Director's Take: Balancing Heroes and Matchmaking

news.blizzard.com:

A few weeks ago, we published the first in this series of updates on the game. It’s crazy how much has happened since then! We launched Season 3, announced a collab with One Punch Man, and I’m now dating Genji! I feel so lucky…

I wanted to dive into two topics today. Season 3 balance and the matchmaker.

We feel that the start of Season 3 is in a much better state of balance than the start of Season 2. We hear from players that balance is the best it’s been since the launch of OW2, while the game feels fresh based on all the changes made. It’s been great watching that discussion, and to foster it, I’d like to give a bit more details and a bit less commentary.

Let’s look at the support role first. On the positive side, most supports are viable in nearly every skill tier. Brigitte has really popped this season and has the highest win rate for nearly all skill tiers except for Top 500, where Zen takes the lead, with both averaging out to a nearly 55% win rate. On the other end of the spectrum are Kiriko and Moira at around 45%. This goes to show, that Heroes with the highest win rates aren’t always the heroes that are played the most. When we look at who is actually being played, the top supports are Ana, Kiriko, and Mercy for nearly all skill tiers until Silver and Bronze, where Moira becomes picked quite a bit. It’s counterintuitive that Kiriko has such a high pick rate at the highest levels of play, but such a low win rate, and Brigitte has such a high win rate but a mediocre play rate. While it would be fun to pick on this group... we tend to think that highly skilled players are continuing to pick certain heroes for good reasons, and we’re getting additional metrics for maps, team comps, and team fights to try and