Overwatch Dev Tracker

YASSSSS!

Yeah I know it’s pretty awesome. Some comments on the bug in our bug tracker were saying we should keep it. :)

I can answer a few of these!

Why no backfilling or pauses in Competitive?

There's no backfilling because we're pretty sure no one would want to do it. If you ever backfill in a game and lose shortly afterwards, you're not happy. If we allowed players to backfill without consequences to their SR, its giving them a license to throw or act negatively. There's simply not a lot of great options there.

As far as pauses, and I think you're asking about pauses due to disconnect/leaves, we have to consider cases where players might abuse the rules in an attempt to harass someone or waste people's time. The best way to try and minimize leaves is to not provide any kind of outside motivation for them to occur. We're never going to be completely leave free, due to internet outages, personal emergencies, random acts of chaos by cat, we just want to make sure and minimize them as much as possible.

Is there a reason for the "minimum draw"...

The Overwatch team was formed from the ashes of Titan, and much smaller in size. While we learned a lot during that development, it certainly was a blow to our confidence, as any set-back can be. But the one thing we knew we had from the beginning was each other and we bonded together extremely well. Getting that confidence back and making it to the success of the Overwatch announce at BlizzCon was a big hurdle to overcome. Our trust in one-another and the incredibly open and supportive atmosphere we have on the team really enabled us to get over that.

That's disgusting.... ;)

I think that the team had made great decision with changing the team composition to be 5v5, but I think most reason why people get upset on that change, is because of the tank synergy we have right now. Has the team thought about forgiving that in any way, by idk changing dps maybe?

One of the core goals of Overwatch hero design is to create these fun synergies and combos throughout the entire roster. It certainly sucks to lose some of these combos, but a lot of game design is making a call to decide if what you are gaining is worth what you are losing. In this case, after significant playtesting, we think its more than worth it for the benefits we gain out of 5v5.

It seems that the tanks with OW2 go more in brawly direction than protect and peel direction, which I am scared makes the game more 'watch out for yourself' than 'watch out for your teammates', and I don't like this direction. Should we expect loads of changes from ...

We don't have any plans to remove it. If anything, we'd like it to be able to leverage some of our improved and new features to make it even better. We don't have a full picture of Workshop for launch, at the moment, though.

Currently, no EMP does not remove over-health. But, hopefully as evidence from some of my other answers, things are very heavily in flux right now, especially in regards to CC and Sombra, so its possible we'll make it work on all over-health.

Brig and Torb gain over-health instead of over-armor now, but it acts like normal health and so doesn't have any innate damage reduction built into it anymore. We'll have to compensate for that as needed, probably by giving more health for them.

Though I will go one step further and ask, "should armor even work the same way it does in OW1?" Its fairly complex and if you ask an average player how exactly armor works most of them will just say something like "oh i dont know, it reduces damage taken somehow". We haven't changed anything with it yet, but its on my list to look at and maybe simplify into something like, "armor health takes -X% damage".

It has further implications if we do that, like bigger hits no longer fe...

She actually started as a Support! I talked about that in a different answer already though.

For OW2, I've done some iteration on her in regards to how she might work in a world where there is less crowd control effects for Damage heroes. Recently we've run two different playtest ideas for her:

1. She couldn't hack players at all anymore, but instead she gained a +50% damage bonus when shooting an enemy in the back.
2. She could hack players again, but a hack on an enemy just meant your allies could see that player through walls instead of silencing them. She could also hack while invisible (she was visible while hacking, but invis wasn't broken). Then, she gained a +30% damage bonus against hacked targets.

These were interesting tests, but each had their own share of big problems.

For #1, it felt weird/bad to just never be able to hack enemies. Shes supposed to be this hacker but her hack was relegated to health packs mostly. This is...

Good questions.

We're definitely looking to combat what I will refer to as "abusive" alt accounts, ie players who repeatedly create new accounts just so they can play against lesser skilled opponents. Part of this is improving the matchmaker's ability to determine your skill even faster, detecting those that repeatedly abuse alt accounts and taking action against them, and looking at ways to limit access to additional accounts. We can't go into all the details here, but it's something that's being actively worked on.

Do remember that many "smurfs" are just friends who want to play together but aren't of the same skill. The matchmaker doesn't just simply average their SR together when considering how to matchmake them, and its also good to remember that the other player might not be a smurf at all. They might just have gotten a lucky streak of head shots. Skill is not a static thing, it ebbs and flows, and we all have our moments we feel like gods of Overwatch and ...

<3

Hey there, I think we're unlikely to put a child playable character into Overwatch given the core gameplay of the game. We really love Efi though, and it's possible we'll continue to see younger lore characters incorporated in the same way she is.

Cheers

Great question. As hardware has advanced since the launch of Overwatch, we are extending the OW2 engine with more high-end features. However, we're also working hard to make sure all of our platforms get the best experience, even in PvE. Switch is a little more challenging than some, and we'll have to make some compromises there. For that reason, some of the higher end visual enhancements might not be visible, there. We'll focus on making sure all of the gameplay-related features get in, first, and then accentuate with additional features as much as possible.

I would say overall, yes there is a shift towards at least slightly more of a raw FPS game. However, Tanks and Support (and even some dps like Doomfist) have always been more about abilities than just aimskill/shooting. This isn't going to change. I feel like this is core to what makes Overwatch what it is, reflecting many different playstyles and empowering many different types of skilled players in different ways. Its always been a balancing act for us, but for a while during OW1's new hero additions it was really starting to feel like we were pushing maybe a little too far away from our FPS roots.

Other than a bunch of stuff we've thrown on the test server and pulled at the last minute (like Zen's discord being able to target through barriers), maybe the most significant was Sombra's hero design. For most of her development, she was a Support hero instead of a Damage hero. In this role, her main goal was to hack every enemy, while sneaking around and trying to stay alive. At that time, Hacking an enemy was a long duration debuff that reduced their healing/damage output, rather than the short duration high-impact debuff it became later.

The idea was that she was balanced so that if she successfully got enough hacks on the enemy team, your team would effectively be able to win a 5-6 (since she wasn't very good in combat for her team), simply because the debuffs were strong enough to allow for that. This is all fine and good on paper, and it was pretty fun to play her this way, but people just hated getting debuffed in this way. In fact, every time we'...

I'm not sure what SR this person is at now but the highest I'm aware of was around ~4300. We really have a wide range of skill levels on the team, while we do many team wide playtests, we also have focused playtests for specific skill ranges when necessary.

Cheers!

We've tried and discarded quite a few abilities during development of our heroes, it's a very natural part of the process. Sometimes the ideas are better fits for other heroes, sometimes they just don't work and we chalk that up as a lesson.

Here's one I worked on for Torbjörn:

Torbjörn had something we referred to as the "Claw Trap" that he deployed similar to Widowmaker's Venom Mine, but instead of dealing damage the trap grabbed a hold of you and prevented the enemy from moving outside a fixed radius of the trap. You could move freely around next to the trap, but couldn't move far away until you destroyed the base of the trap. It had some fun moments as it could do things like stop a charging Reinhardt or prevent Pharah from launching high into the sky, but it really caused a lot of confusion. After a bunch of iteration, we decided to go in a different direction.

Hey there! We ARE working on something super cool in this space, not exactly what you called out, but I'm pretty excited about it. We're not ready to announce it yet, but I thought I'd drop a reply here and let you know that yes.. more workshop related things are still coming :)

Cheers

I think the common one that comes up here is Mei, which is something we've talked about in the past, but we haven't run the "mei tank" experiment internally yet. I feel like she would have to change quite a bit to fit the tank role, so its a bit more of a rework to have her fit well into that role. That doesn't mean its off the table, just that its not a trivial change to throw in and try out.

If we did try it, im sure we'd try the ice slide that everyone loves to think about :) It certainly feels more acceptable on a Tank, which would allow her to engage in front of her team etc.

Doomfist I think requires a bit more thought than even Mei. He is extremely unique, even amongst the Overwatch roster, but he essentially requires CC to control him, and he throws out a bit too much CC himself, even if her were a tank. We haven't started digging into him yet, as we're still figuring out how some of these CC changes are going to play out, but hes on my list to look at as so...

Yes, we've had a lot of changes to the game engine. Many optimizations, better lighting, and many new features have been added. PvE has also allowed us to look much more at how our environments tell our story, so we've added many features that help with that. In addition, since the hardware landscape has changed a lot since Overwatch was launched, we're taking the opportunity (both on the artist side and the technical side) to beef up our high end features and assets.