Overwatch Dev Tracker

Hey all, in the mid-season patch we're adding a new setting that will control whether contextual pings for Group Up and Need Healing would be used when aiming at an allied hero. The default will be "Off".

Contextual pings were a feature OW1, but as someone with thousands of hours in OW1 I didn't know this until players in the OW2 beta started pointing out that they weren't getting their intended "I'm with you" prompts anymore when aiming their Group Up comms at allies. When I reimplemented this feature for OW2 just before launch I made some mistakes, like letting this ping type pass through walls and letting it go an effectively infinite distance. This meant that before Season 4 we had that happening way too often.

Those bugs are all fixed now, but I realized a few months ago (because of reddit posts like these) that the number of players that wanted this feature is likely much smaller than the number of players that do not want this feature, hence why we've take...

Mercy stayed about the same as before, the changes were mostly neutral in terms of power. Her win rate is still around 51-52%. There was a small drop in pick rate from 9 to 8%. Her ‘damage taken’ stats increased by like 4 or 5% but her average deaths stayed the same – likely we can attribute this to the new passive at work and taking more damage due to the longer GA cooldown.

We don’t have further changes planned for Mercy at the moment. We feel it would be good to let this one settle and see how players adjust to the changes since it can take some time, and then evaluate if more adjustments are necessary. The meta is also quite different between the two patches so it’s even more surprising that Mercy wasn’t really impacted overall.

Despite the stats not changing much there have been both positive and negative effects on the player experience. There has been positive sentiment around players feeling like they can more fairly try to counter Mercy in ways that were...

When looking at adding to a hero or reworking them, we first ask: can we achieve our desired gameplay changes in their current kit and abilities? The GA meter for Mercy in OW2 is a good example of adding something new within her present abilities. If we can’t solve for desired gameplay within what we have, we’ll next ask if there is room on the hero for something brand new. We are currently asking those questions for Sombra and Roadhog. If we end up doing new abilities for either of them, it’ll take some time and I’d expect small holdover changes like the ones in our Season 3 patch.

Varying health amounts is a great tool to utilize when designing or balancing a hero. Characters like Reaper and Mei, who thrive in close-range combat, can utilize their larger amounts of Health to help mitigate the risk of approaching close-range fights. Varying health amounts can also help provide flavor to a character. Tracer has a low amount of health because she's quick and nimble, yet Torbjörn has more Health because he's heavily armored. The last balance patch lowered Widowmaker's health to 175, which shows we're considering health amounts when it comes to balancing the heroes overall.

I was looking at Widowmaker stats just last week, mainly for map balance discussions, but it was interesting to see that with the current map pool there were 4-5 maps where Widowmaker was really effective, 4-5 maps where she is quite bad or rarely picked (presumably because she’s not good there) and the rest were that she was playable, but not particularly great.

For anyone wondering her worst maps were 2 of the Push maps and 3 Control maps. Her best maps were 3 Payload and 2 Hybrid maps.

Snipers feel quite counterable to me at the moment but it’s certainly something we keep a close eye on to make sure they don’t get out of hand. I think the instances where snipers feel oppressive to play against are really memorable as it’s typical of human nature to remember the bad more than the good. At least for me, it’s rare that I remember when the enemy Widowmaker was ineffective and swapped off versus when she was dominating.

Great question! We’re certainly aware of the heroes that the community is generally more receptive to being meta though we don’t specifically plan around trying to make them the most powerful.

They are usually already popular heroes that will be played regardless of their underlying strength at any time. Many of these heroes have an advantage of having been available since the original game launch and are more accepted because of it.

As a fun exercise, imagine some of the launch heroes being released today and what the community reception to them would be just seeing the design/abilities on paper.

Our primary goal with hero balance is to try and get every hero to be viable at the top end of the competitive ladder (Masters-Top500, within a range of statistical viability since it’s a measurable goal). We also try to keep a handle on any significant outliers at lower skill tiers as well as large community pain points.

I love seeing the community engagement since it means players are passionate about the game. There are many great ideas that generate discussion for us or at least help inform us of the current community sentiments. The downside is that it can be disappointing for them when they don’t see their suggestions directly take effect in game and wonder why we aren’t using their perfectly calculated solutions.

Many players don’t consider the game balance ecosystem as a whole and focus almost entirely on their own experience with a particular hero and how to make that one hero stronger or feel better to play, which doesn’t always align with our goals as designers or what the stats imply about the current balance. There are always tons of other limiting factors like tech/schedule/implementation considerations players aren’t aware of so you really can’t fault anyone there.

For the second part of the question, we do think about upcoming heroes or changes and how they relate...

I love these types of questions! So it depends on the types of changes we want to make. Let’s use two changes as an example here: Orisa’s recent Fortify nerf (125 to 75) and something like Brig’s upcoming ultimate rework (I’m going to try to answer this without revealing too much about the change).

Say we wanted to just do a seemingly simple change like the Orisa Fortify nerf. It’d start with the balance team making a decision then informing other groups (for this usually our Producer/QA/Live Ops) that a change is coming and will require a hotfix. Then a designer would go into Orisa’s scripts, make the change, and submit. At that point QA and Live Ops are notified, QA tests the change to make sure it’s all good and Live Ops will then get the build process going. We usually see that hotfix occur the next day, so overall a small change like this takes about two days (critical changes can happen faster but hotfixes have a chance to introduce a small amount of instability).

Junkrat has moved quite a bit since his latest nerf two weeks ago (down 3-4% at both the highest ranks and the metal ranks). We understand that there are further pain points in his kit though. One change we’d like to make but it will take some additional tech is: Junkrat’s grenades have a smaller hitbox after bouncing off a wall. We believe that type of change would alleviate a lot of the pain points when facing Junkrat and still keep his gameplay rewarding. No timeline though as it involves multiple teams.

We agree that we can do more to disincentivize leaving games, especially at the end of competitive seasons. We’re considering making ranked penalties partially carry over from season to season and we’d like to make sure that leaving games is never optimal for progressing challenges regardless of whether you’re in ranked or unranked.

We have been revisiting some of our hero design philosophies and seeing how they line up with OW2. One of the core pillars we have when developing a new hero is Counterplay in Mind. Heroes should have clear strengths and weaknesses as well as space for situational upside. Some of our recent heroes may have been doing too many things well on launch without those weaknesses to offset their strengths.

As we look into the future, it’s quite easy to look at the positive feedback surrounding added complexity in the hero kits and continue down that path. For us though, creating Overwatch heroes will always be about variety and making sure there are different playstyles with varying amounts of complexity. We tend to look at this over the course of the year, balancing those three hero releases so that there’s a healthy mix of playstyles.

It’s certainly a complex issue, but we do suspect that some aspects of OW2 can lead to the game feeling more one-sided than OW1 did in some cases.

We’ve been looking at all sorts of issues that affect how one-sided our games feel. We know that leavers cause matchmaking to feel bad in Quickplay because our priority is to get a player into the match as quickly as possible, and this doesn’t always mean the player that is backfilled is as good a fit for that match as the one that left. We think we can improve our process here in the future.

Addressing more punishing gameplay specifically, we know that getting back-spawned or spawn killed if your spawn room just shut down (due to an objective capture) are bigger swings since we have fewer heroes in a match. We’re working on a solution for these issues for Season 4.

We know that there isn’t a silver bullet for solving the issue of one-sided matches, but we’re attacking the problem from several angles simu...

Every character in the game is going to get varying amounts of value at varying time investments. Some characters, like Wrecking Ball, require a lot more investment in to start getting large amounts of value from. A player gets less value at the start because they're being constantly exposed to new situations and aren't going to confidently deal with them. As the player experiences more and learns from their mistakes, they start getting more and more value. Other characters get a lot of value at the start, but time investment doesn't necessarily reward as much value increase as others. Not every character's value increases over time is linear. Mercy gets a lot of value from new players because of the ease of using her Caduceus Staff, but the value for time investment will fall off fast unless players dedicate themselves to mastering her movement and positioning.

We think it's important to have characters that have varying value curves for difficulty to serve different play...

Coin Line is being replaced with "Win 5 games in Mystery Heroes, Free-for-All Deathmatch, or any Arcade mode" in the mid-season patch along with other Weekly Challenges changes!

This should be fixed... right now! See our patch notes at https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/patch-notes/ for details.

Due to the SR Decay system we launched with in OW2 our SR distribution curve was noticeably shifted left (meaning that there were more lower ranked players than higher ranked players). Most players did not play enough games for their SR and their MMR to converge.

In Season 3 we made several changes that shifted the curve back to the right (meaning that we moved back toward our intended distribution of ranks) to begin correcting for SR Decay’s removal at the start of Season 4. Fortunately, our MMR distribution curve (MMR being the value we use to make matches) has remained the same, meaning that our ability to predict outcomes and make the best matches we can remain unchanged.

The Experimental Card was much more useful in the past when the patches were further apart (months vs weeks). The turn around time to have it patched and reacted to between releases means it isn’t really feasible as a testing for upcoming live patches sort of thing, though hopefully we’ll try to find some fun uses for it again in the future outside of just patch previews.

The most polarizing changes are usually during the hero prototype or rework phase rather than anything for live balance. There have been a lot. The ones that immediately come to mind are Sombra Hack reducing max health for a minute, Wrecking Ball knocking down enemies he rolls over, and D.va having an ability to tether and drag enemies with her mech (launching them tethered to her ult was hilarious and mean).

Neither A or B. Our wider matches aren’t because of any type of scarcity, they’re because the criteria we use to reject candidates are currently a bit too simple. We’re adding additional tuning knobs to correct this issue soon.

This is something we are actively working on and have tinkered with iterations internally! The overall goal here is to bring back some lost synergy in Cassidy’s kit (ex/Fan the Hammer losing some of its ease of use). Magnetic Grenade is rather flat in what it does and while some abilities can be in this space Cassidy’s kit already has a lot of simplicity, making Magnetic Grenade a prime candidate for adjustments. We won’t be in full stun mode like Flash Bang, but are looking at ways to push Magnetic Grenade into an ability that either enables Cassidy to line up more shots or provide newfound utility.

Gonna have to wait a little longer, but I’ll echo something Aaron said earlier that the next hero will have really exciting ways of interacting with your team 👀. Can’t wait to share more soon!