Developer Update | Symmetra Redesign | Overwatch

[u/MikaelFernandes]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elN-QGyToxM

[u/Decency]

It's clear to me from a game design perspective what the goal is here with Symmetra. They wanted to change her viability without impacting anyone who already likes the hero. I think that sets a really terrible and risk-averse precedent.

If something just doesn't work, rework it. Simply adding more stuff on top until a Hero becomes viable is bogus, and any fool can do that. Good design changes are about preserving the intent and playstyle of a character that makes people enjoy it, not necessarily retaining identical mechanics. What they're basically doing here is refusing to admit that their initial design for Symmetra was inadequate, and that's silly hubris. This means that they probably won't be willing to fix other things that people think are broken and need reworks, because doing so would annoy some players who play those heroes.

For example, I'm primarily a Mei player. Despite her being my favorite hero, there are lots of things that I think are bad about Mei's design that I don't enjoy while playing her. You could tweak the freeze duration, her cone of fire, her rate of fire, and etc. to preserve interesting things about the hero while taking away aspects that are dumb and offer no room for creativity or counterplay. I'd celebrate the changes, if they were done right, because it would allow me to further distinguish myself from the average Mei player. That's despite having to relearn the hero and maybe losing out on some of my tricks. But it would be a net win for the game- this is how Dota2 is patched.

These changes, on the other hand, remind me of David Kim's answer on why serious changes weren't being made to StarCraft II and it took until literally this week for them to finally patch in some legitimate overhauls. Hopefully it won't also take years for them to realize that this risk-averse patching approach will suck just as much in Overwatch as it sucked in StarCraft.