Overwatch – How a Successful Game Was Killed With Bad Decisions

What mistakes did Blizzard make in my opinion in the development of their shooter?

Released in 2016, Overwatch is an undeniably successful game from Blizzard that has received recognition from other Overwatch players and a huge fan base since its release, and good sales only meant that the developers would be able to develop the game further, delighting players with a constant influx of new content. 5 years after its release, the game is not in the best condition: searching for a match on popular roles can take up to 10-15 minutes, the last content in the form of a new character was added more than a year ago, the balance of heroes is criticized daily on official forums, and the game itself is still a couple of years ago, smurf accounts began to fill up, spoiling the overall impression of the gameplay. Let’s try to figure out what went wrong and when.

“GOATS”. The Origin Of Death

The first nail in the coffin of Overwatch.

Many (including myself) believe that the problems began after the release of a new support hero – Brigitte. If we go back to the roots, then Overwatch was promoted by a rather unusual feature – the game has no attachment to roles, the gameplay encourages changing the hero at the right time.

Can’t your ally kill an enemy flying hero? Well, regardless of your role, you can take a conditional sniper right now and deal with this hero yourself, you do not need to rely solely on your team in all aspects of the game.

The release of Brigitte, on the other hand, prompted professional players to a fairly simple idea – tanks in the game have a health reserve 2 times more than that of an average DPS character, while tank damage is either the same or in some cases (Roadhog) exceeds most other DPS, so why just not to forget about this role and not to take enemies exclusively with fat?

Brigitte was the final touch of this idea since the hero was the first tank support – a lot of health, a shield, makes allies even more impenetrable due to the ultimate, while again, in terms of damage, it is not inferior to any DPS hero that was popular at that time. This is how GOATS was born.

Pickney Reinhardt, don’t take Genji.

GOATS is the name of a hero pack consisting of three tanks and three supports. Named after the team that popularized this strategy and was able to play it extremely successfully in the NA Open Division and Contenders NA.

This strategy was so strong that it could be beaten… by a GOATS pick. I think it’s not necessary to talk about what these “most interesting” games looked like – 12 fat heroes fight against each other and wait for someone to make a mistake, but if you decide not to play by the GOATS rules and take a DPS hero, 6 fat carcasses pile on you and demolish these ridiculous 200/150 health in a second.

Brigitte’s weakening was, of course, inevitable, but that didn’t stop the professionals and ordinary players in matchmaking – the strategy is too simple to execute, it is not punished for mistakes, and the enemies will not always want to play by your rules.

At the time of writing this article, Brigitte has more than 20 nerfs since the release, but the developers managed to defeat GOATS by making a very tough and controversial decision – to introduce violent role restrictions, forcing them to take at least two tanks, two DPS heroes and two support heroes (or in people – system 2/2/2). Just imagine, ONE HERO forced Blizzard to change a whole gameplay mechanic that, before the introduction of Brigitte, basically worked well and no one complained about it.

The introduction of the 2/2/2 system itself was also not without developer errors – instead of resetting the entire existing rating and starting everything from scratch, the developers solved the problem of distributing the “new” rating very simply: after calibration, your old rating was duplicated for each role, and the fact that there are many “vantricks” (players who play exclusively on one hero) in the game was ignored.

According to Blizzard, the average player who plays, say, ONLY Reinhardt and gets a conditional Master rating on him deserves the same rating on both DPS roles and support heroes. And it doesn’t matter that for 4 years this same player could not have played a single game in a different role in principle. All this, of course, worsened the overall level of the game and the quality of games in general,

Current Balance Issues

• April 2021 Hero Pick Rate Statistics at Grandmaster Overbuff.

As you can see from the 5 “skyscrapers” in the picture above, Overwatch, like any game, has its popular heroes, but the main problem is not their popularity, but how long they remain popular. Let’s say “Zarya” and “Reinhardt” since the release of the game have established themselves as the strongest combo tanks in the game (both in the professional scene and in matchmaking), and after 5 years… they are suddenly still the strongest combo.

While in other competitive games “meta picks” are deliberately weakened by developers and players are motivated to try something new, Overwatch chooses the path of stagnation.

For example, recently the Sigma and Taran tanks became popular in the game – an alternative to the well-established Zarya / Rein, the win rate of the former on Overbuff reached 52-53%, after which the developers released patches with the weakening of these heroes. In the meantime, there are 5 versatile heroes in the game with the strongest abilities and ultimates in-game: Reinhardt, Zorya, McCree, Ana, and Baptiste – this is the set you will see in 90% of games on the rating above ” Platinum”.

At the same time, the percentage of victories of the listed heroes with the top 5 pickrate also has good values ​​​​- 55-56%, but Blizzard also does not see this as a problem and is too rarely and reluctantly trying to change something, because ordinary mortals don’t have them there and interested.

• April 2021 Hero Win Rate Statistics At Grandmaster Rank Overbuff

At the same time, there is an equally important problem of balance in the game – too weak or situational heroes, whose pick rate can sometimes not reach even one percent in most leagues: Sombra, which needs a complete rework or at least large buffs since the release, Reaper which was weakened for the sake of the lower leagues, which is why it became noticeably weaker than its counterparts in the middle and higher ratings, Symmetra and Torbjorn underwent many changes up to the rework of almost all abilities and ultimates, but in the end, they remain more often only troll picks, “Bastion”, which itself does not know what it exists for and was in demand only in the bunker meta.

All this has been talked about for many years, but has it gotten any better? The problems of most OW heroes were laid in them when they were created, if you don’t make bold decisions like a real reworking of all abilities, these heroes will continue to be in demand in one of the hundreds of games.

At the same time, the situation differs from league to league – if on Grandmaster (1% of players) characters like Sombra can be played and have a high win rate, then on the average rating of these heroes it’s not that difficult to implement, they require perfect level of AIM, understanding of the character, positioning and other things that the average player cannot have without a thousand games on this hero. But who wants to waste time on a thousand games if there is “Makri” which with less effort gives a greater result? As a result, Blizzard cannot buff weak characters – they will just start to tear in high leagues and OWL, but if you leave everything as it is, the characters will be dead in the average rating.

It’s time for Blizzard to ask themselves the question: “Who are we making our game for?”. If you build a balance of around 1% of players from the major leagues or exclusively for professional players, your core audience will sooner or later get bored of playing. People are waiting for bold decisions and not the fear of increasing the hero’s 0.1 damage because some kind of player will become invincible to him.

Smurfing

Welcome to Overwatch in 2021

Smurfing – Create a second account to play at lower ranks. Usually, high-ranking players who, for one reason or another, do not want to play on their main account, are engaged in smurfing, therefore they open another one to play against weak players.

At the moment, “smurfing” is, in my opinion, the most important problem of the current OW, as well as the reason why many players became disillusioned with the game and never returned to it. If we understand the origin of the problem, then I can say that the reason for everything in most cases is the lack of motivation among players to play on the main account.

Judge for yourself – the average player has been sitting on his rating for half a year without promotion anywhere, there are no interesting activities in the game: the last hero and map were a year ago, the events got tired after the second year, and the number of skins in them decreased, balance patches do not change the game is radical, there is still no normal system of achievements that would motivate you to be on your main account.

Sooner or later, this player will come up with the idea to buy an account for some 300 rubles, say, 1000 ratings lower than his own, and play there on his favorite hero, killing any enemy without much effort. He is having a lot of fun at this moment, but the other 11 players are not at all. Let’s hear what Jeff Kaplan himself, already a former Overwatch game designer, has to say about smurfing in 2017:

Starting a new account is not against the rules. Lost of players use services like overwatch boosting  after their rating become stagnant. If you sign up for a new account and play normally, the game quickly detects your skill level and starts matching matches with players of similar skill levels.