What makes a character worth choosing?

 Going over this for the given choices in R6 and the characters I had chosen; not focusing on powerfulness but rather the depth of their toolkits and guns with how fun they are. Doc is fun on smaller maps with his radar being abusable through walls.

Yager is fun no matter what map you use and has insane amount of depth. This made me realize why some ops are chosen more than others; the same with other games like Overwatch where in a non-comp environment the chosen characters are for the fun factor; not the power factor.

On the other hand what makes said characters fun? The clear answer being the depth of the toolkits, how hard and rewarding is their toolkit for the given output you get for doing things.

The constant gun nerfs were dumb and lazy in Siege; the same thing with nerfing abilities via cooldowns in Overwatch. Raising the skill floor for more powerful tools would've been the smarter answer and you see this in custom lobbies where the most OP characters have their toolkits nerfed with having to jump through additional hoops for that powerful effect like with immortality field.

You need a counter balance; you need skill expression to make something feel fair when it is not. This is why I get upset at Sniper players and no other class in TF2 and many other people expect people bemoaning Pyro; although that's because he's a very easy character to get into and has an insanely high skill ceiling with the easiest progress point from point a to point b.

That's the other thing; what is the path, what is the journey of mastery for said abilities.

In something like Warframe for the beginner frames you have it where the mastery of the frames are from easy to understand/ get into with simple abilities with the later on frames having harder to master and harder to use abilities with more thinking and planning being needed.

Not just that but the abilities in Warframe work together with one another! You see this with many characters in Borderlands and the best example being Krieg; weaker shields, delayed shields and being downed is the best way to play him with synergy around high risk, high reward dangerous gameplay.

Not just that but every single one of them needing something unique to bring to the table. However something like League of Legends where possible overlap existing (I hadn't played long enough) but in those instance with a game like that you have it where a top laner plays much different from a mid laner for the given gameplay making it where similar abilities can be twisted into one lane or another for changing the fundamental gameplay elements.

So a fun character needs the following;

1. Easy path for power unless it's a broken ability then needs more hoops to jump through

2. Lots of depth and has map synergy

3. Synergy between abilities

And finally; 4. must have a unique playstyle unless the base gameplay already has a high knowledge floor.

Now there are exceptions to the rules and all that but at the end of the day there aren't hard and strict rules, more like guidelines and you have to figure out what camp your game fits into at the end of the day.

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