Overwatch PTR Patch Notes – October 20, 2020

A new Overwatch patch is in development and now available for testing! To share your feedback or report any issues, please post in the PTR Feedback or PTR Bug Report forums.

Please note that the below patch notes only include changes currently available for testing on the PTR. While many of these changes may also be available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in a future patch, the PTR is PC-only and only reflects changes coming specifically to that platform.

GENERAL UPDATES

Feature Update: Minimum Latency Support

Competition is at its best when it’s fair. Historically, we’ve run tournament events like the Overwatch League and the Overwatch World Cup with teams competing head to head, in person, with local servers to provide the lowest possible latency and the best player experience.

In today’s world, with so many events and tournaments moving online and teams spread across the world, we wanted to provide a mechanism to ensure that the experience is as fair as possible, regardless of how close the teams are to the tournament’s servers.

The Minimum Latency option sets a target latency for Custom Games, leveling the playing field between competitors whether they’re 50 or 500 miles away. Players with latency lower than the minimum setting will automatically have their network traffic delayed to meet the minimum target, while players with latency higher than the target won’t have any additional delay introduced.

This feature is designed to work with a variety of network conditions, and will generally keep players within 8 milliseconds of the target setting.

We hope this feature will be useful, especially for community-driven competitions that want to Play Nice, Play Fair.

CUSTOM GAMES UPDATES

New Custom Game Maps

• Workshop Green Screen

HERO UPDATES

Lúcio

Wall Ride

• By default, Lúcio will now perform his wall jump boost immediately upon releasing Jump to leave the wall, instead of requiring a second Jump press immediately after leaving the wall
• Lúcio can now also drop out of wall rides by pressing Crouch, which will not trigger the automatic jump
• This new setting appears inside Lucio’s settings page as “Wall Jump On Release”

Wrecking Ball

Grappling Claw

• Improved target detection to help with the consistency of connecting to walls

WORKSHOP UPDATES

General

• Increased max Workshop Element Count to 32768
• Added Type field to Start Forcing Player Outlines
• Added Spray options to Communicate, Is Communicating, and Is Communicating Any
• Added Sort Order field to Workshop Settings Values and increased the max Workshop Settings Count to 128
• Allow Button, Disallow Button, Press Button, Start Holding Button, Stop Holding Button, and Is Holding Button now accept Button Values
• Create Beam Effect, Create Effect, Create HUD Text, Create Icon, Create In-World Text, Play Effect, and Start Forcing Player Outlines now accept Color Values and support options for Color Value Reevaluation
• Added Black, Gray, Rose, and Violet color options
• Added a new option to the Apply Impulse action allowing horizontal and vertical velocity to be modified together (instead of each considered separately) when canceling contrary motion

New Workshop Actions

• Log to Inspector
• Wait Until
• Set Knockback Dealt
• Set Knockback Received
• Set Environment Credit Player
• Start Assist
• Stop Assist
• Stop All Assists
• Create Progress Bar HUD Text
• Destroy Progress Bar HUD Text
• Destroy All Progress Bar HUD Text
• Create Progress Bar In-World Text
• Destroy Progress Bar In-World Text
• Destroy All Progress Bar In-World Text

New Workshop Values

• Color
• Custom Color
• Workshop Setting Combo
• Workshop Setting Hero
• Evaluate Once
• Update Every Frame
• Magnitude Of
• Number of Slots
• Spawn Points
• String Contains
• String Length
• String Slice
• Last Assist ID
• Is Communicating Any Spray
• Player Stat (limited to current match stats)
• Player Hero Stat (limited to current match stats)

Developer Comments: Evaluate Once can be used to isolate a part of a reevaluating parameter and “freeze” it at its initial value. One way this can be useful is when a reevaluating parameter (such as an effect’s position) makes use of a For loop’s control variable. For example, if you want to create a vertical stack of effects that move with a player, you could loop over a Create Effect action using Global.Y as your control variable and “Position Of(Event Player) + Vector(0, Evaluate Once(Global.Y), 0)” as your position (with reevaluation enabled). Doing this, the position of each effect would move along with the player, but thanks to Evaluate Once, the vertical offset for each effect would be frozen to the value of Global.Y when that particular effect was created (instead of the final value of Global.Y when the loop ends).

Update Every Frame increases the rate at which certain values will update. For example, “Position Of(…)” only updates 12.5 times per second, but “Update Every Frame(Position Of(…))” will evaluate 62.5 times per second for conditions and other logical checks and as fast as your framerate for visual output, such as effects and camera. This value can be used to create highly sensitive positional triggers and smooth movement for effects and camera work. Depending on your usage, this value could have a significant impact on server load, framerate, or both, so use it only when needed. That said, executing a single condition or action that contains an Update Every Frame is still much more performant than repeatedly executing an action in a tight loop to try and achieve the same result.

BUG FIXES

General

• Fixed a bug with Capture the Flag that caused the overhead flag to not appear properly during sudden death

Heroes

Hanzo

• Fixed a bug that caused an animation issue with his Hero Select animation

Pharah

• Fixed a bug that caused Pharah’s eyes to face the wrong direction in her HUD portrait when equipping the Lifeguard skin

Workshop

• Fixed a crash that could occur when swapping the parent/child relationship between two players (using the Attach Players action)
• Fixed a bug where Disable Messages was also disabling messages sent from Workshop (e.g. Small Message and Big Message)
• Fixed a bug where setting multiple Ability Cooldowns within the same frame could fail
• Fixed a bug where the camera override from Start Camera could be overridden from other sources (e.g. emote cameras)
• Fixed a bug where Wrecking Ball could leave from ball form even if the Ability 1 and Primary Fire buttons were disabled
• Fixed a bug where the user could lose focus when interacting with the Array Value in the editor
• Fixed a bug where Set Move Speed and Set Jump Vertical Speed couldn’t set the speed to 0
• Fixed a bug where Declare Team Victory could fail in Elimination
• Fixed a bug where the Start Camera and Chase Variable actions would not update smoothly at high framerates or during slow motion
• Fixed a bug where D.Va and Echo could use their flight abilities to break away from an Attach Players action
• Fixed a bug where values with redundant parentheses would fail to paste from text correctly
• Fixed a bug where values with mismatched units (for example, a directional vector instead of a positional vector) would fail to paste from text correctly
• Fixed a bug where the element count could be higher than expected when pasting from text
• Fixed a bug where multiple 0.016-second Waits running on the same player (or the global entity) could result in some Waits taking an extra 0.016 seconds to complete
• Fixed a bug where the Phased Out status behaved inconsistently when applied to a dead player (since Phased Out and Dead are mutually exclusive)
• Fixed a bug where a Set variable action (not a Modify) would behave incorrectly when a previously-Chased variable was on both the left and right side (such as Global.A = 1 - Global.A)
• Fixed a bug where a player’s current health would be incorrectly limited to the player’s original max health between executions of multiple Set Max Health actions