is there an official way to offer suggestions for new features to be added to the game? sometimes REALLY good suggestions get buried before they can ever reach your team!
we read this subreddit all the time. if it's a great idea, it will get visibility
I don't know if this has been discussed before, but what has the OW team thought about having a hard reset for their competitive mode? I don't know if the open competitive mode had a reset of some kind but my Sr increased by a massive amount compared to the average or even the highest sr in role queue. And this honestly felt like where I actually belong cos I've been hardstuck in a particular sr and I feel I consistently do well but I do get unlucky with teammates or some other factors.
Is there any way that the game dev's could give an option to people who have been playing for a long time to reset their mmr(hidden probably?) or their Sr in some way (hard or soft)?
I honestly like the game a lot, and the only thing that bugs me down is that I have a fair number of great games and then I have an equally good number of bad games and somehow I'm stuck in the same elo.
We've certainly seen a lot of requests to reset MMR and SR for competitive play, but there are a lot of negatives associated with actually doing it. For instance, a hot topic amongst the community is Smurfing and how they can disrupt games by being much higher skill than everyone else in the game. Well, resetting everyone's MMR would basically have the effect of turning every Masters and Grandmasters player into a smurf with an incorrect SR. Match quality would be really bad for months, or possibly even longer.
Everyone has streaks of wins and losses, and most active players do hover around the same SR. Honestly, the trick to improving your SR is not actually worrying about your SR, but just playing games with a mind towards improving your play. If you have a favorite hero, pick an aspect of their kit to concentrate on improving. Play some games where you concentrate on more macro-oriented skills like making sure to attack together with your team. Think about the hard ques...
Read moreAny suggestions for ways to stand out from the crowd when trying to apply for software/technical internships or jobs at Blizzard, in particular relating to Overwatch?
Some thoughts from me:
A passion for games (and Overwatch, in our example) is obviously a huge plus.
Experience is great, whether you gain that through your job or through hobby work outside of your job. That can apply to engineering as well as to experience working in a team. If someone has demos of their work, that goes a long way towards standing out.
For us, familiarity with C, C++, C# is big as is familiarity with some of our content creation packages (like Maya, Photoshop, etc).
And we're always looking for individuals that bring a different viewpoint to our team. We find the best ideas/solutions tend to come from a diverse team working together to solve a challenge or implement a feature.
/u/blizz_jlafleur /u/billwarnecke The GDC 2017 Gameplay Architecture and Netcode talk is one of my favourites, a great insight into ECS and CSP! Do you have any more technical conferences or articles planned in the future?
Hey there, that is also one of my favorite talks! There are a few GDC presentations just a bit after we launched Overwatch, if you haven't seen them all you should check them out! Right now we don't have anything planned for conferences, I think we'll need to see the impacts of covid19 further. Cheers
Does every hero have the same chances in Mystery Heroes? Because I often see Bastion, especially in the initial composition.
it's random
Read moreCopying the questions from /u/Ceiu as i'm interested too:
- Has there been any internal discussion on having some kind of public bug tracker? As a player, I find it very frustrating and difficult to report and track bugs in a meaningful way, as the forums tend to be flooded with non-issues, and reports don't seem to get any traction or attention unless you happen to post something that gets bumped repeatedly or a dev happens to see it.
- What are the scope of changes going to be for OW2? We know it'll include at least a couple new heroes and a new game mode, but should we also expect a plethora of balance changes? Have bugs in the current game already been fixed in the OW2 branch? Is the underlying engine getting an update (perhaps dropping the rollback-like key-sending netcode for explicit command events/packets)? I think back to the patch notes for a typical StarCraft update vs the massive list with all sorts of changes for the initial rel...
Hey there, I can tackle a couple of these!
We haven't seriously considered a public bug tracker. As you call out there are a few benefits that would come from having one, there is a major investment required to manage that system, and process changes for the entire development team. Our development team and QA folks are regularly reviewing bug report forums. It may not seem like issues are noticed but they're almost certainly being tracked.
We don't have a lot to share about OW2 today, but as a general strategy we fix bugs in the earliest version of the game that makes sense. We wouldn't intentionally hold off on a bug fix for OW2 unless there was some major architecture changes required to make the fix.
What are you general thoughts on the power creep discussion?
i think this is a good discussion. but i think a lot of the good points get lost in the echo chamber of the internet. i'll see a good thread, video etc about power creep but then there is a lot of "group think" that happens and you have a bunch of people who think they are agreeing on something, when really they are not.
"power creep is bad!"... "btw buff roadhog, revert rein earthshatter nerf, buff pharah, you should TOTALLY be adding way more new heroes... and they all better do new cool stuff...." ... "oh yeah and power creep is bad!"
personally, i prefer when the conversation is more focused. is time to kill to fast? do we feel like CC is too much? too much/little healing? and then apply all of these to individual heroes....
we've added 11 new heroes to the game since it launched. obviously, the game is going to change when you do that. we just need to evaluate each hero on their own and make adjustments.
my personal feeling is that i would like...
Read moreDo you regret any of the reworks you have done with any of the heroes at all, If so who and why?
Not really... though as i've mentioned a couple times here already maybe we could have pushed harder to iterate on Symm as a healer instead of a damage dealer. Maybe we can still revisit her as a healer.
Will there be a balance between the amount of heroes in each role (so 33.3% in tank, damage, support) or will damage always have the largest pool of heroes?
This comes up a lot so i'd like to touch on this.
I would love to get the roster to 33% each, that's certainly a goal. That said, I'm worried about going a very long time without any damage hero representation. If you look at the release history, we've been trying to push it towards an even roster without just ignoring damage heroes entirely.
Throughout the development of Overwatch, has there been anything you're willing to share that you've regretted, or wished you had handled differently? Whether it be in regards to heroes, abilities, maps, things you wish you had done, things you wish you hadn't done, etc.
this type of question is very hard to answer because we all now have the benefit of hindsight.
sometimes i wish we had kept offense and defense heroes (rather than merging them into damage) and only allowing offense heroes to be played on attack and defense to be played on defense. i know that idea might sound crazy and stupid but i think it would have allowed us to more "all in" on some "niche" hero designs like Torb, Symmetra and Bastion. much of the issue we face with the hero balance on these heroes is our player expectations that these heroes should be fully viable on all situations, and that really wasn't our intent or vision for the game. we believed that with hero swapping, people would be more willing to adapt to "solve the problem". we're fighting some amount of human psychology and game design, i know.
the sombra arg is another standout... lol
tracer plz
Doomfist could also work, hes kind of a fighting game hero already! He's certainly inspired by fighting games.
With the workshop features, have you ever though about making a map editor for Overwatch?
That's a great idea and something that we have thought about over the years. Unfortunately, it requires a decent amount of complicated technology changes as our engine and asset pipeline is primarily set up to deliver pre-made content. But it is something that we are continuing to consider.
It’s well known at this point that tanks are the least popular role to play. Do you have any thoughts to share on this ie. Balance philosophy, upcoming ideas that you’d want to try?
Actually we've been talking about Tanks, as role, a lot recently. In the past we've had trouble trying to figure out how to make tank heroes like Roadhog compete with big protective tanks like Reinhardt. Lately we've been thinking, what if we just go the other direction? What if Reinhardt was more like Roadhog? What would that feel like for the entire game? Basically, what if all 'main tanks' became 'off tanks'?
This would mean Tanks would be less about pure protection, and more about brawly offense. Barriers would be less prevalent, damage overall would be higher (tanks doing more dmg, and reducing less dmg), which is kind of scary potentially. We've already been experimenting on this front and so far its been pretty fun, though the game does feel significantly different. Players have to play the map angles a lot more aggressively as you can't just rely oin your Tank/barrier for cover.
I'm not sure where these experiments will go but they're pretty intere...
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<3
Will there ever be a option to combine your console account with your pc account, because know I look like a genji one-trick on pc while having lots of hours on tank on console and also I cant use the limited edition skins I got on console on pc.
we really like the idea of cross-persistence. it's something we would love to see for overwatch. the technical and business hurdles are immense but we are very passionate about trying to make something like this happen someday.
Interesting, why is the flail so challenging?
Figure that's why I don't see it so often.
There were many challenges, here are two specifics.
We had a hard time coming up with a look we liked for the chain. Most flail reference we found had the chains at a fixed distance. It was hard to find reference of something swinging like a flail, but also having an extending/contracting wire/chain. We ended up swinging an XBOX controller around, controlling the distance of the wire with our other hand.
Once we had a target look, getting it to move like that in engine was an animation challenge. We had to come up with a way to break up the animations and models for gameplay, but still get the look we liked from the XBOX controller video reference.
What map was the most challenging to make and what made it difficult? In reverse, what map were you guys most excited to bring to life in game?
well apparently paris and horizon are the most difficult...
i think bringing blizzard world to life was particularly special for our entire team
u/billwarnecke I really like how Overwatch has a global cast of characters, so can you talk a bit about the audio localization pipeline works (for example how you manage the sheer amount of audio for different locales and how you decide which voicelines will be in the character’s native language or not)? or any fun stories about audio features? (I love the piano in Paris!)
Hey there, great question! Localization is an important part of Overwatch and audio is just one part of that effort. When we're discussing new heroes, new maps, and lore, we make an effort to collaborate with our diverse global team early in the process. A unique aspect of localization for us is empowering our regional teams to help select voice actors and provide early feedback when we're working with content that is from their region.
In general we try to have VO in both English and native language, and tend to alternate which we use based on if the hero is on your team or the other team. There are logistical considerations, for example not all voice actors are multi-lingual.
Audio plays a huge role in Overwatch gameplay. Scott Lawlor, our audio director, and the rest of the audio team are extremely passionate about Overwatch. Their hardwork and creativity result in not a great overall audio experience but also nice touches like the piano in Paris!
As someone who’s been on the receiving end of numerous racist and homophobic slurs in the text chat channels, would perhaps censoring some of the words and obvious variants in those be within the realm of possibility to deter that sort of behavior?
i'm so sorry this happened to you. please make sure to report all cases of this. it really does do something and we take this very seriously. we have some ideas we would like to explore to minimize the ability for this to happen. in the meantime, i strongly recommend leaving the profanity filter on.
There's been a lot of talk about reworking certain Damage characters into Tanks/Supports, such as Mei into a Tank, or as mentioned Symetra back into a Support.
What have the team's thoughts/discussions been around this idea?
Yea we've been talking a lot about this, especially as we're working on OW2.
Mei as a tank comes up quite a bit, its something we can maybe try. She would have to get nearly reworked though, for example her secondary fire is far too much dmg and long range to go on a Tank, but its a possibility.
Other ones that come up pretty consistently in conversations are Roadhog as a DPS, Symm as a Support, Brig as a Tank.
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