'Overwatch' News: Dev Contemplates Creating a More Balanced Version of Mystery Heroes
A thread on the official Blizzard forums talking about balance in Mystery Heroes quickly gained traction when game director Jeff Kaplan himself stepped in to say that they might consider creating a separate, more balanced, game type instead.
Titled "How to Fix Mystery Heroes," user GreyFalcon noted down some rules that could be used to make Mystery Heroes feel less dependent on luck. Most of them boil down to having a system that can identify the current team lineup and limit or allow certain hero types based on that.
One such example is if a team already has too many healers, make it so that the game will no longer spawn healers. On the flipside, if there are no healers on the team, then the next spawn should be a healer. Several other examples were presented that, all in all, seem reasonable.
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Surprisingly, Kaplan took notice of the thread and decided to give some insider info on what the developers think about Mystery Heroes.
"We've discussed putting logic like this into the mode numerous times," he wrote. "Every time we get close to doing it, someone argues with us that the point of the mode is to allow for "broken" comps and that's what makes it fun for them."
"For me, personally, it's frustrating that the game doesn't build better comps. But I also understand the fun in 'whacky' comps in this arcade mode."
He concluded his message by saying that, perhaps, in the future, they will create a "Slightly More Balanced Mystery Heroes" mode or something similar to that nature so that those looking for just crazy lineups can queue for one, while those that want some more stability and control can join the other. Of course, this does have the downside of splitting the player base as well.
One of the biggest issues in Mystery Heroes, as detailed in the original post, is that it opens up the potential for hero stacking — the act of having multiple copies of the same hero. While "Overwatch" initially launched with this mechanic, it was not too long before the developers took it out of Competitive and Quick Play just months after the game's release.
Instead, hero stacking has been moved to its own specific game type, No Limits, and many argue that Mystery Heroes should at least have some kind of restriction for it as well. While Kaplan did say they are discussing the possibility of this new game type, there has been no decisive answer to it as of now.
