Overwatch Dev Tracker

Would you mind to send me your battle tag?

May I get a replay code for this match?

That's part of what Morgan is saying in this video - we're allowing wider duos to be considered Narrow. If you're not a duo though, the amount of rank you gain or lose is based on actual width though (not just being flagged as Narrow or Wide), so if you're just barely outside the Narrow bracket then the amount your rank changes with wins or losses will be very close to normal. You could still climb (or fall...) now.

This is on our radar, we agree it's a problem.

Are you able to get a replay code for this match? If so, could you send it to me?

1. I think we are more happy in the 20% DPS Passive world than the 15% (it cuts through a lot better, helps mitigate the healing more effectively) so Mercy is more worth a look when that world is permanent. There are some questions of how far we can push her movement and know that is one of the most requested changes.
2. Mercy is still a top-picked 3/4 Support and even higher on console until you hit GM/Top 500. Her performance follows a similar trend, where she's in the top grouping for most ranks and remains above average at the highest ranks. Doesn't mean that she wont receive changes but that is where she is at currently.

At its core, Overwatch is a game designed around being able to swap heroes to gain a tactical advantage or help solve a challenge you might be encountering. This contributes to keeping the moment-to-moment gameplay experience dynamic, drives hero diversity and offers a wider range of both strategic gameplay and skill expression in learning when/where/how to play multiple heroes.

There is a question of how much of an advantage is too much compared to the cost of switching. Ideally we want counters to be clear and understandable, but soft enough that it's still possible to outplay a disadvantaged matchup. It is a team game though and 1v1 matchups are not the highest priority when assessing the heroes.

Tanks do feel this the most with only one of them per team in 5v5 role queue, but all roles do experience the pressure to counter and be countered to an extent.

We're striving to find a balance between swapping heroes every death, (which certainly feels too of...

Answered the Roadhog question in a different place, but yes changes coming soon.

For Lifeweaver, one of the discussions we are having right now (actually this week) and have been having for a while is around the friction that comes with switching between his healing and damage. Giving him more flexibility here would be a great boon to his capability within team fights. Additionally, we've experimented a lot with his Petal Platform. Personally would love for that to be a more attractive area to stand on as a teammate (whether that be through a buff the platform gives you or something else) but there's a lot of learned behavior to work through as allies hop off the platform quite often.

These fall outside of hero design but can talk briefly about the first two questions

1. Think you are referencing the speed boosts that would potentially come to Flashpoint. Took us some time to get these in a good place but they have been promising in playtests and are on track for a later season. It's important to us that when we add elements like that to a mode that it not only brings quality gameplay but is also communicated well through Sound and VFX. Feel good here now.
2. We got a lot of great feedback but there are some things the team wished we did better with the Clash Preview. Firstly, it should have showed up more in Quick Play so y'all got more reps on it and can get a better feel for the flow of the game mode. Secondly, we don't think it was best suited for Open Queue in Arcade. If we do something like this again, we'll clean that up. With the feedback we received, we've been investigating how to make the final point more appealing to capture for the ...

Some of this is related to meta happenings or balance changes but also related to armor changes/headshot reduction for Tanks. From what we can see the biggest winners (in terms of their performance delta) of the patch are: Ana, Junkrat, Pharah, Roadhog, Sigma, Wrecking Ball, and Zarya.

Many heroes stayed relatively similar while a handful saw a decrease in performance (Bastion, D.Va, Mauga, Orisa, and Reaper).

Yes, we plan on nerfing his survivability very soon. We are touching Take a Breather and Whole Hog in an upcoming patch. Hoping that can go live tomorrow.

For the most part, we are relatively happy with the new bases both have been given but there is still some fine-tuning to be done.

I'll start with Wrecking Ball. Our goals were to give him more flexibility with his movement/engage options, heighten the benefits he gives to his team, and give him some quality of life updates. I think our changes all attempt to address those goals but one I think we can hit harder in the future is heightening the benefits he gives to his team. We were a little conservative with the Adaptive Shields change (overhealth is hyper scary in coordinated environments), so perhaps there's room for that to be more pronounced through tuning and actual feedback received in game (working on some updates there). Overall though, Wrecking Ball is doing much better after his recent updates and we believe we have a great base to work with going forward.

For Roadhog, aside from the conversations about his current survivability (we plan to hit that soon)...

Hanzo is still an effective mid-range burst damage hero even without the one-shot kills. Post season 9 with the projectile size changes actually saw an increase in Hanzo's performance on the stat side. I do hear you on the loss of how good the one shot kills felt, but an overarching goal of season 9 was to reduce a lot of those burst damage frustrations for players on the receiving end of it. Armor changes in season 10 have also been a benefit to his damage.

Still very early but we've been experimenting with adjusting health pools for some of the more evasive or high damage heroes which would also put them back into the range of lethal Hanzo headshots and some other hero combos at 225 HP, but while it would bring some interesting texture to hero interactions overall there are also a bunch of other problems to solve if we want to go through with it.

There aren't any plans currently to shift resources toward supporting something like that. Sites like Overbuff don't have the complete picture, but the data there for win rates and such is generally fairly close.

There is some argument against being too transparent with those stats in that it can create a bit of a feedback loop where you might see player behavior driven by what appears to be the meta in the stats, but that kind of happens already with just the general discussion and sentiment around heroes without stats as well.

Our target range for hero viability by win rate is between 45-55% unmirrored win rate at Masters rank and above. Those individual win rates often can fluctuate 2-3% by day, mostly because heroes tend to have a wider range of win rates per map and we're looking at the global average of those, but also individual player performance isn't consistent.

Lower pick rate heroes fluctuate more and there is less confidence in their win rate be...

I tapped in our own Gavin Winter for this first part, he's what he had to say: "There haven't been any changes to these systems, but there are edge cases like the example of Guxue that was recently posted in this subreddit where our systems don't perform in the way we'd like. Most players will still be placed appropriately as they transition from Quick Play to Competitive Play, but unfortunately cases like this have always been possible. Explaining exactly how this happens would make it easier reproduce, so you'll have to excuse me from not going into intricate detail here."

For the second part of your question, we believe we made it slightly too difficult to climb at the highest ranks and are looking at making some adjustments soon.

1. We should do a better job about this, especially when it comes to getting the community's visibility on what we are seeing vs. what the playerbase may seem to think is the best hero at any given one time. These can differ regularly as certain heroes get power reputations (weaker or stronger than their reality at a given rank) that are hard to shake off. Thanks for the feedback there, will make sure we have something here even if it's a simple change.

2. Symmetra kept some of the buffs in that patch but yes we hear the feedback of where her current power level is. We may have been a bit overreactive to the Mauga compositions popping up during that timeframe (he was certainly overtuned), but we wanted to be sure of it. For right now, we are in discussions about Symmetra and especially her frontline presence. Believe that's a piece of the kit we'd like to promote further, whether through her survivability or beam damage.

The two upcoming updates that were mentioned were for Cassidy and Reaper.

For Cassidy, we started some exploration pre-Season 9 for his update. Due to where he was at that time, this update was originally looking at multiple pieces of his kit but we saw the Season 9 changes largely benefit him so the update has gotten more focused on Magnetic Grenade and other Quality of Life updates (specifically to his Ultimate). In Season 11 we are updating Magnetic Grenade. It will behave closer to old Flashbang (no magnetic homing to the target, used in the short range) and will slow/hinder the target. We think that plays a lot better with his kit and removes some of the larger frustrations around Magnetic Grenade. More specifics on all that soon.

For Reaper, we went fairly wide as well in the beginning and then started to focus closely on updating Shadow Step. At the moment, we have something we quite like but it's actually a large technical challenge and we are in the process...

Probably Sombra due to permanent invisibility restricting how deadly we can make her but also because she is a hero that excels with strong team coordination.

There are a handful of other heroes with performance stats that differ greatly from the broader community perception of them and that can create difficulty in how we approach balancing them as well.

No secret testing of anything upcoming in the immediate! We do look at how some changes play out though when they become more real and get lots of games, I think the Bastion Ultimate in particular was quite fun even if very loud and on the border technically. Reinhardt's Frenzy passive was also something we played around with internally but it was quite hard to communicate effectively. It's always good to see what players get excited about when there are more wacky ideas such as Mirrorwatch or April Fool's, some of those could become real down the line.

May I get your battletag?