AMA with the Overwatch team - ask about perks, Stadium, Season 16, and more!

Some of the winners so far have been Ana, Bastion, Pharah, Ramattra, and Winston. When it comes to individual perks: Ramattra's Vengeful Vortex, Mauga's Firewalker, Zarya's Energy Lance, and Soldier 76's Agility training have all been quite impactful. It's important though to look at the combination of your Minor and Major perks, what rank thresholds players are using them at, and how quickly a hero is gaining their perks. There's still quite a bit for us to dig through there!

In the immediate, we mostly plan on balancing perks in order to make them feel more impactful. There will still be some core kit tuning alongside that, but there's still a meaningful amount of change we want to inject into the system throughout the next few patches. Tuning to perks and actual perk swaps (hoping for some in 16.0) are included in that.

Like you, I also believe Clash is awesome when it all comes together! We actually spent a good amount of time on Clash's scoring before we made the decision to pull it from Competitive. Even with scoring changes, we believed the mode needed some fundamental geo changes to points A+E to perform better as a Competitive mode. Currently we are experimenting with building another Clash map from the ground up with a different approach to the layout to see if that solves some of the core issues the mode has. That's all very early, but hopefully some significant geo changes along with scoring changes can get Clash into a great spot.

1. Actually neither! The true impetus for this was our need for a game system layer to introduce more change into the core game. Having some talents to pull from was nice to have but a large majority of the perks were built for the perk system specifically. The team had gotten really great at expanding kits, so there was plenty of good experience for us to bring good learnings into building perks. Junkenstein's Lab gave us more signal for Stadium and how much we could expand the bounds of an Overwatch match while still making it feel like Overwatch.
2. We played with a number of different iterations. Originally we had three levels but there was no choice, didn't feel very different. Some iterations later we gave players their Minor Perks passively but you had a choice between two Major Perks later on in the game. We really liked the choice that gave, so decided to bring it in earlier at the Minor Perk level. Overall, we felt this was the right amount of change to introduce initially. We were changing some of fundamentals of how Overwatch worked and were trying to measure how much we could disrupt that. Maybe we could've gone even farther, but I think we are in a good place for now and with time we'll see how far the playerbase wants us to take systems like this.

Well the goal overall is to make fun perks for every hero! That can be more difficult on certain heroes though, as boosting certain elements of their kits can cause issues. Currently, the number buff perks are some of the perks we like the least and plan on changing a handful of those over time. This initial launch has given us plenty of signal on which perk combinations players find compelling and which ones they don't!

Think it's important for us to stay true to our values for Minor and Major perks. Your Minor Perks are supposed to be lighter, nice little upgrades. Your Major Perks are supposed to be transformative. We have some work to hit that goal for all of the heroes and offering more transformative Major Perks.

We did want to add more friction to counterswapping and we've seen that drop quite a bit since Season 15's launch. It'll be some time before players settle on how much less they want to counterswap but in Ranked Role Queue we've seen players swap about 25% less and more so at the highest ranks (Masters+ players swap much more than the ranks below that).

For power spikes, the goal of the perk system isn't to limit power spikes. We actually introduced more power spikes and hopefully more texture to your individual hero's moment to moment gameplay through the perks system. We think a number of our heroes needed bigger moments than they had previously.

Going forward, we are looking at raising up some of the less impactful perks and making sure you feel there's a real choice between your Minors and Majors. We have a lot of opportunity to make that choice more interesting by cutting out some of perks players aren't gravitating towards. Things like Roadhog's increased Pig Pen throw distance.

The goal there would be that every hero gets at least one new perk to play with! Still scoping out what that refresh would look like for Season 18, but somewhere around 25-50% of the perks changing (some being completely new and some receiving significant tuning). If we have perks that players really love, we don't want to immediately remove those and the refresh would be looking at perks that are more middling in interest.

We'd also like to evaluate how the perks system functions overall at that point too. That could include changes to the catchup mechanics, gain rates, or even a starting level choice. Those are fairly early discussions though and how this season goes will give us good insight of where to take perks next.

We played with a variety of movement perks for heroes that don't have much mobility. We wanted to see if we could do a movement perk for Torbjorn. I think it only lasted a playtest or two but Torbjorn could launch himself off of his turret by double jumping on it. And the idea was that if you had the Sticky Turret, you could change the angle of that leap and catapult yourself into backlines. Maybe we will come back to that one day, was certainly silly!

We have a fix for this coming next week actually. You'll get two random perks (one Minor and one Major) each time you spawn.

Perks are mainly about creating new things for your heroes to do, increasing situational viability, and giving you more agency over your in-match experience.

For that goal of increasing the amount of situations in which a hero can be viable: That can come through via shoring up weaknesses against certain heroes, that can also come through by adding mobility so certain heroes can be played on more maps. That goal led to perks like Junkrat's Frag Cannon, Sigma's Levitation, and many more.

For perks like Sombra's White Hat, that is fulfilling a particular hero fantasy that many players wanted us to lean into and we think that's an interesting opportunity the perks system creates. Over time, we'll see how players respond to some of those more off the wall ones.