overwatch does not use any analysis of chat (voice or text) for matchmaking.
without going overly into details, overwatch match makes on:
--your matchmaking rating (MMR) - this is mostly affected by win/loss, with variance applied for certain conditions (i.e. brand new player, among other things)
--your region
--your ping
again, that's overly simplified. but that's basically it.
Hey there, you’ll be able to play! It’ll just work. Cheers :)
Geoff, could you maybe explain yourself a bit better? Sorry, but since you're already so forthcoming on these upcoming changes, I was hoping you could elaborate. Because what you're saying here sounds like a straight nerf to Moira, Surely that's not what you're trying to acomplish?
Sorry no this would be part of other changes, like Fade still causing your team to phase out (like the last experimental card).
It was a fun experiment, but it was too good as a dispeling/cleasing tool and far too good at countering zarya/sigma ults. We're going to try a version where she can still phase out her allies, but she doesn't remove debuffs (like ana nade) and it wont break people out of these ults. You can, however, learn to time it vs. sigma ult to try to cancel the damage part of the slam, or just reduce incoming damage while stuck in Zarya ult, which can still be very powerful (maybe too much still? we'll find out)
Would it be possible to make it a real feature that doesn't require a weird button mash combo?
This is a reasonable request. I'll look into it.
People love to throw around power creep because everyone can attribute whatever issues they with the game to some kinda power creep.
However, most discussions center around damage/healing and ttk.
On the lethality/ttk front:
Its hard to know exactly if lethality has crept up in the actual hero data, if the meta and/or player skill has pushed it up further than it was, or if its all just perception, but we've tried a couple internal experiments where we've tried lowering dmg and healing across the board to see how it feels. That experiment didn't quite work as a simple experiment, because there are a number of heroes that have certain thresholds that break if you lower damage etc. We'd have to do something more methodical to test it properly but I can tell you for sure the game doesn't feel very good when lethality gets too low, even if healing also gets low.
On the healing front especially, once health bars are moving up and down a lot more slowly, it makes it really hard to feel like you're "saving" people in clutch situations (unless you use an ult or something of course).
Interestingly, on our list of experiments to try is to make the game signific...
Read moreQuestion for overwatch dev team and or also jeff kaplan. Is it a good and fun work environment to be creating and be a part of the Overwatch team? P.S. I as an Overwatch Player/Fan am thankful for your guys work.
I absolutely love working on Overwatch and the team is amazing. I'm regularly inspired by the amazing people that not only directly work on the game but also support us from other groups. Much love to folks in IT, Battle.net, Risk, Game Security, Customer Service, Localization, etc.
The community regularly inspires me. It's why you'll find me on reddit and our forums regularly outside of the AMA. Thanks for being a player and a fan, we're thankful for you! <3
I want to thank you for the enhanced comms options that allow women (or anyone) being harassed in voice chat to still be able to communicate with the team. Are there other features or enhancements you are exploring to allow for people to feel safer in-game?
I'm a 40 year-old mother that love games. My 20 y/o and I have Alliance/Horde tattoos; Being a woman and playing OW can be uncomfortable sometimes; I have often had to leave voice chat due to harassment, and then missing callouts or not being able to provide them because of this; so my SR suffers. I appreciate anything you can do to make OW safer in that regard.
Making Overwatch a better, more positive place to play for everyone is super important to us. While we've made a lot of progress with player reporting, thank you messages for reporting bad behavior or abusive chat, endorsements, etc., we're always looking to do more.
We definitely know it can be difficult for women of all ages to use voice chat, as the abuse and harassment takes away your enjoyment of the game (and as you noted, your SR!). I hear this from the women on the OW team, across Blizzard, and in our community.
There are some initiatives under development that we hope will directly address these issues, but I can't quite talk about them yet.
In the meantime, everybody please continue to report players who are being abusive through the in game reporting mechanism, whether they're being abusive to you personally, or anyone else. The reports do matter, and as a community we can make Overwatch a more positive place for everybody.
Hey! Aspiring game developer here. I was wondering what some of the core aspects of creating a new hero are for you guys. What steps do you take in creating a new hero? Also, what are some of your core balancing values when it comes to heroes in general, or adding new heroes?
creating new heroes is a lot of fun. our process is interesting in that new heroes can come from story (76, ana), design (pharah) or art (winston). we really inspire each other with ideas and we'll add different heroes for different reasons. we're always talking about "what does the game need right now"
How closely do the engine team and content team collaborate? How does that process work?
Like with Echo’s ability, was that something that the engine team needed to build support at the engine level for first, then the content team can get to work customizing the feature that was built?
All parts of the team collaborate in the creation of the heroes. Heroes are usually available to play in team playtests months before they will come out. So we all get a look into them in an extremely early state.
The game engine is a good bit more flexible in development than it is in retail, so often the designers have what they need to make something work; we just need to make a pass to control the performance and efficiency of the heroes so that they will function well on all our supported hardware. On occasion, like with Echo, we need to do more significant rewrites of systems so that we can get things within a shipping budget.
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Zarya, Zenyatta, McCree
To those who have an answer, what's the funniest bug you've ever ran into when designing/building heroes? Thanks in advance!
One time I accidentally replaced Ana's dart projectile with Ana's ragdoll. That meant any time I shot Ana's rifle a dead Ana shot out of my gun hehe.
Read moreThanks for allowing the community to do this first of all!
(/u/blizz_jeffkaplan) (/u/blizz_smercer) (/u/blizz_geoffgoodman) The biggest thing on my mind is that of Ultimate Abilities and your take on their current power level, particularly when they are thrown in conjunction with each other. A solo Ultimate feels pretty fair for the most part, but more often than not those "desperate pushes" that involve 2 - 4 going off simultaneously just feel TERRIBLE on the receiving end.
I acknowledge that there's strategy in saving Ultimate abilities, so blasting everything the team has isn't always the best choice. But I still can't help but feel like when these moments DO occur, which is still too frequent for my taste, that they negate the gameplay integrity that is so demonstrable in the regular gunpla...
This comes up fairly often, and in the past we have done a few things to nerf ultimates already. We've nerfed the ultimate costs across the board twice now, to try to make sure they aren't coming up too often. We've tried to adjust ults that feel like they don't have enough counterplay, such as Sombra's EMP getting a longer delay before going off.
Overall this is something we're very aware of and we're trying to make sure ultimates still feel like big moments within the game, but not just purely being an 'I win' button. Abilities like Baptiste's lamp (which btw i find funny the community calls it this, since internally we literally used a lamp model while testing it) were created to help open up more options to counter ults without requiring your own ultimate. Ideally it should feel great to land a big ultimate, but also feel great if you can work around or straight up counter an enemy ultimate, which is also why we made a change a while ago which made it so if you ever kil...
Read moreHow has remote support for your team gone? Are you still using internal support to handle the case load?
Remote support is challenging. Our team regularly works together to support each other, we have chat channels for help, and people utilize that regularly for support. While engineers are often helping the team out with connectivity issues, it really has been a team wide effort to band together and solve problems.
/u/blizz_jeffkaplan youre an inspiration, thank you for your work on Overwatch <3
thank you so much for saying that. warms my heart. but i always remind people: overwatch is made by a whole team of amazing developers... i am just one tiny and equal part of that. but thank you.
Hey! Aspiring game developer here. I was wondering what some of the core aspects of creating a new hero are for you guys. What steps do you take in creating a new hero? Also, what are some of your core balancing values when it comes to heroes in general, or adding new heroes?
I think one of our core processes that helps us be successful is finding ways to fail early and fail fast. For us this usually means prototyping abilities with really rough blockout art until we have a kit we generally like. Keeping things in this rough state means it is a lot easier for us to change direction or iterate.
Will there ever be an implementation to let players choose—or at least prefer—which servers they want to play on? I'm on Middle Eastern servers for example and, though the low ping is nice to have, I'm met with even longer queue times instead, and I'd personally rather play on ~150ms ping with shorter queue times than ~30ms ping with longer queue times.
Hey there! Recently we added the ability to specify the server location when creating a custom game. Currently we don't have any plans to expand this to Quick Play or Competitive, but we do see people ask for this occasionally. We have some concerns with how this would be implemented, in particular trying to avoid win trading or match fixing by abusing low population regions.
If you're on PC you can select Americas, Europe, or Asia for your region when you launch Overwatch. That will limit you to servers that are part of that region. Middle East is currently part of the Europe region, you could try to use Americas or Asia to change things up.
Cheers
is there an official way to offer suggestions for new features to be added to the game? sometimes REALLY good suggestions get buried before they can ever reach your team!
we read this subreddit all the time. if it's a great idea, it will get visibility
I don't know if this has been discussed before, but what has the OW team thought about having a hard reset for their competitive mode? I don't know if the open competitive mode had a reset of some kind but my Sr increased by a massive amount compared to the average or even the highest sr in role queue. And this honestly felt like where I actually belong cos I've been hardstuck in a particular sr and I feel I consistently do well but I do get unlucky with teammates or some other factors.
Is there any way that the game dev's could give an option to people who have been playing for a long time to reset their mmr(hidden probably?) or their Sr in some way (hard or soft)?
I honestly like the game a lot, and the only thing that bugs me down is that I have a fair number of great games and then I have an equally good number of bad games and somehow I'm stuck in the same elo.
We've certainly seen a lot of requests to reset MMR and SR for competitive play, but there are a lot of negatives associated with actually doing it. For instance, a hot topic amongst the community is Smurfing and how they can disrupt games by being much higher skill than everyone else in the game. Well, resetting everyone's MMR would basically have the effect of turning every Masters and Grandmasters player into a smurf with an incorrect SR. Match quality would be really bad for months, or possibly even longer.
Everyone has streaks of wins and losses, and most active players do hover around the same SR. Honestly, the trick to improving your SR is not actually worrying about your SR, but just playing games with a mind towards improving your play. If you have a favorite hero, pick an aspect of their kit to concentrate on improving. Play some games where you concentrate on more macro-oriented skills like making sure to attack together with your team. Think about the hard ques...
Read moreAny suggestions for ways to stand out from the crowd when trying to apply for software/technical internships or jobs at Blizzard, in particular relating to Overwatch?
Some thoughts from me:
A passion for games (and Overwatch, in our example) is obviously a huge plus.
Experience is great, whether you gain that through your job or through hobby work outside of your job. That can apply to engineering as well as to experience working in a team. If someone has demos of their work, that goes a long way towards standing out.
For us, familiarity with C, C++, C# is big as is familiarity with some of our content creation packages (like Maya, Photoshop, etc).
And we're always looking for individuals that bring a different viewpoint to our team. We find the best ideas/solutions tend to come from a diverse team working together to solve a challenge or implement a feature.
/u/blizz_jlafleur /u/billwarnecke The GDC 2017 Gameplay Architecture and Netcode talk is one of my favourites, a great insight into ECS and CSP! Do you have any more technical conferences or articles planned in the future?
Hey there, that is also one of my favorite talks! There are a few GDC presentations just a bit after we launched Overwatch, if you haven't seen them all you should check them out! Right now we don't have anything planned for conferences, I think we'll need to see the impacts of covid19 further. Cheers
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