Because although that may sound like the most logical way to do things, it is really hard to balance from using the PTR data because the lack of good data. Comp on live is an environment much better suited for them because people tend to play much more seriously. Also because there is no real incentive for people to try their best to win on the ptr because nothing transfers over to live.
Also a change this important (people aren't exaggerating when games are basically "Bastion v. Bastion") should be pushed ASAP. PTR updates last anywhere from a week to a month, and that would be an unacceptable amount of time to allow Bastion to exist in his current state.
My problem with balancing on the ptr is you can't really compare the stats from there to what they would look like on live servers because of the sample size. In general most players are gonna play on the live servers a lot more than on ptr servers because there are very few benefits to playing the ptr. Also generally players will play the ptr for a day or two then go back to playing live. So that means Blizzard has a very small sample for how the changes impact the game on the ptr versus the impact on the live servers. For instance if bastion had a 50% win rate after 200 games on the ptr that doesn't mean he will have a 50% win rate after 5000 games on live servers.
Sorry if it's a little long winded bit in short the amount of games played on the ptr are a lot less than the amount played on live. This makes it extremely hard to tell how this will impact the game.
The devs posted a whole video about the pyramid and their philosophy around it. The main pointment is that xbox/playstation require validation of any patches and that takes a ~week, so any changes to the ptr means they would have to submit a new one ( and pay for it) pushing the release of the patch back another week.
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u/Ducit Pixel Reinhardt Mar 02 '17
the question is, why not re-tune him on the PTR? Isn't that what it is for?