[2020] Why Sage is strong

This is something we talk about a lot. I’m seeing a lot of misconceptions around that we’re nerfing Sage because of her pickrate, and that’s not true! She does have a very high pickrate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s overpowered, just popular.

The problem is she also has a very high winrate, and has consistently been the strongest agent in the game, even through several nerfs. We want to take our time and ensure that we’re bringing her power level in line with other agents while not ruining how it feels to play Sage and the value she provides to the game. We don’t want to butcher the kit, but we also have an obligation to our players to have balanced content.

Choice competition is something that's definitely an issue, both with her healing and her hard stall. We tend to find that healing is more valued in lower MMRs, and her hard stall power is more valued in higher MMRs, although obviously both outputs are useful across the spectrum.

I think having low choice competition definitely makes the risk of a character being imbalanced higher, but doesn't mean that she's doomed to be high pick rate/win rate. For example, Sova is the only character who can reveal enemies from long distances round to round with his Sonar Dart and Drone, but he's not near Sage's pick or win rates. Cypher is the only character who can adequately watch flanks without his actual gun via his Trapwires, but he's not near Sage's pick or win rates.

Long term, we definitely want better choice competition for both of Sage's outputs - her stalling and her healing - and recognize that's an issue. We feel we can work towards resolving her balance issues before choice competition comes into play, though.

We're not currently talking about full ability reworks like that, and would like to avoid that if possible. I agree with your points around stall + heal uniqueness on Sage being an issue due to lack of choice competition - I spoke to that a little bit in another one of my replies here. We want to approach this methodically so we can shave off power in the right areas, but want to avoid full reworks like that if we can!

Yup, good intuition on this one. I'd say this probably accounts for some of her winrate differential, but we're looking at literal millions of games across our entire MMR spectrum in all of our regions and her winrate is substantially higher than other agents, to the point where it's extremely unlikely that this would account for a meaningful portion of that delta. Also, philosophically, even if this phenomenon WAS meaningfully explaining her winrate, we don't really want an agent who is so powerful and agreed upon "meta" that only uncooperative and/or toxic teams don't pick them. That pattern existing at all means that a portion of the agent meta feels solved or forced, which flies in the face of our goals for that system.

If players only viewed Sage as a "must pick" on one or two maps, that could be alright, assuming the power deltas were reasonable - but seeing Sage as a "must pick" in every situation, combined with an extremely high play rate and very high win rate makes Sage a prime candidate for some targeted changes here. We want players to feel like they have meaningful choices in drafting their team compositions.

Oh for sure - in that post I was mentioning why she's "valued" at different ranks. This has mostly come from survey data, when asking players what Sage is good at/why she's powerful, lower ranked players tend to emphasize her healing and resurrect capabilities, whereas higher ranked players tend to emphasize her ability to hard stop site executes. Both groups of players value the other side of the coin, though - all of Sage's outputs are undeniably powerful.

In terms of actual balance data, we have to split by a number of metrics because we have mirror matches in our game (it's hard to understand Sage's winrate when there's a Sage on both teams 90% of the time - one's gonna win, one's gonna lose). So raw pick rate, % round winrate on defense, % round winrate on offense, and match win rate are our primary metrics - we look at those with and without mirror matches so we can understand an agent's power in isolation as well as an agent's general power in the ecosystem. Naturally, we also have to split this by maps as well as MMR to understand how an agent's power is deploying across our map ecosystem and skill spectrum.

We also gather player sentiment on balance and the state of our weapons, maps, and agents every patch, to understand how the playerbase at large is feeling about the state of the game, and incorporate that into our decision making process.

Oh you’re good, I don’t feel like you were aggro at all. Yeah, we’ve been looking into ult power a lot recently and Sage’s is definitely coming out as the strongest, so that could be an opportunity for us to dial back some power. We’d like to keep the resurrect in the game, though, so we’ll likely be exploring tuning levers there first before resorting to something like a rework.

This is all still in flight, so maybe we’ll pivot to different areas, but the ult looks like a pretty likely place for us to adjust the power on next - agreed on that.

It's actually the opposite - the higher an agents' playrate, the more their winrate will converge to 50%. Every game that has the same agent on both sides counts as a win and a loss for that agent in aggregate winrate, cause one of them wins and the other loses.

This is why it's important for us to understand win rates in situations where agents aren't being played in mirror matches! But we still look at mirror win rates and round-level win rates to make sure we're understanding the entire picture.

Yup, this likely speaks to some of the differential but is also a problem in itself if Sage is enough of a “must pick” that she becomes a litmus test for a team’s willingness to cooperate. I speak to it a bit more in a different reply in this thread!