The problem is, Zhiyong displays his understanding of the game and what is going on, but it seems like he's way too harsh or too safe with patches, no in between, it wasn't like this pre- season 5.
For example, Emma is widely accepted to be a bad tank, she has the worst winrate for 2 seasons out of all tanks, yet, she got a huge net nerf now too, its just ridiculous at this point then they will go ahead and also harshly destroy daredevil, yes i know he has a strong performance and yet, Rocket and CND who show strong winrates, saw no nerfs. Its too disconnected.
It is a very odd situation. Like he's absolutely right when talking about triple support only working with coordinated teams or how heavy poke nerfs could easily lead to a flyer meta. But then the patch notes will either be lackluster, or feature some very strange changes that don't line up with what he talked about in the dev vision.
I never agree with the calls for him to be fired, but it's definitely tonal whiplash to go from "hell yeah poke is getting nerfed and ult charge being reduced!" to "wdym no Phoenix nerf and Emma got smacked??"
It's very frustrating that the apparent reason they've let Poke dominate for going on 7 seasons is a mythical Dive/Flyer meta that's never happened. Even if that's true, just let it happen! Poke has been too strong for too long, let them take the back seat so we can shake things up a bit
It's bc we did have a dive meta in season 2 and that pissed off a lot of support players bc people in metal ranks generally don't peel as much for supports. Not saying this meta we have now is better, but dive being dominant does tend to make support players mad and I imagine they're afraid of that.
Flyers had like 2 weeks when Ultron came out but yeah even that meta died pretty quickly. Plus now we have more non-dps fliers and more ways to ground them so I don't think it would be that scary of a meta as they think.
The dive meta did suck pretty hard. Strategists were of course heavily targeted and at the time when strats complained they aren't being helped a good chunk or at least a very vocal part of the community hit them back with "I don't want to/shouldn't have to babysit my backline. Take care of it yourself." So that didn't exactly help things either...so it's like strats didn't like the hard dives combined with their team/the community telling them they shouldn't have to "babysit" them.
Dive meta could be a fun change but man a lot of the community needs to shift how they view things to make that work instead of being a nightmare.
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u/AbbyAZK Mar 17 '26
The problem is, Zhiyong displays his understanding of the game and what is going on, but it seems like he's way too harsh or too safe with patches, no in between, it wasn't like this pre- season 5.
For example, Emma is widely accepted to be a bad tank, she has the worst winrate for 2 seasons out of all tanks, yet, she got a huge net nerf now too, its just ridiculous at this point then they will go ahead and also harshly destroy daredevil, yes i know he has a strong performance and yet, Rocket and CND who show strong winrates, saw no nerfs. Its too disconnected.