Introduction on the Surface, Overwatch Is a Simple Game. As You Advance Through the Competitive Rank Tiers, the Game Evolves
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Introduction On the surface, Overwatch is a simple game. As you advance through the competitive rank tiers, the game evolves into something completely different. Eventually, you reach the professional tier of players (Overwatch League) where the game is completely different than the game that most of the players are playing. The focus for this analysis isn’t on the professional scene. Instead, data gathered from the actual competitive player base of the game will be used. In particular, the focus will be on the heroes in the game classified as “Damage” heroes. For those new to Overwatch, each hero in the game is assigned a broad role (Tank, Damage, Support). Tank heroes focus on soaking damage for their team, Damage heroes focus on damage dealing, and Support heroes focus on healing up the team. The Data For Overwatch League data, we have access to a wide variety of statistics through the official Overwatch League website. There is also a fan run website called Winston’s Lab that also has a good amount of data stored as well. But, these websites only track the professional players. All statistics come from the website Overbuff. Overbuff isn’t perfect as the average rank of players on the website skew a bit higher than normal, but it has lined up with official Blizzard statistics in the past and should work reasonably well for a statistical sample of players. The four statistics that I will be looking at for the Damage heroes are: Pick Rate, Win Rate, Eliminations per Game and Damage per Game. The heroes have also been reclassified into two roles: Hit-scan and Projectile. Hit-scan hero damage is done immediately, while Projectile hero damage has a travel time through the environment before the damage is done. This deviates from Overbuff’s categorization of Offense and Defense. I prefer my categorization since Overwatch no longer differentiates between Offensive and Defensive heroes and instead I think comparing two heroes makes more sense if they deal the same type of damage. Because of this, the pick rate statistic will not be 100% accurate, as it was intended to add up to 100% for each hero category. I’m not sure why Overbuff hasn’t updated this information, as it has been in the game for a good amount of time at this point. Statistics have been tracked for each competitive rank tier (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster) for PC players only over the time period of one month. Each chart shows either hit-scan or projectile heroes only. Pick Rate The pick rate of a hero is the representation of how popular the hero is at a given rank. Using this information, it will be easy to determine what heroes are popular for each rank. Hit-scan Pick Rate for Hit-scan Heroes 50.00% 45.00% 40.00% 35.00% 30.00% 25.00% 20.00% 15.00% 10.00% 5.00% 0.00% Bronze Silver Gold Platinum Diamond Master Grandmaster Competitive Rank Tier Bastion McCree Reaper Soldier: 76 Sombra Tracer Widowmaker The pick rates for these heroes are pretty interesting. Take Bastion as an example. Bastion goes from a 10% pick rate at Bronze to a 1% pick rate at Grandmaster, with a pretty big drop from Bronze to Silver. One reason for this is that Bastion is a very situational pick and will require teamwork for him to work well. Widowmaker is the only hero with a dramatic increase in pick rate as you go up in rank. She goes from a 15% in Bronze to a 47% in Grandmaster. She’s likely a popular choice because she is one of the two sniper heroes in the game, and is a powerful choice against many of the heroes in the game, especially when played by a skilled player. Projectile Pick Rate for Projectile Heroes 45.00% 40.00% 35.00% 30.00% 25.00% 20.00% 15.00% 10.00% 5.00% 0.00% Bronze Silver Gold Platinum Diamond Master Grandmaster Competitive Rank Tier Doomfist Genji Hanzo Junkrat Mei Pharah Torbjorn Junkrat remains king of the projectile based heroes at the lower ranks (Bronze, Silver, Gold), but quickly starts to drop off upon hitting Platinum. Hanzo, Genji, and Doomfist all grow in popularity as you go through each rank, with Hanzo becoming the most popular pick. Doomfist’s reliance on one-hit combos and having a reputation of being easily countered have an effect on his pick rate at these higher levels. Genji remains a solid projectile-based hero, offering many opportunities to combo with other heroes on his team. I decided to exclude Symmetra from this conversation, since her pick rate statistic won’t really tell a good story compared to the rest of these heroes. Overbuff still considers Symmetra as a support character, so her statistic for pick rate is being compared to the other support characters instead, which will artificially make her pick rate much lower than it would normally be. Win Rate Win rate of a hero represents the percentage chance that a hero has at a given rank. Since Overwatch is a team based game, this value only represents the amount of time that a hero is on the winning team. Hit-scan Win Rate for Hit-scan Heroes 55.00% 53.00% 51.00% 49.00% 47.00% 45.00% 43.00% 41.00% 39.00% 37.00% 35.00% Bronze Silver Gold Platinum Diamond Master Grandmaster Competitive Rank Tier Bastion McCree Reaper Soldier: 76 Sombra Tracer Widowmaker I don’t particularly like to look at win rates, as they don’t really tell you much about the hero in question. Usually, win rate goes up as you go higher in rank since the players tend to get better at those higher ranks. However, one hero catches my eye for the Hit-scan category. The hero Sombra has a big increase from Bronze (37%) to Grandmaster (52%). I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but perhaps one of the other statistics can help explain why this is occurring. Projectile Win Rate for Projectile Heroes 58.00% 56.00% 54.00% 52.00% 50.00% 48.00% 46.00% 44.00% Bronze Silver Gold Platinum Diamond Master Grandmaster Doomfist Genji Hanzo Junkrat Mei Pharah Symmetra Torbjorn The most interesting part about this chart is that both Symmetra and Torbjorn have massively high win rates at the lower tiers compared to the rest of these heroes. Most win rates are increasing as you go up in rank, but Pharah decreases a bit from Diamond to Master, but then returns to a higher win rate from Master to Grandmaster. Also, it’s hard to see in this chart, but Mei and Doomfist share similar win rates, yet Mei has a much lower pick rate than Doomfist. Mei tends to be quite good against teams that rely heavily on movement as she can freeze them in place as well as break them apart from each other using her abilities, which probably explains why she’s able to maintain a pretty high win rate. On the other hand, you could argue that her lower pick rate means that players who play her the most are the ones who are picking her, meaning that these players will be much better at the hero. There are too many variables to say why this is occurring, but it will be worth to keep this in mind for the next analysis. Eliminations Eliminations are an interesting statistic to look at. In general, damage based heroes will have a good amount of eliminations in the game, since they are always dealing damage. Hit-scan Eliminations per Game for Hit-scan Heroes 28 26 24 22 20 18 16 14 Bronze Silver Gold Platinum Diamond Master Grandmaster Competitive Rank Tier Bastion McCree Reaper Soldier: 76 Sombra Tracer Widowmaker Taking a closer look at Sombra, it looks like we can see one potential reason why her pick rate goes up as you go up in competitive tier. At Bronze, she averages 15 eliminations per game. At Grandmaster, she averages 24. That’s a pretty big increase, which helps explain one reason why her win rate would go up that much. Projectile Eliminations per Game for Projectile Heroes 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 Bronze Silver Gold Platinum Diamond Master Grandmaster Competitive Rank Tier Doomfist Genji Hanzo Junkrat Mei Pharah Symmetra Torbjorn Junkrat being the most popular pick at the lower levels has a pretty low amount of eliminations. Torbjorn’s higher elimination count at the lower levels might be due to his turret getting easy kills against players who don’t react to the turret damage fast enough. Genji’s elimination count grows as he goes up in rank, becoming the highest for all projectile based heroes just above Hanzo. Pharah’s eliminations grow until you reach Platinum, but then decreases as you go past that rank. Damage Damage is the total amount of damage that a hero does over the course of the match. This is one of the most important statistics for damage-based heroes as a large amount of damage done in the match should give a higher chance of eliminations. Hit-scan Damage per Game for Hit-scan Heroes 23000 21000 19000 17000 15000 13000 11000 9000 7000 5000 Bronze Silver Gold Platinum Diamond Master Grandmaster Competitive Rank Tier Bastion McCree Reaper Soldier: 76 Sombra Tracer Widowmaker What’s really interesting about this chart is when you start comparing hero pick rates and total damage done.