Of its 22 character roster, Indian architect Symmetra is one of the game’s least played characters. Game director Jeff Kaplan describes her as a “situational” hero, which is why Blizzard plans to reevaluate her stats in the coming months.
In an interview with Business Insider, Kaplan reasoned that Symmetra’s game time tends to see her used defensively on the first part of a point, before seeing her switched off if the player loses said point. This makes her a situational character, says Kaplan, which is something that’s “not really desirable” to him and his team—even if there’s logic behind why she’s ultimately being left out.
"That definitely impacts her play time when you’re looking at the stats," says Kaplan. "Now, a character being that situational is not really desirable to us, so even though I can kind of justify why it happens, that doesn’t mean that I believe that it’s right. So Symmetra is a hero who’s on our list right now to take a good look at and really investigate.
"I don’t have anything really specific to talk about right now, other than she is kind of an internal project right now. She is a hero we’d like to make some changes to. I think those changes wouldn’t see the light of day until November, though, because we want to do a bunch of internal testing.
"It’s one thing when we do something [minor]—like, we have a change to Junkrat on the [Public Test Realm] where his Ultimate activates faster, but it’s a very incremental, safe change—whereas the type of changes we think need to happen to Symmetra require a lot more internal testing and discussion."
Overwatchers: do you play as Symmetra? Let us know what you’d like to see change in the comments below.
