Okay, so a few days ago we pointed out Blizzard has a problem with it’s representation of people of color as well as it’s representation of women (meaning it’s extra bad for women of color) and a few people were confused by why Blizzard announcing they need to work Symmetra’s gameplay viability was relevant… so let’s talk about that.

Her outfit is clearly terrible and has no focus on being practical or useful and seems to be designed with more focus on combining Portal technology chic with modern cocktail dress fashions.  There’s nothing combat about it, nothing cultural about it and nothing that makes sense especially when according to the comics her regular clothing (a Legendary Skin) is over nine thousand times more practical for literally everything but flirting at a cocktail party.

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And seriously, according to the comic the cocktail dress is Symmetra’s “combat and espionage activity” outfit.

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(Worth noting that until Blizzard patched it out, it was also her combat outfit when she was posing for photos that appear on the front of wank rags – to the bets of my knowledge Blizzard never even tried to address this before they started pretending that it never happened)

Generally that’s BABD’s core focus so I didn’t want to elaborate further on it… because frankly Blizzard’s handling of Symmetra is so terrible it’s hard to know where to begin, so I’m going to try to just focus viability.

But, the core point is that Symmetra is currently so non-viable (according to Blizzard) that people get harassed for wanting to play her in Overwatch.  This is actually pretty amazing given that Overwatch is not only not a revolutionary game, Blizzard has resources other companies can only dream of and Overwatch had both closed and open betas.

Given that she’s basically a sexy brown lady version of the Engineer (but without healing) and that they managed to balance more unconventional characters (like Roadhog) but don’t seem to have even looked into balancing Symmetra… it’s almost like they just want the character for a list of traits they can use to claim they’re progressive while also primarily pitching the character for sex appeal in their marketing.

I mean they said themselves: they don’t even know what they going to do since it’s not something that they can fix with a simple tweak like adjusting Widowmaker’s scope (again), basically they’ve taken this long to realize the whole approach is nonviable.

– wincenworks

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