch); I feel more respect for the widow that just hit a hook shot cross-map than I do hate of the game for not letting me play.

Sombra, Doomfist, and Brigitte, however, can disable or one-shot characters with little to no skill. That is not to say that good Brigitte (or doom or sombra) players cannot separate themselves from bad ones, but players who are significantly lower in skill and game sense can now compete at higher levels simply because Blizzard added a boring hero to the game.

I am aware that this is Blizzard’s game and they can do whatever they’d like with it, but I am baffled that they would rather add these frustrating, skill-less heroes rather than heroes that are fun and interesting to play and take time to get the full value out of (like genji and widow).

If a Dev happens to read this just please take this away: make heroes that enable your team and take more than 10 mins experience to get almost full value out of, don’t make heroes that make the fun heroes impossible or frustrating to play.

2

Look at games like LoL. They have 140 heroes and some of them are super easy to play, while getting super high value out of. LoL has been there for almost 10 years now, and balance is still a funny thing, in that game. What Riot Game, did was always keep the game fresh by introducing change after change after change.

If they figured out that, the secret recipe to making a game successful was keeping things fresh, why shouldn’t Blizzard do that too?

3

But Blizzard has clearly shown that they will be very slow with updates, therefore they cannot follow in Riot’s lead.

AND LoL is much more a game about game sense and knowledge, whereas OW is roughly half game sense and half raw skill. So its frustrating when some characters are viable when they don’t have to worry about half the game (rough guesstimates)

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4

Well, Riot has more than 1000 developers focused on a single game, while Blizzard doesn’t have that kind of manpower yet to put on Overwatch. They are trying to introduce those things that make a key difference.

They introduced heroes like Brig, Moira and changed up the roster because the meta has been stale since season 4, with Dive alone. Now on PTR, we see social features like LFG, endorsement that’s aimed at solving frustration the community has been facing.

Mechanics is a super important factor in LoL aswell. But a different kind of mechanics, it’s more about how you react using the right skill in a given situation.

5

I’m all for switching up the meta, but why not do it with heroes that take a lot of skill to play well and aren’t simply frustrating to play against?

And come on, is Blizzard low on funds? They could update the game faster if it was a priority for them.

6

Because the vast Overwatch community aren’t ex CS:GO players, with stellar aim. They come from so many different genres, that making aim a prerequisite to do well in this game doesn’t work out.

Blizzard has the number on what the communities overall accuracy are like, and they make decisions to help out the larger audience.

2 Likes
7

It’s a FPS. Aim is part of it.
But look at a hero like Zarya. She is an incredibly high skill cap hero, and her usefulness scales extremely consistently with your actual game skill. She doesn’t take a huge amount of raw aim to use, but you can’t be lazy with your aim. Blizzard should make more heroes like her.

8

Like I told you, the idea is to make this game fun for the wider audience.
Overwatch isn’t like the traditional FPS games, were aim trumps it all.
It’s a hybrid between a MOBA and has FPS attributes to it. A pure FPS game in the literal sense would be games like CS, Rainbox Six etc…

1 Like
9

Like I said, take Zarya as an example.

And OW is obviously a very unique game, but the devs do expect players to be able to aim as seen with heroes like mcree, widow, and soldier.

Moira was even a great example of how to make a fun hero with almost no aim. Sure, some of her kit can be frustrating to play against, but she empowers her team, and she doesn’t disable the enemy team at all.

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10

The point being their are enough heroes to cater to both camps. Those that want to play high precision heroes, those that want to play heroes that doesn’t require aim, we got projectile heroes, heroes that need to pre-aim… I don’t agree with your notion of making it purely one sided by only introducing aim only heroes. That’s not going to happen.

11

Not once did I say that only heroes that require aim should be in the game. My argument the whole time has been that Blizzard should add heroes that take considerable skill to get value out of AND are focused more on cool abilities or enabling their own team to the game instead of heroes that simply stop the other team from playing the game because they pressed a button while facing in your general direction (sombra hack, doom punch, brigitte shield bash).
They even made it much more difficult for Roadhog to one-shot people because it isn’t fun to play against, and now roadhog is in a great place in the meta

12

A smart developer reasons, based on statistics they collect from their player base. If Blizzard has raw facts showing 70% of the communities aim is dog sh*t, what do you want them to do, make more aim based heroes :smiley: ?

13

Just said that high skill cap doesn’t mean good aim. Reinhardt, for instance.

And I would rather blizzard find helpful ways of encouraging their players to become better (not just at aim, but at the game in general) rather than adding characters that make the game less fun.

14

The problem with having too many high skill cap heroes being it reduces the communities overall effectiveness in positively impacting a game, thereby having a feeling of discontent. A game always need heroes that are easy to learn and be effective with. LoL has shown us this already.

15

This is a competitive post. Overwatch is an E-Sport. They should be adding to the game’s complexity to make it more fun to play competitively, not taking away from it.
lucio, junkrat, soldier, rein, and mercy are all great heroes to learn the game on. Do we really need more than that?
And I disagree with your first sentence. I think having more high skill heroes gives the community more power to positively impact the game and makes the community more likely to aspire to become better at the game.

Also its late and I have work tmro. goodnight, sleep well (if ur in the americas).

16

Which is why they have plenty of high skill ceiling heroes. You have more of them in fact, compared to the easier to pick heroes. It’s about keeping balance.
LoL is also a super highly competitive game. They have a huge e-sport scene as well.
And yet that game has tons of heroes that are easy to play and be super effective on. I wonder why?
Game developers learn from each other, as the gaming industry keeps evolving.

17

This.
Overwatch is a hybrid. And that’s why I(and everyone else) love it.
I love this artwork of blizzards, I feel it’s a master piece. And I play aim-centered heroes mostly.(ana tracer etc).
We need diversity. If auto aim is part of it,so be it. They are still hard to play on high level imo. Some are amongst the hardest.

1 Like
18

I love diversity in the game as long as it doesn’t mean dumbing the game down.

There is an incredible amount of diversity in how each of the good heroes aim. Widow v Tracer v Zen for example. All are extremely different in how they position and aim, but all are also very hard to play, and I think we should be adding new, interesting, and challenging ways to learn to aim and play instead of characters that don’t have to aim.

Ana was in my opinion the best addition to the game since launch. Her abilities counter some of the most powerful in the game, but she is also very difficult to play forcing whoever is playing her to have both hitscan and projectile skills.

And just to clear this up, I am looking at Overwatch as a competitive game. I will admit that what I am saying is effectively irrelevant and wrong when talking about playing in Arcade or even quickplay. I just want OW to be a great competitive E-Sport (as I believe the Devs want too), and adding fun to play, high skill heroes is the best way to make the game more fun to play and watch competitively.

19

As an Ana main i hate dive, Brigitte counters dive, Moira counters Genji, if had so much more fun lately now, if even started picking up Ana again slightly without succes ofcourse since i haven’t played her since dive became a thing, dive was dominant meta for many seasons so it was huge pain to play Ana so i gave up played Mercy instead, Mercy is still the best support in the game right now even better then Brigitte, however Brigitte is the most fun until get bored of her.

20

You know what? I just started to play tracer a lot on this account and I enjoy her a lot.
Also ana main here :slight_smile: