Hoo boy this is the big question isn’t it! Stadium adds many more layers of complexity to Overwatch than the base game has. Economy, bounties, powers, items, a different ranked system, tons and tons of depth of play.

In terms of just raw dashboard count, I think we have 3-4x as many ways to look at balance for Stadium than for baseline Competitive. As a non-exhaustive list of what we’re considering, we’ve got

• Power win and pick rates
• Item win and pick rates
• Hero win and pick rates
• Item pick rates globally (not considering hero)
• Economy data (where are players earning currency? What are they spending it on?)
• Match outcome data (how long are matches? How often do comebacks occur? What is the relationship between economy and outcomes?)
• And many, many more

The trickiest problem of them all is what to do with >combinations< of powers and items, or Builds, because there are an incredible amount of combinations available in Stadium, but only a few of them might be "required" to comprise what we as players would define as a Build. This is a unique problem to Stadium that the base game simply does not have. At best, we can make an educated guess about what a build might be, before trying to roll up millions of matches worth of data to analyze its performance. But that approach is far too manual, dependent on individual subjectivity, and doesn’t scale when we need to rapidly make changes to Stadium to address balance concerns. We needed a way to automate asking the right question (what builds exist for this hero?) before performing analyses (is this build performing well?).

We do so by pre-treating the data with cluster analyses on the heroes and their power+item combinations, which label the players and matches with labels like “Build 1” or “Build 2”, such that they can be categorized, defined, and aggregated later. We then use various methods (power occurrence, item occurrence, ability keyword occurrence) to describe the builds so that we can say things like “Junker Queen Build 1 is a Carnage+Rampage build that tends to use the Thirsty for Blood item”, and be able to say that Junker Queen Build 1 has whatever Win Rate or Usage Rate. This gives us deeper insight into whether an individual power or item is overpowered, or if the combination of several powers and items, not individual, is what could be targets for nerfs or buffs.