Overwatch Dev Tracker

This is an interesting one since I often play Pharah even without Mercy, so I’m probably biased there. Pharah is a hero that is tough to find buffs for (and she performs better on the stats side than most so it always becomes a question of if she even needs changes). She is quite situational as a pick but very capable of taking over the game in the right circumstances and is sort of a harder skill check for the enemy team than most heroes in terms of trying to counter her. I wouldn’t put that all on the Mercy combo, but it is very powerful.

We’ve considered potentially reworking Pharah to make her more interactive, but it would be a dicey one since to make big changes there, it would likely mean she has to lose the air time she is capable of. Her design started as the ‘rocket launcher’ hero but her identity quickly shifted to the ‘always flying’ hero. Losing that would likely alienate a large portion of her fans.

In Season 4 we’re removing SR decay, meaning that in most cases your SR and your MMR will be the same so this should directly help with this issue. We’re also working on a way to display the percentage of players in your division that you are ranked higher than, so that you have a more accurate picture of your progress toward ranking up.

I’ll answer the first question here, we'll cover the Mercy questions in another reply :).

The Moira conversation can be tricky as she offers a sought-out playstyle for many Support players, but she still lacks the utility we want in the Support role. With the Necrotic Orb changes in the beta, it broke Moira’s flow and pushed her in a passive direction. So there’s some things we want to keep intact with any future changes: Moira still having this identity of being able to dish out damage (though maybe tuned down just a tad) and remain a comfort pick for many players as well as preserving her current flow. It’s a tough challenge so we will see where we end up, we’ll share more here as things develop.

We agree that confusion caused by these titles is problematic and we’re working on a solution for Season 4!

There are two issues at play here. The first is that we have reduced SR decay this Season and increased the rate that SR decay is removed when you win games in preparation for removing this system entirely for Season 4. This means that players are reaching their true ranks more quickly than they ever have in OW2. OW2 really does have a different metagame and emphasizes a different skillset than OW1 did, so it is inevitable that some players will find themselves higher ranked in OW2 than they did in OW1.

The second is that our first two seasons had a small amount of unintentional SR deflation, so we've mostly corrected that issue in Season 3. At the highest ranks (like GM where you and your friends are) we've learned we had an inaccuracy in our formula that resulted in an overcorrection.

One of the things we are currently working on is bringing the community into the fold more on the data we are seeing. We want to inform our players as best we can in order to have better discussions around balance changes and the reasons behind them.

That said, we don’t want to be in a place where we publish all current live data as that can have very unwanted meta effects. If players feel stuck playing meta heroes at times, having official live data could only further cement those sorts of feelings, even if players can have success on a wide range of heroes. Data only tells part of the story when considering the experience of playing with or against a hero.

So what y’all will continue to see are some data shared in livestreams, retrospectives that tell the story of hero performance over a season, and quick updates on the top performers in a particular meta. Hopefully these initiatives start to spark more fruitful conversations surrounding hero balance. We’ll als...

Hero passives are super interesting because they often can define heroes and actively change the way the kit is played. Since many passives have fewer restrictions than active abilities (due to the lack of cooldowns), certain passives become the defining feature of the kit. Lucio's Wall Ride is a great example of a passive that completely changes how a character would play. If he lacked wall riding, his style of supporting via harassment and displacement would be significantly hindered, and he would likely focus a lot more on getting value from Crossfade. It's also just super fun to have unrestricted strong movement. Other characters's passives might be less defining compared to Lucio's, but they still can push the player towards playing in specific ways. Sombra's Opportunist pushes players towards eliminating critically injured enemies, but it doesn't define her gameplay loop like Lucio's Wall Ride does.

When it comes to changing hero passives, I think everyone's open to...

Hey all, I want to apologize for the confusion around this feature and the fact that it's currently overzealous. The intent behind this system was to reduce the instances of voice lines being used to annoy other players and to ensure that players still get to enjoy their own voice lines. We all know how it doesn't feel great to try to pause in the middle of a match to squelch or block another player, so this was intended to help reduce that pressure.

Speaking to the system being overzealous, it's currently counting cases where you only hear your own voice lines as spam. That's a mistake on my part that I've corrected for Season 3. This means that if you never stop spamming voice lines in game now, you won't be heard again after a short time.

There is one inaccuracy about the system in this post though. There is no concept of a permanent mute in this system; but you can effectively cause this if you never stop spamming because of the aforementioned mistake. It'...

This should be one of the ones that's allowed now. I'll double check.

Thanks for the feedback! I'd guess most players are not aware of this feature so that's really perceptive! We agree it was too aggressive in season 1, so we made it harder to shortcut into the ping wheel for season 2 through this method.

If it's still happening to you in season 2 in scenarios where you find it undesirable please let us know!

Great ideas! We will keep developing this system and we'll be looking to make improvements like what you're suggesting here.

Hey all, I'll start by saying the issues you're seeing here are my fault and they are mostly not intentional. When I was building the Ping System I built it on top of the Comms system from OW1, and some of these issues are because of things I missed in that upgrade.

The most obviously unfortunate one is "Group Up" saying "I'm on my way". This was a feature in OW1 (it said "I'm with you" IIRC), but it only happened within 40 meters when you were aiming at an ally. I accidentally bypassed a check, and that distance defaulted to 500 meters instead of 40. This functionality is disabled entirely for the mid-season patch, but I'd like to bring back in a minor way in the future.

The other bug that this thread focuses on is harder to diagnose, but we have a bug in Season 2 right now where if you open the ping wheel and then cancel it (with right mouse or with B on xbox, circle on playstation), *then* use the comms wheel you fire a ping like "Going In". This is fixed in Seas...

This person can no longer play Overwatch. This type of behavior isn’t welcome in our game.

Overwat2

Hey there, sorry for this bug, I know it's a frustrating one. We have a more robust change in the upcoming Season 2 release. Apologies we couldn't get this fully fixed in the update today.

Whoops will fix.

Yes, we felt like being very explicit about how this works was important to avoid any confusion.

This is correct. It’s a performance constraint.

RAMATTRA HYPE

Thanks for the reasonable take, it's appreciated. Having these changes delayed is frustrating, for sure. We'll continue to work to do better in the future.

Gameplay data, including hero abilities, is compiled into game assets that exist on both the client and the server. When we change abilities, even simple numerical values, we need to have both the client and server updated to match. This may seem overly complicated, but I'd highly recommend watching a GDC session we did in 2017 that dives into this system in depth before making that assumption!

When we need to update both the client and server, the simplest way is to release a new version. We release new versions every few weeks, but given Cross Play and Cross Progression, these releases require scheduling. We can urgently add a rele...