An Open Letter to Blizzard and Community Regarding Sombra

Summary

In an honest plea, Questron, a high-ranking European Sombra player, addresses the divided opinions about Sombra in Overwatch. Despite his abrasive reputation, Questron argues for a balanced solution that satiates both Sombra players and her opponents. He critiques the dichotomy of views on Sombra’s gameplay, suggesting that people either dismiss her weaknesses or condemn her features as toxic. This letter aims to bridge that gap by proposing changes to her kit to promote a healthier game environment. Questron advocates for tweaks that balance her downtime and uptime, seeking a harmonious middle ground that respects Sombra's unique mechanics without unfairly burdening players.

Highlights

• Questron is a high-ranking European Sombra player focusing on fun and improvement, not leaderboards. 🌐
• This video is a plea for understanding and serious discussion about Sombra's place in Overwatch. 📢
• The conversation around Sombra is divisive, with players and opponents having starkly different views. ⚔️
• Sombra's mechanics can create polarized opinions, but solutions exist in balancing downtime and uptime. ⚖️
• Questron suggests improvements that capitalize on Sombra’s stealth and mobility to improve her play. 🕶️
• Questron aims to take Sombra's gameplay from polarizing to pleasurable for all players. ✨

Key Takeaways

• Questron, a European Sombra player, balances fun and competitive play, addressing Overwatch's Sombra issues. 🎮
• Sombra's community discourse is split; Questron suggests a middle ground for players and adversaries. 🤝
• Current discussions are polarized, blaming Sombra's gameplay rather than seeking solutions. 🚪
• Sombra's controversy is rooted in her unique kit; Questron pushes for balanced adjustments over removal. 📊
• Engaging with Sombra's nuanced gameplay can lead to less toxicity and more balanced play. 🌟
• A proposed focus on mobility and uptime for Sombra could reduce toxicity while maintaining player enjoyment. 🚀

Overview

Questron opens up with an appeal for credible, serious understanding of Sombra's controversial presence in Overwatch. As an enthusiastic player not tied to professional ranks, his unique viewpoint sheds light on underexplored aspects of Sombra's kit. Hoping to unravel existing biases, he aims to present balanced solutions that may please both sides of the Sombra debate.

Through exploring Sombra’s history, Questron identifies the polarizing views that fracture the Overwatch community. Advocating for understanding, he balances critiques from both players of Sombra and those who face her in the game. His discourse highlights the gaps between intentions and perceptions in Sombra’s gameplay, pushing for constructive dialogue.

As the letter concludes, Questron’s vision for Sombra involves embracing her unique mechanics while dialing back extreme elements that create friction. Suggesting a focus on mobility and uptime instead of raw power, he believes these changes could transform Sombra into a less divisive hero, enabling players to enjoy her without community backlash.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Introduction and General Thoughts on Sombra The chapter introduces Questron, a high-ranked European Sombra player known for his laid-back and fun approach to playing the game. Despite his high rank, Questron has no professional aspirations and doesn't aim to top the leaderboards, which is contrary to the typical competitive mindset. His casual attitude and choice of playing Sombra—a character that often draws negative reactions—sometimes lead others to perceive him as abrasive or annoying. Due to these perceptions, he usually avoids engaging in activities that require a degree of credibility, such as coaching or offering opinions.
• 02:00 - 05:00: Issues with Sombra's Gameplay and Misconceptions The chapter discusses the issues and misconceptions surrounding the gameplay of the character Sombra. It emphasizes the importance of addressing these issues seriously to ensure a balanced experience for both those who play as Sombra and those who play against her. The chapter sets the stage for a deeper exploration of why Sombra's gameplay is problematic, its origins, and possible solutions. The author seeks to engage those critical of Sombra, encouraging them to consider a unified perspective for the benefit of all players.
• 05:00 - 09:00: Sombra's Gameplay Dynamics and Perception The chapter explores the polarizing opinions surrounding the Overwatch hero, Sombra, particularly in relation to her gameplay dynamics. It highlights the strong division among players—either feeling victimized by Sombra or identifying strongly with her. The author expresses understanding of the 'heroban' situation, acknowledging that it was predictable but criticizes the insincere dialogues surrounding her character. There's an emphasis on the binary perception that seems to ensure someone's interests are hurt regardless of future changes to Sombra.
• 09:00 - 15:00: Community and Developer Reactions This chapter addresses the community and developer reactions towards Sombra, a character in a game. The differing opinions between the two groups are highlighted: Sombra players argue that her effectiveness is a 'skill issue' and point out her lower ban rate in higher ranks, while her opponents feel her kit is toxic and advocate for significant reworks such as removing her stealth abilities. The speaker, adopting a contrarian view, believes that both sides are somewhat irrational in their arguments.
• 15:00 - 19:00: Suggestions for Sombra's Future ### Summary In this chapter, the narrative delves into the controversial dynamics surrounding players who main the character Sombra in the game. It describes how these players often revel in the frustration they cause to their opponents, displaying a lack of sportsmanship. This behavior is contrasted with players of other characters, like Soldier, who also disrupt gameplay but find joy primarily in the act of killing rather than eliciting annoyance from their opponents. The chapter suggests that the uniqueness of Sombra mains lies in their distinctively disruptive spirit, which doesn't have a parallel with any other character in the game.

An Open Letter to Blizzard and Community Regarding Sombra Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Hello. Uh, I'm Questron. For the ones that don't know me, I am a highranked European Sombre player. I don't have a pro career nor any interest in even being in the top of the leaderboards. I just so happen to be high ranked and then have fun by having fun playing well. I don't really have the character trait of taking things too seriously, which comes across as abrasive, loud, and to a lot of people annoying, especially given that I play Sombra. I very easily get dismissed for these reasons. This is why generally I steer clear from being involved in topics that require credibility to be heard like coaching or giving takes or suggesting
• 00:30 - 01:00 what the developer should do. So before we go anywhere, I just want to kind of ask to be taken a little seriously. I know it's rich coming for me of all people and I get that wanting to dunk on Sombra players is fun and funny, but I genuinely think Sombra can be solved in a way where both people playing Sombra and people playing against Sombra come out happy. The more you hate Sombra, the more it's in your own best interest to be on the same page with me here. So, hear me out. Sombra is a problem. This video is going to go over why that's the case, how it came to be, and what I think should be done about it. Given
• 01:00 - 01:30 that my entire online identity is directly tied to this hero, I get why you'd think this video is intended to sway public opinion into not hating Sombra. But, I'm going to be real here. I think the heroban situation isn't shocking at all. I get it, and I did see it coming from a mile away. My issue is with how disingenuous the conversation regarding Sombra is from both sides of the aisle, forcing whatever future Sombra has into guaranteeing someone losing out big time. The conversation about Sombra is generally very divided into hard lines. Either you're a victim to Sombra or you play Sombra and both
• 01:30 - 02:00 sides have very different perceptions on why they're upset and how to fix it. I, being the contrarian that I am, disagree with both. In recent discussion, people playing Sombra generally just say skill issue and that Sombra gets banned less in higher ranks. People victim to Sombra say that her kit is inherently toxic and needs to be reworked into not having the major components in her kit that she does. Turning her into a support, removing stealth, that's where all that stuff is brought up. To put it blunt, I think everyone's absolutely out of their damn minds. Respectfully, Sombra players
• 02:00 - 02:30 are out of their damn minds because, well, have you seen our style Sombra mains? They're kind of just [ __ ] that so happen to be playing Sombra, gloating at how they have fun directly at the expense of anyone in the enemy team with no signs of sportsmanship in sight and getting giddy for being called slurs. It's weird. There isn't a single other hero in the game that has that type of player. Soldier players revoke fun passes on a real basis just as hard, if not harder, than Sombra, but they find joy at the kill. Not some sadistic, I hope he's pissed about that. The problem with this is that in actuality,
• 02:30 - 03:00 they're playing Sombra wrong. just to do this. Spawn camping, for example, as Sombra, I do just about as often as I would on Soldier 76. It's inefficient, and doing so is at the expense of your own actions per minute and impact in a fight. I'm being genuine when I say that playing Sombra without emphasizing her toxic traits genuinely lets you win more often. Let me rephrase. Not actively being a dick makes you win on Sombra. And on the flip side, the people victim to Sombra, they say that her kid is
• 03:00 - 03:30 inherently built on toxic gameplay traits and has to be cut into little pieces and disposed of, which is just absolutely ridiculous to me because Overwatch is special because of the developers capability of pulling off nonsense. It's genuine art and it's the main reason why I love it so much. Take for example this comment here. It hits all the talking points. But this is where it gets weird because well, sure, Sombra has the ability to disable kits, but so does Doomfist, Orisa, being slept by Anna or pinned by Reinard also count. plus every character that can kill you. Being dead and respawning is a good way
• 03:30 - 04:00 to not let someone play the game. But it's because of the role and context of their kit that make it okay. It's not a perfect comparison to Sombra because for starter she's a DPS. And I don't necessarily think this excuses it, but the understanding of the premise that context and execution of design in Overwatch means that everything has a solution. Sombra as well. We all hate oneshots and think they're bad. People call for oneshots to be removed from the game entirely, but Tracer's pulse bomb is a one shot. It's an ultimate, but it's used like an ability. Whiffing it doesn't even mean you directly lose a fight, unlike EMP or Genji Blade. Now,
• 04:00 - 04:30 invisibility being toxic, I somewhat agree with. I have plenty of videos where I go over the premise over and over again. It's related to the core principle behind why I've always told people to stop hacking health packs. When it comes to getting out of jail free cards, hell, Tracer's recall is way more of one than Sombre was even before, back when you could put Transicator on a health pack. Recall does not require prep work, has no cast time, heals you without needing a health pack, repositions you away from where you were in danger, and it doesn't even have a negative connection to her general mobility either. It's a fully separate
• 04:30 - 05:00 cooldown. Sombra's get out of jail was comically overkill by going across the map, but achieved the same premise. Sombra was hated. Tracer hasn't had any significant changes since 2017, and people are happy about that. They praise it even. I should probably say that I have no issue with Tracer here. I don't want changes to Tracer. The main point is that the nuance exists and to have a healthy discussion, we need to acknowledge the double standard. Oneshots are not inherently a problem to people. Get out of jail is not inherently toxic. It's the context of the character's kits that make them tolerable or not. This applies to
• 05:00 - 05:30 Sombra, calling for her removal of her elements in this way is not a solution. Please stop making the same Reddit post over and over again in different wording. There's a rule of thumb regarding Sombra. It's the one piece of advice that has applied to her since the beginning of her existence. And that is that the more you're using stealth, the more you're just proactively doing nothing. There's always been a direct inverse correlation between a Sombre player's rank and how much time they spend in stealth to set up for what they need to do. The skill difference between Sombra players is in managing that
• 05:30 - 06:00 downtime as efficiently as possible to do the most amount of things. Somber matchups are one not by directly hunting each other down. They are one by one doing more things than the other to the enemy team. It's the extreme inverse of Widow versus Widow matchups where nobody can do anything until one of the Widows kills the other. Standing still for 30 Seconds waiting for a Sigma to flux is not efficient. I made a video titled We have to talk about Sombra will her rework even do anything which essentially serves as a massive I told you so now. The problem was more blatant back before Virus existed where
• 06:00 - 06:30 permanent invisibility facilitated and allowed it to happen in the first place. This is why I violently disagreed with everyone when r/ Sombre man said Sombra was dead and that Sombra was gutted back when Sombra stealth was put on a timer and tied to her transllocator. Her identity did not change. You just played her inefficiently on purpose up until that point and weren't able to do so anymore. The change allowed for more efficient pathing to set up, meaning you got to be in fights more often for longer periods of time, all because stealth wasn't fully interruptible anymore. This direction change for Sombra is why I was so excited for the
• 06:30 - 07:00 change because I thought that it implied that moving forward, this would be the emphasis for balance for Sombra. With the most recent batch of perks, I feel like steps were taken back and alarm bells are ringing. Combined with the amount of hate I already receive with every interaction I have with anyone, I now feel the need to seriously have one massive video to hopefully call for change to happen in the right direction. There's some people that want her to be reverted to early Overwatch 2. when she put up a new historic record of the lowest average win rate any hero across Overratch one and Overs 2 had ever had. She wasn't less annoying, she was just
• 07:00 - 07:30 bad. This solution reflects the same premise. Arguing that this is a good solution is not arguing for the sake of balance and design. It's vindictive under the guise of saying it's for the best and is at the expense of the people that just want to play their Sombra. It's dishonest and gets in the way of actually finding a solution. In the modern day as of season 15, we have perks. Perks help generally speaking, but Sombra's season 15 perks not only sucked, but actively sabotaged her gameplay loop. In season 15, for the
• 07:30 - 08:00 first half, I was forced about half the time to not pick a perk. Kirku gets a second teleport and Tracer gets a full reset of her blinks and Sombra has to not pick a perk. Not only does Sombra get left behind in the power creep, but this is made even worse because the perks that got added to her counters directly shut down the way of managing their duels. Against Tracer, you'd make her waste her blinks and have her recall by only using virus or only using hack to save the other one for after recall without blinks to get her at her least mobile. But now she gets those blinks
• 08:00 - 08:30 back, which means essentially you have to just 1v one her but twice. against Kirao. Seeing her enter somewhere via her teleport meant that she would either have to waste Suzu to save herself or die if you dove her. Now she just has another teleport. There's no window of opportunity type dynamic. It was just directly taken away. Not only that, but Sojurnn was essentially a hard counter given how versatile her burst damage plays out in game. Meaning every dive I did needed to be a guaranteed kill and fast. Otherwise, Sojurnn would quite easily chase me down and kill me. She
• 08:30 - 09:00 can abandon her positioning from high ground and just get back real quick. unlike Cassidy, but with the burst damage of Cassidy. So, the window of opportunity was smaller, dives became more easily stopped, and Sombra was [ __ ] out of luck. This is where Stack Overflow was legitimately the only way Sombra would ever get a kill in that scenario, but it turned her into even more of a binary diver. Either your chance of killing someone is 100% or you don't go for it. The oppressive feeling of Sombra was exasperated because of this, causing them to remove this perk in season 16, which is fair enough. I
• 09:00 - 09:30 don't think it's healthy for the game, but herobans means I can ban Sojurnn, so I don't really miss Stack Overflow that much either. The problem still persists, however, a lot of people asked about my opinion since I made a big deal about it when we found out Stack Overflow was going to get replaced, but I realize I overreacted somewhat since I underestimated the impact of banning Sojurnn. I really don't like what it was replaced with, but that's for later in the video. The main reason I made a stink about Stack Overflow leaving is because people don't realize the more fragile she is and the higher the chance
• 09:30 - 10:00 of who you dive escaping, the more risky her dives become, which places more pressure on getting the best bang for your buck. The only time she'd dive you is when she knows you're [ __ ] out of luck, making her feel significantly more oppressive than she actually is. Her only mobility, cleanse, dodge, and the entirety of stealth is under the same cooldown of 7 seconds. Tracer has five or six independently usable blinks and a recall, assuming you get the perk. The reason she isn't hated is because she doesn't play in a way that makes her
• 10:00 - 10:30 have to get value out of every engagement. Unlike Sombra, you get to swat away before she goes in for a kill. For Sombra, the moment she goes in at all, it is for the kill. The rule is you have one translocator per person you go for. No concept of Genji's dash reset, no wall climb, no deflect, nothing. Do or die. All the while having 225 health, which is less than Genji and Sojurnn, who both have vastly more mobility and lethality. For the sake of keeping us on the same page, in this case, mobility is assumed as mid-fight mobility, like
• 10:30 - 11:00 Genji's dash, Tracer's Blink, Wrecking Ball's grapple, Juno's dash, Ekko's dash, and flight. You get the drill. Symmetra's teleporter is for this reason utility, not mobility. Even though Overwatch one Sombra had incredible utility, Overwatch 2 Sombra has more mobility. To visualize my gripe with how Sombre's been handled, assume all characters by design have three main points to them. How much those points are leaned in on is how impact unfolds. The three main points are lethality, mobility, and utility. I'm going to skip
• 11:00 - 11:30 explaining them because I don't want to put too much weight on a visualization of what I'm talking about to avoid arguing semantics. It's just to help guide, not genuinely some philosophical theory. Imagine the three main points all have their representing characters. Lethality being something like Bastion or Reaper. Mobility being Tracer and Genji. And utility being someone like May or Symmetra or Sombra back in the day. Then Overwatch 2 came out and Sombra moved from pure utility to somewhat lethal without a bump in mobility. From that point on, every rework was essentially adding more and
• 11:30 - 12:00 more hoops to jump through to do the same slightly too much amount of damage slightly too fast. In Overwatch one, the gun did the damage. Then later, you had to hack someone first to do damage, then more later hit them with a projectile to do damage, then even more later. You had to first hack them, and then hit them with a cube to do the damage. And all the while, the major glaring problem still existed in her gameplay loop. Every dive was still do or die. No way to stall her survival out like with Doomfist Block, Genji Deflect, May Ice
• 12:00 - 12:30 Block, or Wrecking Ball's Overhealth, but also no extra mobility to leave early like Tracer's Blinks or Mercy's Guardian Angel. Regardless of how it happens, every dive ends up with someone dying, which meant that her status was essentially either a hated hero or a useless one with no gray area, depending on whatever the most recent patch is at the time of conversation. If Sombra's output gets nerfed because it's overbearing at whatever point in history, then you can really only replace it with other things that need to be overbearing to fill the gap in
• 12:30 - 13:00 value. Kind of like a power vacuum that keeps getting replaced with a differently colored power vacuum. It's a little side tangent, but this premise clicked for me when I was replaying Insomniac's first PlayStation 5 Spider-Man and J. Jonah Jameson popping up talking about Kingpin being gone, meaning there's a power vacuum because of Spider-Man. And the entire story is literally that playing out. This is why we have like 10 reworks under our belt. This means that whatever the problem in her kit was 10 years ago, it still is now. The community keeps attacking the direct output of the abilities. Like how
• 13:00 - 13:30 everyone complained hack was broken, so hack got nerfed from 5 seconds to 1 second in Overwatch 2. Translocator was broken, so it became short distance. Invisibility was broken, so is put on a 5-second duration. And now we still hate her. The developers listened. You lot were just wrong for once. I'm sorry, but it's true. Otherwise, she'd be fixed by now. So, to put it bluntly, it's my opinion that Sombra's direction shouldn't be facilitating downtime. She should be getting rewarded for her uptime. Facilitating downtime is how you get Sombra players spawn camping and all
• 13:30 - 14:00 the stuff Reddit complains about. Sombra's gameplay should feel like she wants to be out of invisibility to get value, exposing herself to the risk of being shut down, and then that being okay to do so because she never gets fully shut down. with the design of her kit implying she doesn't always need to fully commit even if she doesn't get a kill or shuts down anything important. Her having 225 health, well, her only form of anything, having a 7-second cooldown means there's a lot of pressure on every dive. That's how when whenever
• 14:00 - 14:30 she does anything, she feels overwhelming. Tracer is the opposite of this where she has incredible mobility which means she doesn't need much if any guarantee on every dive which is why she never really feels overwhelming regardless of output. And before you're worried that I'm going to suggest turning her into Tracer 2.0, this also applies to Genji, Wrecking Ball, Doomfist, and plenty other heroes. The act of giving Sombre more mobility, survivability, or survivability through mobility does not inherently mean she's turning into Tracer. looking into maybe decreasing the demanding nature of
• 14:30 - 15:00 Sombra's dives is a good direction to explore. Control alt escape is an absolutely phenomenal example of this and should be a cornerstone in how perks are thought about for Sombre in my opinion, leaving hack and oppressive stuff to more general balance changes. I still absolutely think stealth is a major loadbearing component to Sombra, so I don't want it gone. But to me, it exists in her kit in the sense that the better you are, the more efficient you are with stealth and the less you use it. but never zero stealth. In my ideal world, I'd have her two major perks
• 15:00 - 15:30 function in the two main ways you have survivability in the middle of a duel. Either you get more mobility in a literal sense, or more direct survivability. Perk one, for example, would be that the translocator cooldown speeds up while out of stealth by 50%. Promoting the usage of the transllocator itself, as well as promoting the lack of stealth, really doubling down on the aggressive way people can use the translocator. And then the other perk would be controlled escape, but turned into a major perk where it triggers the passive self-heal when using transllocator without the 50% health
• 15:30 - 16:00 requirement. Her self-healing would still stop if any damage was done to her, not to just have being in stealth mean you get healed. Then the minor perks can be more damage oriented like maybe the area of effect virus we have as a major, but nerfed to do less damage or have less range or have it not speed up on hack targets or a combination of the three. I'm not a game designer and I don't have the resources to trial and error or anything. So, I'm just spitballing to paint a picture. Given that in discussion I constantly see a resurgence of the same couple ideas, I narrowed it down to four ideas that I
• 16:00 - 16:30 could preemptively shoot down right here before a derails conversation when talking about Sombra with people that don't have thousands of hours on her. This isn't meant to be condescending, but there's a disconnect in why people think people enjoy Sombra that you can't quite explain without being in the thick of it. So, here they are. Here are the four. Um, you can pause the video. Maybe if your idea is between this, hopefully that answers my response. Decreasing the all-in all-allout nature of Sombra's dives doesn't inherently mean give her more mobility either. The reason control
• 16:30 - 17:00 at escape is an absolutely phenomenal example of this is because control at escape grays out the black and white in and out by giving her the risky option of partially rehealing up the damage she took from the dive she did and stick around instead of having to entirely give up to go to a health pack. A health pack that's across the map. The change in direction from a combination of lethality and utility slowly shifting towards mobility means a decrease in lethality. Decreasing Virus's cooldown, but at a way lower amount of total damage would be a good start. But
• 17:00 - 17:30 honestly, it's a trial and error-based balancing system. Maybe hack loses its damage boost or Virus's impact damage doesn't get amplified on hacked targets, only sped up. Who knows? But also important is that she regains some more utility after losing damage. The one thing I miss from Overwatch 1 isn't even something people really thought about, but that hacking itself should be situational. As it is now, every single hack has some form of excuse. Whether it's damage boost, virus boost, visibility through walls, an interrupt, there's always a value. Back in Overwatch 1, if an Anna usern dart, a
• 17:30 - 18:00 hack's lockout was shorter than the cooldown. If you hacked Anna while those were on cooldown, you gained literally nothing out of it aside giving away the element of surprise. I think at the very least, damage should not be tied to hack with some kind of buff that the developers can trial and error their way to find to compensate. I did not like it when Overwatch 2 launched and was disappointed they brought it back in the recent rework. So, in conclusion, I think Sombra in each of her reworks went in the right direction. But the further
• 18:00 - 18:30 in balance it went beyond each starting point, the more she got dragged back into why people hated her. And I can't even blame them to think we need another rework. But I don't really think so. Blizzard, we've tried an emphasis on utility. We've tried an emphasis on lethality. I'm suggesting that while we hug the wall of utility, we piece by piece exchange lethality for mobility and uptime till we hit a sweet spot. If Tracer's all the way mobility, maybe like a quarter of the way to that, the foundation in the translocator being what it currently is laid the groundwork
• 18:30 - 19:00 for a solid mobilitycentric iteration of Sombra. One that we've never seen before, one that people wouldn't make the most banned character in the game. That being said, thank you for watching. That's the end of my yap session. If this video gave you some new insight or perspective, please consider sharing it around or using it as a replying conversation about Sombra to get a ball rolling, to maybe get some meaningful change to happen, to fix the most hated character in Overwatch history without taking her away from those that like her.