Board 8 > So, Overwatch

(+) Yeah! (+)

What's up with the constant nerfs and buffs? Is this a common thing in the genre? One day Ana is great, and tomorrow Ana sucks and nobody uses her. Today Mercy is a dedicated healer and next week she is a run-and-gunner with healing, and that's still too strong so she'll have the flight and revive removed next week. How does the playerbase deal with it? Is the developer just bad at balancing?
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Blizzard appears to be known for bad balancing. They change characters pretty often, but sometimes it goes poorly. Right now Jeff Kaplan thinks Mercy is fine while damn near the entire player base including pros think she is a nightmare that is way too strong

Regardless of game, Blizzard can't balance for shit.

Except StarCraft, it's generally pretty well balanced.
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In class-based games, adjustments happen often.

Though I think Blizzard is known for being poor at balancing.
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They do this on purpose to encourage people to keep playing since the meta keeps changing. By deliberately overpowing certain characters they change all the strategies which gives the illusion of the gameplay feeling fresh and exciting. They later roll back the changes a little while a different character gets overpowered to flip everything once again, which interests the people who wanted the nerfs, the people who like playing the new current overpowered character, and the people who got tired of that meta and want to see how things changed.

It's a way to keep the playerbase to continually return to the game. A lot of people tend to fall off of multiplayer games once the meta settles and stagnates, even if it's well-balanced, which is bad for games that go for the " games as service" model of longevity. That's why you see many patches that unbalance the game in MMOs and MOBAs. When you consider the pedigree of Overwatch's developers it's not surprising they go through this route too.
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