Legends：Designer’s Notes

Question

I have reviewed the recently published Designer’s Notes ( https://www.ea.com/en-us/games/apex-legends/apex-legends/news/29-0-designers-notes ).

Regarding the scatter plot showing the relationship between win rate and pick rate for each character (with the average set at 0,0), I have several concerns.

Why are the axes not symmetrical? The current scaling makes it difficult to visually identify the distribution of outliers, such as Octane or Horizon. Furthermore, this visualization clusters most legends near the center, making it hard to discern the lack of characters with significantly low pick rates.

Is this truly the right priority?In the notes, you focus heavily on Vantage, Conduit, and Alter. However, all of these characters fall within a ±5% range of the average. (Personally, I found the data for Alter surprising, as I perceived her to be significantly stronger).
Does this not suggest that the issue is more structural rather than just individual character balance? The legends with abnormally high pick and win rates are almost exclusively limited to the Skirmisher and Assault classes.

To be honest, it is difficult to welcome new legends while the current roster remains so unbalanced. I strongly believe that the priority should be achieving proper balance with the existing legends first, rather than further increasing the number of characters requiring adjustment.

reconzero · Answer

The axes are asymmetrical to accommodate the data points without creating a lot of empty space on the chart. I get that it requires the reader to really pay attention to understand what they're looking at, but it makes sense.

Personally I was surprised by the data on Octane and Horizon. He's being addressed by the addition of the new legend who, in theory, will dilute his pick rate. But what about Horizon? Always over-powered and never addressed.

I can agree completely that the game didn't need a new legend. This one in particular seems to have been created for the sole purpose of splitting the Octane audience. More game clutter, imo. Or as someone else put it, "slop."

From my point of view a legend tune for Overclocked should have addressed the entire right side of the graph and not just Octane. Is Maggie not a problem? Wraith? Horizon? It all makes me wonder if the invisible Y axis would be labeled "dollars spent in the store," and that's where those four legends also excel.

When did I get so cynical?

akipekopeko · Answer

reconzero​&nbsp;You say it’s a specification to reduce whitespace, but I think that’s exactly the problem.By crowding everything into the center, it becomes harder to see that there are surprisingly few legends with extremely low pick rates. This suggests that "low-pick" legends aren't necessarily unusable or severely underpowered.Instead, shouldn't we be focusing on the real outliers—the ones pushed to the far top-right or far bottom-left? It feels like this visualization obscures the severity of those extreme cases. Am I overthinking this?

reconzero · Answer

I wouldn't say you're over-thinking at all. I guess I'm a lot more het up about an op legend I get killed by too frequently than I am about underused legends I never see on the field. It's Respawn who should be thinking about underused legends. I guess the only thing that would get me to think about one is if it was one I wanted to main but felt was just too uncompetitive. In which case I would just switch to a different legend. Problem solved for me, though still not for the game.

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Legends：Designer’s Notes

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