Overwatch Dev Tracker

Game design goes through a lot of iteration to find the most engaging combination of mechanics within the scope of our goals. We naturally try a lot of prototype variations even with a strong starting idea.

We tried a few alternate mobility abilities for Overrun. One of the first ideas was a short range dash that would toss enemies into the air behind him if you impacted them. It was fun to use but the transition from third person to first person and trying to turn around to shoot them wasn't easy, and solutions like automatically doing a 180 with the camera took away control from players.

The weapons had a couple alternates such as a flamethrower or incendiary grenade launchers. There were a few attempts at having two very different firing weapons in each hand, so one being hitscan like it is now and the other being a travel time projectile. It didn't play as well when trying to fire both at the same time unfortunately, especially in versions where they have differ...

As we inevitably add more heroes to the game, with their own set of abilities and visual kits, we'll continue to look at past vfx and new vfx to make sure they all play nicely together.

We always strive for clarity but the Orisa post was a great example of how it can be difficult to read some of those stacking effects. Team is currently talking about solutions for that and hears the feedback on the readability for some of Mauga's abilities.

We'll have to see how this develops over time as there's always a learning curve for new heroes. Shooting both guns is not always more effective due to the large spread and more random nature of it. Learning when to use each firing mode to your advantage is part of the fun. Generally if enemies are further than 15 meters or so you'll want to use the alternating primary/secondary fire.

We wanted to lift up some other tanks that we knew would have a particularly hard time with Mauga, but the changes themselves weren't necessarily tied to their direct matchup with Mauga. The change to Doomfist's Ultimate for example was something we believed would help players engage with it more regularly, the change to Winston's primary fire helps him in a number of matchups.

For Roadhog, we saw internally that he had quite a hard time with Mauga so even though he had been performing quite well across our rank thresholds, we decided to hold off on any changes. How Roadhog slots into the meta will be made more clear with upcoming Mauga changes and Mauga's inclusion into Competitive.

Mauga is intended to be an aggressive, high damage output tank as he offers less in defense to his team compared with other tank options and doesn't have great mobility. We're lowering Mauga's weapon damage in general which will help with some of this where it can feel extreme at times.

He has good and bad matchups within the tank role, which is great for creating some depth, so it's not necessarily a role-wide problem. Sigma/Dva match up well and have an advantage against him, Roadhog/Junkerqueen/Ramattra are fairly even matchups, Zarya/Rein can do decently but require more support from their team, and Mauga is strongest against the dive tanks and Orisa.

We playtested a first round of Wrecking Ball changes last week and think it's off to a good start. Overall, we are looking at making it a bit easier to play alongside Wrecking Ball with various support heroes, increase Ball's options in combat, and implement some quality of life changes.

In terms of timeline, it depends on how far we go with some of the changes and what's required there. It could end up as a bigger balance patch, it could end up with giving Wrecking Ball a new ability. Right now though, I think it'll lean closer to the first and not need the same sort of support that Roadhog and Sombra needed. Hopefully get something out there in the next few seasons.

Ha I love it. Team actually uses the short thanksgiving week to work on whatever ideas they want (some are wacky, some are more serious), this is perfect for that.

yes

Hook and Vape are both staying :)

June patch notes had a typo, it was 65 previously

nice

Balancing a new scoring system like this internally is tough, and we definitely erred on the side of making it easier to attain than harder to attain because we wanted players to get to see it and play with it.

We agree with this feedback though, and today's patch makes it more difficult to attain and to maintain, so let us know how it feels with these changes!

To your other point, the system is designed to be compelling to players at all MMRs (including our highest). This is difficult too, because lower MMR players don't usually have the same stats as higher MMR players. I think with our first pass we landed pretty squarely on "too easy and too common for everyone".

Yeah, I was oversimplifying that explanation.

As a Competitive player it wouldn't feel very rare at all. When we test internally we mostly test in custom games and very frequently in a one-off fashion for discussion and team balance afterwards. Obviously as a dev team we don't have enough players to queue for Competitive internally with good matchmaking, so normally we test that mode in custom games for things like On Fire. I take the blame here for not pushing for more playtests with the Competitive ruleset for On Fire.

We fixed this bug the day after Season 5 launched internally because it immediately started appearing online and the cause was pretty obvious, but this one slipped past us.

We agree it is too easy to gain On Fire with this reworked version of the scoring system. We've made several tweaks and fixes (including a fix for the bug in the OP) in the mid-season patch that should address this concern and others we've seen online. If it still feels too trivial (or if it now feels too difficult) to gain On Fire after the patch please let us know!

Thanks for the report! Here's what went wrong:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/14wex9n/comment/jrj6w33/

This is essentially correct, and it's a bug. If you gain Fire score in the last frame of the previous round (because you're playing Control in Quick Play or because you're in most Competitive game modes) and that made you On Fire or you were already On Fire, then Fire persists to the next round.

Gaining Fire score in the final frame of a round isn't too difficult if you're playing a hero like Mei or Moira and you're dealing continuous damage to enemies as the round ends, or you're on the objective and gaining score for being there.

Unfortunately this one was just rare enough that we didn't catch it internally, but it will be fixed in the mid-season patch *very* soon!

We've got several other fixes and tweaks to Fire coming with that patch that are intended to address many of the complaints mentioned in this thread. Thanks for all the reports and feedback that continue to help us make this rebuilt version of On Fire better!

Tracer has more ping lines now, and we've modified the delay for spamming pings on enemies. I know we left it like this for too long, but it was changed in Season 5.
Let us know if it's still too annoying on live!

You can send me a message.

Thanks for the description. We removed this shortcut feature for mouse and keyboard last season, but I see now that it was not removed when using a controller. My apologies for that oversight.

I can't make any promises with regards to the timing of removing this feature for controller, but I will work on removing it there too.

We disabled that movement based shortcut in season 3 for mouse and keyboard, so she might have more luck trying it again today.