A Plea From An Autistic Gamer Re: Symmetra

capicada:

Please upvote this discussion here!! I want to get the OW team to see this if I can.

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I hadn’t planned on saying anything because I knew this rework wasn’t going to be undone and that I would just have to adapt. However, a comment from the US vs. Switzerland World Cup Group Stages game made me realize that I needed to speak up and express my thoughts. I would like to talk about how non-aiming bias has taken an accessible hero away from autistic people like me. Further, I’d like to respectfully ask that the dev team consider making Symmetra’s beam lock-on again, or at least make another hero have a lock-on mechanic in the future for the sake of accessibility.

The prevalent attitude towards Symmetra, before her rework and even now to an extent, is that she doesn’t take any skill to play. To quote Semmler and Hex from last night’s commentary, “…no longer the lock-on, so you get a bit of the skill factor.” This side comment enraged me, so much so that I clicked out the stream entirely and did not continue to watch.

As an autistic person I’ve personally connected with Symmetra, and her kit having the lock-on has meant the world to me, allowing me to participate in a world of gaming that wasn’t open to me before overwatch came into being. Symmetra has taught me how to play competitive games structured like this that no other game bothered to do and has even taught me how to aim: I can now play Mei and Orisa because Symmetra’s lock on has helped me learn how to steady my hand enough to aim decently. Symmetra made me feel as though I was finally being listened to, as a player and as a gaming customer. No other game has bothered to include so many non-aiming kits, and here was a game that understood that people who weren’t blessed with aiming skill weren’t the only ones who knew how to strategize, who knew how to work and play in a team, and who knew how to make use of a character’s kit to earn their victory.

However, ever since the Mercy Rework, I’ve gone from feeling heard to feeling ignored. The addition of Brigitte was a passable attempt at adding accessibility into a game growing rife with reworks, visual noise, and a CC meta, but in the end all of this plus the lack of challenging to the attitude that accessibility is something to be mocked has made the game unbearable to play. Symmetra’s rework has been the last straw and knowing that not only has she been changed so that I can no longer play her, but that people like me still aren’t accepted as skillful and worth playing because we needed the lock-on, is absolutely infuriating. There’s no victory in seeing Symmetra used in pro-play with this attitude still present, and it makes her rework a hollow robbery. The encouragement of lone-wolf play in character reworks and emphasis now placed on kill count instead of team play only rubs salt in the wound.

Pro players have the entire cast to play and can take their pick with whoever they please to play, they have more room to adapt and change their thinking than we do. Making all the characters more high-skilled for pro-player use is counterproductive for the other 90% of the playerbase and either forces us to re-learn characters we knew the basics of or, as in my case, lose a hero that was previously in our hero pool.

I’m not going to act like some of the re-work isn’t good. The re-worked turret placement is really nice, the speed at which she can now put turrets up and use them to protect her team is an improvement. Although the teleporter is incredibly hard to coordinate in almost all levels of play other than pro, I can appreciate the attempt at making her able to transport her team without having to wait for an ultimate. However, these should’ve been “quality of life” tweaks instead of an entire rework to a character that had nothing wrong with them as an individual, and the attitude that made her beam change and made her less accessible for the benefit of those would not play her otherwise is ruining this game. It’s been slowly and surely ruining the big draw of this game for a while and will continue to do so if the people who make the decisions of how this game is developed don’t recognize that the bulk of their most profitable audience is quitting the game because what made it so special in the first place is being replaced for the supposed benefit of pro players and OWL.

This game is marketed to those who cannot usually play FPSes. This game is marketed to people of color, disabled people, people who are usually stopped at the gates of entering games like this because of lack of diverse casts and high skills roofs that make it difficult for most to reach. These post-Mercy rework changes make this marketing feel like a straight up lie, as though all the time and money I put toward telling this game I appreciate its effort to include me was a ultimately cruel trick and that I should have never trusted it to do so.

I realize tweaks here and there are necessary to keep hero kits functional and fresh, but re-learning a character after a year or so of her kit being stable? Re-learning a character that’s autistic, as an autistic person, that’s only being changed primarily because of non-aim bias? I feel it’s unfair to autistic players, who have suffered the most from this change and still have to deal with the toxicity that has not been addressed and will not be addressed if Blizzard keep avoiding the elephant in the room re: its toxic players.

Nothing that Blizzard will do will make her pickrate go up or her kit “exciting” enough, and perhaps by the time they do the people that it matters to will have left this game. I know I’m getting closer and closer to considering it. I’m writing this so that the dev team knows that I still want this game to succeed, not for my money or even my continued play, but because this game means a lot more than you realize.

The Pink Mercy event, Tracer’s lesbian reveal, the diverse cast, the effort put into the game’s initial accessibility, everything that this game has done for those so often ignored in the gaming industry, is too painful to lose. I know this game can advocate to do so much more, can represent so much more, can help raise more awareness for other causes and could give so many more people like me a chance to play something mainstream and fun with their friends if it just realizes where its long-term success lies.

So to conclude, I’m asking the devs to please re-consider reverting Symmetra, or to actively work to include more accessibility in future game updates. This would go a long to making the game accessible again and less focused on the very niche desires of pro-players.