A man versus public perception

Pro player Greg “Grego” McAllen, formerly the Lucio of Cloud9, recently shared his frustration with a notion he often finds himself confronted with. In a tweet he stated the following:

Grego himself is known for his solid aim, oftentimes switching off his main hero to the aim-centric Widowmaker in beta. With this context, it seems reasonable to assume that these comments arrive him as a sort of flattery by his fans but couldn’t be received as such. Indeed they do reveal a clear hierarchy in the perception of hero difficulty and impact in the model that the community has of the game.

His initial argument being a conclusion of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which an individual of low skill is unable to accurately judge his own ability and thus the depth of a task, doesn’t quite justify the relative comparison to other heroes. Just because Lucio is harder than people think doesn’t mean that people understand the depth of McCree and that they are fairly compared in terms of contribution to each other.

For further clarification of his opinion, I myself offered up a thought experiment in which Grego had to put the best player in the world, who is able to play all the classes at the same level, onto a position and asked him which he would choose.

Grego values the shot callers impact on the game the highest, regardless of role and only then ranks actual in-game performance. While hardly tangible to the outsider of pro team communications, this still seems generally logically sound. Strategy and tactics are important in Overwatch. What his argument essentially boils down to is that the DPS role is the worst to shot call from and that you, therefore, don’t want your tactician to play it.

With that insight taken in, to stop here would certainly leave — at least me — with an unsatisfying feeling of incompleteness. Besides, there is a semantic argument to be made if the question of the best player would even so much as entail shot calling or out of game impact at all. It also remains to be proven if the best teams hand over the shot calling duty to only one person or if indeed a structure of fluent exchange without strict authority could be feasible especially in a hectic game like Overwatch. It also wouldn’t do justice to the paradigm shift I experienced while following the initial question down the rabbit hole. We will continue to explore the initial question, could the best player be a Lucio main, for closure.

Are all heroes created equal?

The idea that every hero contributes exactly the same amount all the while being just as challenging to play in a relative sense, that being that one metaphorical skill point gain would increase your chance to win by the same amount across all heroes seems unreasonable in a world where Ana is Ana, Roadhog is Roadhog and Bastion is the unification of the unstoppable force and the immovable object.

Prior to this, I had a rule of thumb of 60/40. Approximately 60% of a win would be coming from supports and tanks in 2/2/2 line-up (which in my mind was also applicable to the tank meta when considering Roadhog and to a lesser extend Zarya as more of a DPS), giving those four players each 15% of the win share respectively while 40% would be the DPS impact and thus each would contribute 20%. Obviously, this model was rough and a more nuanced view, for instance, would see the Flex DPS player slightly higher than the other for increased difficulty of having to have a large hero pool, among many other adjustments. Be that as it may while evaluating Grego’s argument it became increasingly obvious that this couldn’t possibly true. It might have been once, for a specific meta, for a certain subset of teams.

But the meta is too volatile, styles between teams are too wildly different and hero strength changes too frequently. Heroes aren’t created equal, aren’t maintained equal, but most importantly aren’t used equally.

Talent trumps truth

From a theoretical perspective, each version of the game should have an absolutely optimal way to play the game. Certain hero power levels enforce what this would look like and could be considered objective truth of what is knowable at this point. It is the idea of putting in all the values of hero characteristics and known tactics and strategy into a sophisticated computer that would spit out a formula of how to be unbeatable in Overwatch.

This delusion seems to be the crux of the community and in fact a substantial amount of pro teams and the prime cause for rigid metas. They chase this goal of the perfect composition and try to practice it in order to harness its power while disregarding ironically their hero within.

The aforementioned objective truth of the perfect combination of tools ignores all the inherent skill sets of a respective team. And so those who try to catch up to the top shoehorn their best player onto a hero he will underperform on, under the assumption that the best team has tabbed into this holy grail of supreme Overwatch knowledge. In reality, of course, they have created the perfect system around their own talent and now you are trying to outperform them at their own game. And while I do concede that certain states of balance have played their fair share into forming a solid meta, I remain that it most of all cases it is a false God to worship. The best team in the world might not be even remotely close to truth, but might be maximising their subjective reality, their individual talent.

First field tests

From the same logic follows that it is entirely reasonable to be open to the possibility of the best performing player in the world to be a Lucio main or at least something other than a DPS player.

The proof of concept already exists in Lunatic-Hai with both Miro and Ryujaehong, as well as possibly even Zunba turning heads while WhoRu is also making a solid case for himself. One of the teams DPS players EscA has recently come under fire for his performance that was apparently lesser than his role opposition. This again ignores the resource allocation a team has to employ and who they build strategies around. While EscA will never be able to claim the title of best player in the current iteration of the team, the system the Korean roster has build inherently puts him out of that star player function. They are still winning impressively all the same.

Another possibility of a reconstruction around an honest assessment of talent could be Misfits. Maintank Reinforce recently announced on his twitter that the team is “trying out some new role changes”. TviQ, currently the flex DPS player of the team with the broadest hero pool in all of Overwatch, has always been very open about his desire to be the star player and to be put in that position where he can carry the team the hardest from. Initially, when joining Rogue he believed this to be the flex tank role but ultimately switched back to DPS as he found the position to lend itself more towards achieving his goal. Without having heard any inside rumours, it wouldn’t surprise me if Nevix moved into TviQ’s place with Zebbosai going back to Support and TviQ assuming the off-tank position. This could especially be true if TviQ’s current understanding of the game and his own abilities would tell him that it was worth it for Misfits to become a team build around this role. Famously Meta Athena has been relying recently on their Zarya player HooN to do the heavy lifting, giving him for example most nanoboosts in order to build his graviton surge faster and allowing him to playmake more.

Similarly, it wouldn’t be ridiculous to state that a pillar of a team could be their Lucio player, not just as a shot caller, but as the one that takes more correct decisions and for instance builds up ult faster than other Lucio. A team could, for instance, allocate more resources to him by simply having him build ultimate charge up faster through letting him do much of the healing and topping, and trusting that paired with his superior aim this star player regularly gets more Sound Barriers on the map while also using them more effectively than others. He could be superb at finishing off targets or being extremely slippery and providing distraction much like the flex DPS player so often does. Grego shares most of these ideas here in a follow-up tweet.

Where does this leave us?

The apparent conclusion seems to be that we especially as a community need to rethink of how we hand out praise and attention to individual players and some experts have long started doing so. The urge to find the outstanding individual is natural and valuable, but to only search them within the ranks of DPS players is misguided. This is not to simply protect the fragile egos of those who lack the specific talent to be DPS players and treat the millennial special snowflake syndrome but to accurately reward performance. For having the talent and grit to be an outstanding Lucio player might be just as rare and in fringe cases more impactful depending on the relative meta standing and level of play of the star in question. Maining Lucio is not merely a free ticket to the pro experience and people who click heads really well allow you to live the e-celebrity lifestyle. Against all odds, the world’s best player might just be a Lucio virtuoso and it would be a darn shame if we failed to recognise him as such.