please stop listening to community figureheads agenda-posting#1168

it is very frustrating when it feels like beastly, nurse, zeke, and (insert top player) have more input on balance than the playerbase. even if this is not true, it definitely feels like this constantly and makes me doubt competitive integrity of the game when people starting jockying characters to get uneeded nerfs (continuously nerfing orcane, olympia, kragg, or fors for example) because they lost to plup or some random top 30 player they refused to learn the matchup against.

arbitrarily arguing some characters are “healthy” for the meta while others aren’t is deeply against the core ethos of this game. this game is supposed to be insane/janky, it is not supposed be la croix melee or ultimate with cc. just make the game FUN and nerf stuff people actually care about that is hard to interact with.

I don’t want to bandwagon hate towards any of these people, but can we stop with this please?

every time someone really advances the meta for their character (when it isn’t some stupid touch of death setup), it’s just immediately followed with demands to nerf said character. let the game actually cook; buff characters that aren’t consistently in top 8s and let the game be.

Imagine having a beast like Zetterburn in the game and then be like “Nah, Zetterburn is fine, we should nerf Orcane instead”, and the tourist winning EVO with Orcane doesn’t help at all, no real Orcane mains made it that far, he’s just that good, he could pull a La Reina outta his A & win EVO with her, all the real Orcane mains are gone, Marlon left, Iota switched characters, the last good Orcane main we had (Remrin) quit, she was the only Orcane main left, Supernova has no Orcane mains on the preliminary seeding, that speaks volumes about how “balanced” Orcane is, they should fire whoever’sis in charge of balancing, they clearly are not listening to our feedback, or maybe they do & they simply just don’t care, I’m so tired of this, here’s hoping tomorrow’s patch comes with some buffs, but who am I kidding? They probably come with yet another nerf . . .

Just want to point out that calling Plup a “tourist” isn’t fair to him. Plup barely attends tourneys but he does grind the game online, and has brought multiple accounts to the actual #1 spot on the leaderboards.

Remrin also just attended GOML last weekend and did quite well but didn’t hit top 8. Unless she’s quit in the meantime, she’s still in the game.

And generally, I also don’t think it’s fair to the devs to assume they’re only listening to the content creators with loud opinions. They have access to way more data than we do, and I’m sure they take into account ranked and bracket winrates/matchups, as well as feedback from diverse sources.

There’s definitely some confirmation bias going on here when they make decisions that seems confusing to us with our limited information, and just happen to align with so-and-so influencer’s hot take.

they are definitly listening to those people since they also get early access to new chars and stuff to provide feedback.
So OP definitly has a point. but i think the main issue is not with those people, its the general focus on tournament level play when it comes to balance.
i understand that chars like orcance might still be strong in the hands of extremely skilled people and i also understand that chars like clairen might fall off near the very top level BUT what do I, as a “normal” player, care about the absolute top level balance? its irrelevant for 99,9% of the playerbase. When clairens and zetters still can face roll their controllers in diamond rank, while other chars have to play an extreme uphill battle against those chars, its hurting the game a lot. We already had big lay offs and we are seeing the results with extreme content cuts in the upcoming roadmap.
they need to finally make sure the game is balanced and fun for a bigger percent of the playerbase so the game can finally start to grow instead of constantly shrink. If tournament level balance takes a hit while doing so, its not a big issue if you ask me.