Overwatch Dev Tracker

Hey, everyone!

I wanted to clarify an update I have made to the patch notes since publishing them on the forums!

• Mercy can now attempt to resurrect teammates who die OVER environmental death pits (not teammates who die in them).

Sorry for any confusion, and please shoot any questions you may have over to me!

Hi, everyone!!

The post I made has sense been updated, but I just wanted to point something out.

Mercy can now attempt to resurrect teammates who die OVER environmental death pits (not teammates who die in them).

My apologies for the confusion! Please let me know if I can help clarify any more.

Friend, contributing to the writing of prepared statements is an important part of a community manager’s job. We provide insight into how players will respond to what we say, and suggest edits that will hopefully sound less “PR” and more appropriate for players.

It’s a collaboration with multiple communications disciplines, which means there’s give and take on all ends.

CaptainPlanet shared some stats with us internally. I’ve not had the bandwidth to prioritize chasing down if we can share it publicly or not. I’ll try to ask about that this week.

This was a miss on my part. I should have noticed that there was a lack of developer notes and called that out before the notes were published, especially for changes like the Cassidy air roll, and the Wrecking Ball grapple.

Jodie and I will both be more vigilant about this in the future.

Practically speaking, if we announced this the day before, that’s all that would have driven conversation for the next 24 hours, rather than excitement around the new skins.

I’d much rather that myself and Jodie take it on the chin in a thread like this after the fact, than to do anything that would diminish excitement aro...

This was a conscious choice on my part, so please feel free to direct any ire towards myself specifically. There was a zero sum chance that this topic wouldn’t be addressed in the community, and we knew there would be an opportunity to respond directly to player conversation.

Keep in mind that we have many channels of communication we manage, and we’ll activate them in different ways, depending on how we want to communicate something. Sometimes we want for information to be announced through media. Sometimes we’ll want to partner with content creators.

Major beats and ...

Just as player feelings are incredibly important, so are the feelings of the people who work on the team. We are a team of humans, not machines who mindlessly produce product.

If the last year has taught me anything, focusing on the human side of the industry is something that we could all use a bit more of.

If that’s what you took away from that statement, I apologize. I clearly miscommunicated it.

It’s more of an emphasis of having something concrete to discuss with our major announcements, so players actually have something to be excited about.

I can’t really speak to that as it was before my time.

I’m not prepared to address that topic today. Apologies.

I don’t expect anyone who is frustrated with their current experience to tone police themselves, within reason. What I would implore anyone to do is to lead with empathy and not assume that we as a team are apathetic to the player experience.

Don’t worry about it, man! It’s all good.

I sincerely don’t mean to diminish anything that anyone here is feeling, but I do empathize with your frustration. We want to share everything we have with you guys as much as you guys want to know! It’s just taking us time, collaboration, and a LOT of hard work to get there.

I’m pretty confident playing tank is going to change dramatically when we move to 5v5, and I am interested in how that will change perceptions on Reinhart when we get there!

I promise you that this isn’t unique to Blizzard XD

I’m going to assume you’re talking about the collective “you”, and not myself specifically.

There are people who have been working on this game since before we were even Overwatch. I’ve worked in this industry for over 15 years now, and I can tell you that developers do not work on a game they don’t care about for more than 5 years.

Not to be overly effusive, but Team 4 is hands down the best development team I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. I have regular 1:1s with Aaron, Gersh, and several leaders on the team. We have full access to the dev team, and they have always been excited to answer our questions and ...

I hear what you’re saying here.

In another post, I made mention that we want to focus on letting our work speak for itself this year. Not much more I can say aside from this feedback has been communicated to the team, and I personally feel it was well received.

To manage expectations, you should never be looking at blue posts (from CMs) on these forums for major announcements. The community team is here to facilitate conversation and provide additional granularity whenever possible

Should go without saying, but no leaks from us either. I have a family to support.

Yup! I love the group of people working with gameplay insights data. They are too cool!

But they are one piece of the puzzle, right? Game dev is a science and an art. I’m stoked to see how your opinions on Reinhardt will change with the future of Overwatch. I know it can be frustrating right now, but we have some really cool stuff coming down the road.

I get this feeling. It’s understandable that folks want information right now.

To provide some insight as to our processes; any announcement or news that we share is heavily coordinated, highly scrutinized, and meticulously planned before it ever sees the light of day. There are several stakeholders at every step of the process that need alignment and to have their feedback both listened too and considered. Major announcements are even more complicated, sometimes needing approval from all the way up the chain.

By the time we’re ready to announce something to the broader community (let alone preview it ...

I don’t know the specific breakdown of the numbers offhand, but I can tell you I am not talking about only OWL skins.