Statement of Intent:
For awhile I've wanted to take a look at Systems Design from Designers who have been in the business much longer than I have. My goal here is to learn more about balancing combat systems and abilities in games that have post-release support. Not only against other players or heroes, but also how that balancing translates into the game world. I've decided to chooser Overwatch, Blizzard's Arena Shooter, as the target of my deconstruction due to its consistently high player-base and popularity.
For awhile I've wanted to take a look at Systems Design from Designers who have been in the business much longer than I have. My goal here is to learn more about balancing combat systems and abilities in games that have post-release support. Not only against other players or heroes, but also how that balancing translates into the game world. I've decided to chooser Overwatch, Blizzard's Arena Shooter, as the target of my deconstruction due to its consistently high player-base and popularity.
What Exactly Am I Doing?
Overwatch is a large game, and I don't have an infinite amount of time. What I'm going to do is hyperfocus on one system that is core to most every game that takes place in 3D space: Navigation. I'm going to look at three heroes in Overwatch who have navigation included as a core part of their character identity. I'm going to break down those characters, analyze their abilities and provide a comparative deconstruction in their role and performance relative to each-other. In the end, I hope to learn more about Systems Design, Balancing a large roster of characters, and how Navigational Systems relate to the larger game as a whole.
Overwatch is a large game, and I don't have an infinite amount of time. What I'm going to do is hyperfocus on one system that is core to most every game that takes place in 3D space: Navigation. I'm going to look at three heroes in Overwatch who have navigation included as a core part of their character identity. I'm going to break down those characters, analyze their abilities and provide a comparative deconstruction in their role and performance relative to each-other. In the end, I hope to learn more about Systems Design, Balancing a large roster of characters, and how Navigational Systems relate to the larger game as a whole.
Index
1. Mei a. Mei's Role b. Understanding Hard-Lock c. The Versatility of Ice-Wall d. Constructing a Level around a Hero e. Balancing Mei 2. Tracer a. Tracer's Role b. The Functions of High-Mobility c. Accounting for Mistakes in Play d. How Tracer plays in 3D Space e. Balancing Tracer pt. 1 f. Balancing Tracer pt. 2 3. Genji a. Genji's Role b. Advanced Air-Mechanics c. The many uses of Blade-Dash d. The coexistance of Gameplay Space and Navigational Systems e. Balancing Genji f. Understanding How Cooldowns make Player's Think 4. Compare and Contrast Each Hero a. The Economics of Navigation b. Mei vs Genji c. Genji vs Tracer d. Mei vs Tracer 5. Conclusions a. What Have I Learned? |
Mei
Understanding Mei's Role
A large part of understanding why character's have the abilities they do comes down to comprehending what role they fill in the game world. Mei as a hero is all about denial and suppression. She is the only hero in Overwatch who can create terrain and is also one of two heros that "hard-locks" enemy players. To optimally play Mei, players need to understand where she excels and why she excels there. Mei is one of the best duelists in the Overwatch universe, her kit is designed to isolate opponents and negate their ability to fight alongside their team. Primarily this is accomplished by using her ice-wall to separate teammates, but on rare occasions her primary weapon is just as effective. Let's Talk About Hard-Lock Mei is one of two characters in the game who can perform what I call a Hard-Lock on an opponent. A Hard-Lock is a state where a player is unable to move or influence their character in any way. There are only three ways this can happen for any notable period of time. These are: Ana's Sleep Dart, Mei's Endothermic Blaster (her primary gun), and Mei's ultimate: Blizzard. It's rather safe to say that if you want to make a player feel helpless, then you take away their navigation. The Call of Duty series is notorious for taking away the player's controls during cut-scenes to incite this exact thing. Overwatch takes this a step further. When you are frozen by Mei, not only can you not move around at all, the player also can no longer look anywhere other than the direction they were facing when they were frozen. This hard-lock state removes the player's main tool of information gathering, sight. Which, in shooting and fighting games as fast-paced as Overwatch, is critical in finding success. The Versatility of the Ice Wall Mei does possess a unique ability that no other hero in the game has similarities to. This ability is Ice Wall. Ice Wall allows Mei to temporarily raise up terrain effectively creating a new obstacle. Ice Wall has a secondary function that takes some practice to perfect using. Namely it allows Mei or her teammates to get up to places that are normally inaccessible to them. The versatility of the ice wall is what makes Mei, in my opinion, one of the most useful utility characters available to be picked. In just a very short button combo, she can be up in a sniper's face or denying an entire attack lane to an enemy push. Very few heroes have the ability to be as clingy as Mei is to objectives and I believe this is primarily due to the figurative doors the wall opens to Mei. Building Mei around a Level Blizzard takes a very modular approach to Level Design which many players and designers alike can appreciate. A lot of buildings and objects adhere to a standardized measuring system. This means that most raised platforms, walkways, and harder to reach places tend to share a very important characteristic. Height. The Ice Wall reaches 5 meters high, and Mei herself can jump up to two additional meters. Utilizing the Ice Wall, Mei can get herself up to 7 meters off the ground. Guess what the height of most of those raised platforms and walkways are? Yup. 7 Meters. That's smart wall design right there. Changing the Numbers Around What's the worst that could happen if some Mei-Loving-Fanatic got their hands on her balance sheet, what kind of damage could they do? More specifically, what are the implications of needing to re-balance her wall. What state would the game have to be in for that to be necessary? Should Mei require tuning on her wall there are likely one of two scenarios occurring that are causing it to need to be changed.
2. Survival Survival is being used here to describe the life-span of the wall. If the wall isn't lasting long enough for Mei to effectively block a passage, or if she doesn't have the time after deploying the wall the get to her intended destination consistently something needs tweaking. In this scenario the obvious fix is to change the duration of the wall from 4.5 seconds to whatever it needs to be. However, if the problem mainly comes down to Mei not being able to use it as a navigation tool; lengthening the duration of the wall could potentially make Mei too good at blocking chokepoints. |
Tracer
What Does Tracer actually do?
Tracer and the rest of the heroes talked about in this deconstruction belong to the category of attack heroes. Belonging to this category means that the primary objective when playing them is to kill the enemy heroes before they kill you. Each hero plays a bit differently and the currently accepted fashion of playing Tracer is a bit like a hit-and-run. Tracer's ultimate, Pulse Bomb, is currently the lowest cost ultimate in Overwatch. This means that it's relatively easy for her to build it up and use it multiple times a match. By constantly harassing weaker targets and using her high mobility to gain optimal positioning. Tracer will dash in, stick a high-priority target with her bomb, dash out, and effectively have made the next team fight a 5v6. Tracer, Mobility, and You Tracer is one of, if not the most, mobile character in the game. Often times watching competitive matches players will switch on to Tracer in last-minute scenarios where speed is key. The primary way Tracer accomplishes this is through her Blink ability. Blink is the bread-and-butter of Tracer's kit. It allows her to travel nearly 25 meters almost instantaneously. Why is Blink such an effective ability? Blizzard has done something very neat when they were putting Blink together. As many players can tell you who have played a lot of Tracer, Blink is both an Offensive ability AND a Defensive ability. The most obvious use of Blink is to gap-close space between Tracer and her target to either harass them or throw a pulse bomb. This allows her to be able to get in the face of any target she's trying to harass and minimizes the spread of her weapons, and makes it much easier for the player to aim and hit their target. Aiming is the key system that allows Blink to also be a defensive ability. By allowing Tracer to Blink so often, it makes the character much harder to aim at and hit, this is where the genius of the design shows. By accounting for the enemy player's ability to aim, Tracer allows herself to have a brief window of about half a second every time she Blinks around. During this time the enemy must readjust their aim and their spatial sense to account for where Tracer has gone. It is during this time that Tracer is the safest, and deadliest. Making Mistakes & The Power of Recall No player is perfect, and relying on the passive ability of the enemy to aim as your main defense won't get you far as you fight better and better opponents. Most character's in Overwatch have what I like to call in Design the "Oh Shit" button. This is the button that is pressed when the player has put themselves in a position and does not have any way out of it. In Tracer's case, this comes in the form of an ability: Recall. Recall allows Tracer to literally revert time for herself. By sending herself back in time a whole three seconds. Tracer can restore her health and ammo back to it's prior state. Couple this ability with Tracer's ability to Blink around and you've created a recipe for a very hard to hit British girl with an adverse attitude to letting support heroes live. Level Interaction, and Vertical Mobility Tracer is one of the few characters in Overwatch who is absolutely rendered useless by vertical terrain. Blink only allows Tracer to travel distances horizontally. This places a very high priority on the Tracer player to seek high-ground. Tracer's operation in a 3D space is limited by her player's ability to abuse it. Using high-ground and gravity Tracer can perform a "dive-bomb" technique. By Blinking through open air above her target. Tracer can use gravity to fall down onto her victims; she then has a three second window in which she can abuse them before having to use recall if she wishes to go back to the high ground. Why is this maneuver so readily available and so effective for Tracers? To answer this question we need to look at how high-ground is designed. By looking at the trends of how high ground is always laid out in levels. We can see that Blizzard most often places high-ground as a sort of overlook. Very rarely do we see occurrences here of any platforms looking down on unimportant pieces of the map. In the two examples to the right, we can see in these cases high-ground has been placed very critically above objective points. The defenders of the objective have been given the advantage of height that so often finds itself as an advantage in shooting games. Answering the question of why defenders are always given the advantage is a much lengthier topic that would require its own deconstruction. The short answer looks to diversity. Attackers have a wide range of places they can stage an attack from, but Defenders only have one objective to defend. This places the onus on the Attackers to take advantage of Defensive position, and so Blizzard gives the Defenders high-ground advantage to compensate. The Numbers Game When it comes to balancing Tracer; any changes made to her will have an impact on the rest of the heroes to some degree. This is because there are few heroes who interact with every other hero as Tracer does. It is much more uncommon to find Mei interacting with an enemy team's backline than it is Tracer. Therefore, it's important to realize that there will likely be changes that will have to be made to other heroes if Tracer is adjusted too much, especially in the support class. Looking at Blink specifically there are two major numbers that are able to be tweaked, the Blink distance, and the cooldown of receiving new Blinks. Adjusting the Blink distance implies that Tracer's lethal range is out of wack. A range too high means that supports on the enemy team cannot be within effective range of their own team to properly do their job. This will, in turn, require the range of healing to be increased or the health-pool of healing heroes to be adjusted to make them more durable against dives from Tracer. Both of these changes have major implications for how the game is played at the most fundamental level. The other option is adjusting the cooldown of how fast Tracer regenerates her Blink charges. If this number is being adjusted, it's because Tracer is either finding it too easy to dance around her enemies, or because she becomes too vulnerable after dashing in off a flank. While the first scenario will likely lead to a rise of Tracer players making support lives a fragile thing to be cherished (similar to how adjusting her Blink distance would operate). I find it unlikely that an increase would have major resounding changes. I think the most likely scenario to spawn out of this change would be for Tracer mains to stockpile their dashes to allow them to get into a flanking position and keep a dash in reserve as an emergency. The result here would be passively asking players to be more thoughtful with how they use blink. I would find this scenario to be a violation of Tracer's identity within the game and would not suggest this change unless absolutely necessary. Balanced Recall Turning my attention to Tracer's Recall. There's quite a few numbers available to be changed. The two most interesting numbers available to toy with here are the cooldown of Recall and how far back in time Tracer goes when activating the ability. Changing the cooldown of Recall must be approached with the most delicate of hands. If the recall is increased too much, the decision-making that goes into whether to press the button may be compromised. More plainly, the concern is that Tracer players will be too focused on keeping the option to use recall up instead of actually just committing to using the ability. While it reduces the frequency in which Tracer is safely able to harass her enemies it significantly nerfs Tracer's ability to fulfill her role within the game. To compensate she would likely need a damage buff. On the flip-side, reducing the cooldown of recall removes/negates the significance of using the ability. Allowing Tracer to recall more often removes the danger of engaging the back-line of the enemy team. Not only will this annoy the enemy team to death, but it makes Tracer's risk-taking minimal, which takes a great impact on her role and identity. If this change were to be made, I'd suggest a change of the character's health-pool (which is already the lowest in the game) or speed to make her an easier target for her enemies. Finally, it's also possible to tweak how far back in time Tracer is sent upon activating recall. I'd throw myself down at my Lead's feet before suggesting a change to this number. As it stands, three seconds in combat is quite a long time. It's just long enough where enemy players who have been tracking Tracer could guess at the general location of where she'll reappear. This results in a very satisfying engagement for Tracer's opponent if they correctly engage her former position. They don't even need to win the new engagement, guessing correctly is often a good enough reward at this level of play. Increasing the time rewind will make it difficult for Tracer's own player to guess where they'll come out, much less her opponent. Decreasing the rewind makes it much easier to re-engage Tracer after she's done rewinding. The result of this, is that Tracer's defensive ability is pretty much negated, and she becomes easy pickings whenever it is used. |
Genji
How does a Cyber-Ninja spend his days?
Genji is another attack hero that fills a similar role as Tracer. Dive the enemies backline heroes and assassinate them to swing a fight in his team's favor. Where Tracer and Genji differ is in character identity. While Tracer is more than happy to dash-in-dash-out hit and run; Genji takes a different approach. His kit is built around traversing terrain and attacking enemies from unexpected directions. Genji accomplishes this through two abilities. The first is his passive ability: Cyber-Agility. Cyber-Agility allows Genji to scale walls to approach targets from below, or to climb to high-ground and dive down onto his targets from above. It also allows him to do a double jump (jumping a second time while in mid-air). Genji's second relevant ability is: Blade-Dash. Blade dash allows Genji to dash a fairly respectable distance. If his dash passes through an enemy, they take damage. If an enemy should die after being damaged by Genji (but not necessarily killed by him) Blade-Dash is refunded it's cooldown. By chaining his abilities together, a competent Genji player can be very dangerous. A single kill can enable him to snowball onto the rest of the enemy team. Climbing Walls, It's a Ninja Thing While I can't pretend that Genji is the only hero in Overwatch to posses the ability to climb walls (that honor goes also to his brother, Hanzo). I can make the claim that Genji is the only hero capable of abusing it to a staggering degree. Genji is able to climb most any near flat-surface wall for up to seven meters. Similar to Mei, this allows Genji to shortcut long paths that lead up to high ground. Similar to Tracer, Genji is equally capable of abusing high ground positioning to assassinate targets or complete objectives relative to his role. What about the double jump? Genji's double jump makes him one of the most infuriating targets in Overwatch to hit. This is because of a very advanced mechanic called air-strafing. Air Strafing in its most basic form, refers to the players ability to control a character while in mid-air. Genji, having a double jump, allows him to be in the air almost as often as he wishes and be in full control of his movement while doing so. Blade-Dash, How to Steamroll a Team Genji's most utilized tool is his Blade-Dash. It allows him to cross large spaces and deal damage in the process. Plus it gets to reset whenever something he has damaged is killed. Blade-Dash has two primary functions.
Blade-Dash is also an effective tool for getting around, though it's mainly seen as an escape mechanism and less-used as a means of getting to an optimal position. This is because of how critically important Blade-Dash is to Genji's damage combo. Many players would also reason that having the option to Blade Dash remain available is more important than using it to travel. Versatility in Gameplay Space While unable to close as much horizontal distance as Tracer is, Genji makes up for it in the vertical department. Being able to shortcut up high ground is a serious bonus that many heroes utilize in their kit regularly. What sets Genji apart is his ability to continue to use his exceptional mobility after gaining high ground advantage. We see this come through especially when we compare his utility to Mei's Ice Wall. While both characters can scale a 7 meter wall with jump assistance, Mei is left waiting for her wall cool-down to come up before attempting to climb again. Genji on the other hand can scale the 7 meter wall and still have the ability to do it again. This advantage is what gives Genji the strength to fight long-range heroes on the enemy team. Heroes such as Widowmaker and Hanzo love to sit far back on their team's back-line in an elevated position and take shots at the opposing team. Genji has very thoroughly proven to be an effective counter to them through these methods. He does this by first closing on their horizontal space through flanking or utilizing his passive to give him routes most other heroes can't use. Then, once the player finds themselves in sufficient horizontal range, Genji can instantly vertically gap-close on a sniper. Because of his exhaustive navigational abilities any sniper that finds themselves at close range to Genji is either praying for a miracle shot, or a quick death. Looking at the Math of Blade-Dash Getting into the mathematics of why everyone's favorite Cyber-Ninja is designed the way he is we come up with a very complex system to balance. The difference in vertical mobility between Tracer and Genji very drastically changes how the two heroes must be approached when balancing them. Genji's innate ability to climb walls and challenge heroes who seek high-ground advantage is the core to Genji's strength and balancing. Starting with Blade-Dash, we primarily watch this ability be used very aggressively as an "on you before you know it" approach to combat. There are A LOT of numbers to pay attention to with this ability as it primarily defines how Genji begins combat. Two numbers especially tied closely together with Blade Dash are the damage it deals, and the casting time of the ability. An alteration to either of these numbers is a changing factor to how powerful Genji's initial burst is. Instead of looking at these numbers separately from each other, we can form a ratio between them to create a scale of how powerful the ability is. Doing conversions our initial starting ratio is 1:125. The higher the ratio between these two numbers becomes, the more powerful the ability becomes, and the stronger Genji's initial charge is. It is important to keep Genji's dash speed quick, as he is the one challenging the high-ground. His powers allows him to choose the terms of the fight and hold the element of surprise. If the ratio needs to be raised, it means that Genji's initial jump on to his target isn't enough of an advantage to successfully take his opponent by surprise. Alternatively, it could represent a fundamental misunderstanding in how player's are approaching Genji. Incorrect target selection may also be a contributing factor. Selecting a tank as a target will usually yield a health pool much too high for Genji to burst down. In this instance we would look to change the base ratio to make squishier targets a higher priority to Genji. The Psychology of Cooldowns The other important numbers that define Blade-Dash are the AOE (the hitbox), and the cooldown. While these numbers aren't as distinctly tied to each-other as the Engage Ratio they are still valuable adjustment numbers. Primarily I want to look at what is happening in the player's mind that would call for a cooldown to be changed and when it's necessary to change cooldowns. Cooldowns exist as a way to put a cap on the power of an ability. By putting a long-cooldown on something, it inherently adds weight and power to it. A player that sees a long-cooldown will know that the ability must be used sparingly and only when necessary. This carries certain psychological principals of decision-making with it. If a player chooses not to use an ability, is it because they did not think the ability was necessary here? Or was it because they did not want to risk having the ability not be available to them? This is the greatest challenge of changing cooldowns; trying to understand for what specific reason it needs changing. I would argue that it is more important for a player to know exactly when to and when not to use an ability and reflect the ability's power according to that balance. For example, if Genji's blade-dash cooldown was 14 seconds instead of 8. The resounding effect might call upon players to more readily assess their targets and decide if they want to engage them. Thus creating a more critical environment for players to evaluate their surroundings in. |
Tying the heroes together
The Economics of Navigation
One of the tactics I like to employ when building new systems is an economic model. An economic model would be best described as assigning a value to a qualitative property based on its quantitative factors. In Overwatch, every hero will have a certain value that defines how powerful they are statistically. This value is calculated by averaging properties about the hero until a final number is reached. That number is then used comparatively with all the other heroes attempting to achieve a mean base value that matches up with how the Designer wants the game to be played. It's important to realize the trichotomy of how these heroes tie into each other with navigation. Genji, Tracer, and Mei all have a very distinct and different roles from each other and these roles all tie into how each character navigates. Tracer and Genji seek to use their abilities to gain advantages over their opponent. Mei is the only hero that seeks to put her opponent at a disadvantage relative to herself. Mei vs Genji When comparing these two heroes we're primarily looking at how much movement Mei can deny Genji from utilizing or how much advantage Genji can claim over Mei. Mei is a 250 health hero which makes bursting her down much much harder for an offense character. Genji has two primary strengths here: The first is he has superior navigational tools in the 3D space. Genji can easily climb the ledges that Mei must wall up to, and still have more abilities ready to keep going. This makes having initial high-ground advantage very important for Mei. As Mei is a defense hero, this is an advantage she has more often than not. At medium to long ranges, the fight remains relatively even with both heroes being able to deal similar damage to each other. The fight becomes more interesting when the heroes face each-other at close range. In this matchup, Genji will have the advantage so long as he is able to hold his Blade-Dash as a disengage tool. Mei's lethality at closer range is much higher than Genji's, if she is able to freeze him solid, it's a very easy alternate fire for her to kill him. The ideal scenario for Genji plays out by holding his blade-dash until he is about to be frozen to dash-out and re-engage the fight when his cooldown is back up and he is able to safely not be frozen. Utility wise both heroes boast surprising advantages for whichever team they belong to. Mei's main objective is to deny pathways for the enemy team to attack from. Her secondary objective is to isolate individual members of the enemy team for either herself or her team to collapse on and pick off. Genji instead seeks to use his abilities to pick off weaker members of the enemies back-line who seek high ground advantage against his own team. The best two examples of this are Widowmaker and Hanzo, the two snipers of Overwatch. Mei on the other hand falls off at long range and cannot reliably engage snipers without putting herself at extreme risk. Usually the best scenario a Mei player can hope for is to temporarily utilize her wall to break a sniper's line of sight with the larger teamfight to create a precious few seconds of safety to cross open areas until the wall falls. Genji vs Tracer This matchup actually ends up being one of the more simple to deconstruct. The advantage here almost will always go to whoever can establish a map advantage over the other. While Genji boasts a superior ability to navigate the vertical planes better than Tracer, Tracer has a unique advantage in being harder to hit than Genji. Utilizing her three dashes and recall she will be an extremely hard target for any Genji to fight. If Tracer is able to establish an equal high ground advantage to Genji the fight will be much more favorable for her. This is because Tracer can build a surplus of dashes to cross open air to other high ground spots. This essentially forces both players to play on a 2D plane where Tracer possess' the upper hand. Both heroes tend to fill the same role though the target selection and sub-objectives changes depending on which hero is chosen. Tracer fares much better as a harassment hero, being able to get in close on low-mobility support heroes and vaporize them with damage. She also has the advantage of having a much lower cost ultimate to build. This means that she can stick high-health targets with her Pulse Bomb more often. Consistent players of Tracer will find that they more often are able to provide large advantages to the rest of their team by neutralizing tankier targets with her ultimate and superior 2D navigation. Genji on the other hand is built almost solely for assassinating low health targets that pose a high threat to the rest of his team. Instead of seeking to harass the backline; Genji seeks to commit to engagements where he can achieve the upper hand in the vertical gameplay space. While his ultimate takes much longer to charge, Dragon Blade makes short work of the standard 200-250 health heroes. This makes Genji much stronger in neutralizing lower health targets. Ideally a Genji will want to prioritize targets that separate themselves from the rest of their team and seek to use sight-lines to fire into Genji's team. These heroes are McCree, Soldier:76, Widowmaker, and Hanzo also known as Genji's Prey. Mei vs Tracer This fight on paper looks pretty even. Similar to how Genji matches up against Tracer playing the high ground advantage is critical in achieving success. Mei makes this much easier than Tracer does, as Tracer must prioritize attack routes that lead to high ground while Mei can simply shortcut those when she finds it convenient. The initial advantage goes to Mei, she possess' much higher accuracy and consistency at Medium ranges than Tracer does. From here though, players of equal skill will find much higher success rates with Tracer. Proper timing will find Mei stuck with a Pulse Bomb very often. This forces Mei to use her abilities defensively instead of as a utility. The other advantage that Tracer can pull over Mei is her smaller hit box and higher planar mobility. Because Tracer can dash around so often, a Mei player is going to find issues getting Tracer frozen. Whenever Tracer gets close to being Frozen, she will likely have a dash up or be able to recall and cleanse all of Mei's freezing ticks. Tracer loses pretty hard to Mei when looking at the utility the characters provide. While Tracer has a much higher damage rate, Overwatch is not a team death match. Games are won by capturing objectives, not by killing the enemy team. While killing them does make capturing the objective easier, it is definitely not required. Mei is able to deny large spaces of movement from enemy teams and this must be factored against Tracer's ability to assassinate enemy tanks. It's not an obvious decision and with the amount of simple navigational tools most heroes in Overwatch have, Mei finds it hard to find success with how the game is currently balanced. Tracer more often than not finds herself in the meta via the eyes of the player-base. This is largely because counter-play against Tracer is so limited and the hero has so many viable options to attack with. Mei is far superior to denying areas of the map and making things tough for enemy teams front-lines. Tracer's consistency however, finds her winning the navigational value match up more often than Mei is able to take it away. |
Conclusions
What have I learned?
One of the most difficult things about balancing the complicated systems that go into arena PVP games is how much emphasis to place on numbers. I can't expect to get balancing right the first time or even the first couple times. While Math can make things looks balanced; balance comes down to how systems interact with the larger game as a whole. Overwatch is a key example of how a hero can have massive advantages in navigation, but those don't matter unless the design of the map they are playing in allows them to utilize those advantages. The feel of the game is ultimately one of the hardest things to evaluate; math and formulas don't provide enough information. I'd like to look at balancing as a relationship between Math, the Developers and the Player-Base. In my ideal world a game will be balanced 40% by Math, 30% by Developers and 30% by the Player-Base.
I also learned something interesting about how to create what I'll call "Inverse Systems". Inverse Systems are a way of creating a system that takes an inverse relationship to a pre-existing system. Take Mei for example. Her identity is built around denying navigation to teams and heroes. While a Genji or a Tracer will love running around and mindlessly dashing all over the place their navigation is rendered completely useless when the Inverse System is applied to them. Designing Inverse Systems are an interesting way to apply a counter to a mechanic or system that the player-base finds annoying. If the Overwatch player-base were to suddenly rise up and decry or ask for a nerf to most navigational abilities. Instead of hitting every single hero who fits those characteristics with a nerf, they could buff Mei, introduce a new hero a with similar-but-different role to Mei (akin to the Genji & Tracer relationship) or re-work existing abilities to more closely fit how they want the game to change or feel.
Finally, there will almost never be a perfectly-balanced game. Players are too innovative with strategies and practicing to balance a game once and never touch it again. Small adjustments will always have to be made to a game to try and achieve the feel that the developers and the players both harmonize with. Lastly, changes to a game will almost always have unintended side-effects. It's possible to try and guess how the player-base will react to balance changes to heroes. Ultimately it's these balance numbers that determine how players form the meta. While we as developers can do our best to guess what will happen, and create contingencies based on that, it's ridiculous to think that we can plan for everything, and we shouldn't try to. Balancing is a reactionary process and should be treated as such.
One of the most difficult things about balancing the complicated systems that go into arena PVP games is how much emphasis to place on numbers. I can't expect to get balancing right the first time or even the first couple times. While Math can make things looks balanced; balance comes down to how systems interact with the larger game as a whole. Overwatch is a key example of how a hero can have massive advantages in navigation, but those don't matter unless the design of the map they are playing in allows them to utilize those advantages. The feel of the game is ultimately one of the hardest things to evaluate; math and formulas don't provide enough information. I'd like to look at balancing as a relationship between Math, the Developers and the Player-Base. In my ideal world a game will be balanced 40% by Math, 30% by Developers and 30% by the Player-Base.
I also learned something interesting about how to create what I'll call "Inverse Systems". Inverse Systems are a way of creating a system that takes an inverse relationship to a pre-existing system. Take Mei for example. Her identity is built around denying navigation to teams and heroes. While a Genji or a Tracer will love running around and mindlessly dashing all over the place their navigation is rendered completely useless when the Inverse System is applied to them. Designing Inverse Systems are an interesting way to apply a counter to a mechanic or system that the player-base finds annoying. If the Overwatch player-base were to suddenly rise up and decry or ask for a nerf to most navigational abilities. Instead of hitting every single hero who fits those characteristics with a nerf, they could buff Mei, introduce a new hero a with similar-but-different role to Mei (akin to the Genji & Tracer relationship) or re-work existing abilities to more closely fit how they want the game to change or feel.
Finally, there will almost never be a perfectly-balanced game. Players are too innovative with strategies and practicing to balance a game once and never touch it again. Small adjustments will always have to be made to a game to try and achieve the feel that the developers and the players both harmonize with. Lastly, changes to a game will almost always have unintended side-effects. It's possible to try and guess how the player-base will react to balance changes to heroes. Ultimately it's these balance numbers that determine how players form the meta. While we as developers can do our best to guess what will happen, and create contingencies based on that, it's ridiculous to think that we can plan for everything, and we shouldn't try to. Balancing is a reactionary process and should be treated as such.