Balance
“Balanced” and “imbalanced” are two words that have been thrown around since the dawn of competitive gaming. Balance is the idea of a game ultimately being fair across all participants within a single competitive match, and while most games strive for it, they very rarely ever achieve it. This is because each game can have so many variables between different types of weapons, abilities, damage ratios, map designs, buffs, de-buffs, movement speed, obstacle traversal, you get the idea. But the games that manage to align these mechanics in the right way become popular in the competitive sense. They instill the important idea that victory is achievable if you can play better than and out-think the other team.
Even so, most esports games will have a certain level of imbalance, or the idea that the game is tilted in favor of a certain side. Counter Strike: Global Offensive, for instance, often has maps that are tilted in favor of one of the sides, either defense or offense. The way CS: GO gets around this problem is that both teams have the opportunity to play each of the sides. League of Legends has 131 champions at the time of writing with more being introduced regularly, all with different abilities, stats, and the means of purchasing equipment that all have their own stats. The likelihood of LoL balancing all of these variables are slim to none, but because there are so many champions in the game, the competitive scene is able to play around the imbalance by choosing from the list of champions that are the best or fair.
Overwatch is both lucky and unlucky with regards to balance. While the game is very heavy on counter picking, or choosing heroes that are statistically better than the opponent team’s heroes, which helps to keep the game equal, it also doesn’t allow a team to ban certain heroes and prevent them from being used in a match. Many esports games use bans as a way to prevent certain team compositions from being stacked on one side. Overwatch gets around this by removing limits on character selection and giving players the ability to switch characters in the middle of a match. A single team can have 3 Lucios and 2 Reapers and then immediately switch to 6 Tracers. Allowing this to be possible does help to bypass many problems that countering creates, but can also introduce an extraordinary number of other balancing issues. How do you balance the damage output of a team of 6 Genjis? How does a team adjust from fighting a normal team composition to immediately having to deal with 4 Pharahs and 2 Lucios?
Combine this with the fact that there are a number of different maps with different objectives, all of which favor specific characters, and you have quite a few obstacles to hop over when equalizing the playing field. There are so many numbers at play that balancing the game properly will be hard and while it’s certainly possible, Blizzard might need to introduce some mechanical limits in order to balance out Overwatch.
Some of the most fun things about a game can be the ridiculousness that can come from imbalance, but those are the same things that can hurt a game’s chances of being an esport. It may be fun to watch, but the players are there to win. What fun is playing a game that feels stacked against you? At the same time, much of what makes Overwatch imbalanced, also tends to balance it. It has a very odd relationship with its mechanics, but still, a few more limitations would do the game some good.
