From a tech perspective, I think the hardest might have been Echo. Her ability to duplicate an opposing hero brought a ton of challenges and bugs. In most areas of Overwatch, our ideas for what we would like to do are ever expanding in complexity. But we need to make it work with assumptions that we made years ago. Sometimes they don't mesh well. With Echo, it was a difficult clash to work out. In the end, she turned out to be a really fun hero, so it was worth the work. But there was a lot of engineering grey hairs generated around that one!

Hey there, the matchmaker COULD be aware of the level of a player but it isn't something that we currently take into account when matchmaking.

The reason we don't specifically take level into account is because it's an indicator of time played on a specific account and not the skill level at which someone performs. While it is true the more you play the more skill you're likely to gain, it's also true that skill gain will be reflected in the matchmaking values as well.

Cheers

Actually, im not sure if people are aware of this even, but Sombra was initially prototyped as a Support hero. In fact, it really went far beyond prototype, she only became a damage hero in the stretch of her development.

She had some of the most significant changes while going through developement. Her whole kit used to be centered around staying invisible and landing hacks on the entire enemy team (you could hack more than one target at a time). But hack worked differently then: It used to last a lot longer and it reduced your healing and damage output instead of making you unable to use abilities.

This meant even though you had one less healer as a support, you theoretically made up for it by reducing the enemy team's damage. It was a pretty fun little mini-game for her, but people were ultimately very frustrated by being debuffed like that, even if they knew on paper she was reasonably balanced. In fact, we've tried a couple times to try a damage-dealt debuff (W...

we've tried a number of things over the years:

• changed the capture points to work like control points (meaning KOTH points)
• added defenders spawn rooms closer to point a
• added a "middle" capture point between a and b
• moved the defenders spawn point back on b
• made it so that capture happens regardless of if defenders were on the point

those are just a few off the top of my head. lots of level design changes.

Speaking for myself here - I play a lot of competitive Overwatch. I play 10-20 hours of competitive Overwatch every week, and I love it. I used to play flex. I truly enjoy playing a wide variety of characters. Lately I have been focusing on Tanks and Healers, as my friend plays DPS.

we're in a really great place to move forward right now. over the past year we were lucky enough to get jeff chamberlain to become our new creative director. jeff was the director of our original announcement piece for overwatch back in 2014 (as well as some amazing blizzard cinematics over the years -- WOTLK intro for example). we've also added some really amazing narrative designers and are partnering with our story and franchise development group (they make the animated shorts, origins movies, comics, statues etc) at an insanely intense level. there are some very cool lore developments coming.

Hey there, we've definitely worked through audio occlusion bugs in the past, but unfortunately there's not a single problem that solves all of the issues. Any time you encounter this if you can post detail on our bug report forums it really helps us dig into that specific issue.

The AMA has now concluded - Thank you so much for coming and asking your questions!

It’s time to get ready for the Overwatch developer AMA! From 1:30 – 3:30 PM PDT | 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM EDT | 20:30 – 22:30 UTC, we will have several developers from the Overwatch team present within this thread to answer your questions! We’ve written out a few things to know, so please read before posting a reply.

• We will be answering questions about the current state of Overwatch and its history over the past four years, so please no future questions – We don’t have any announcements to make about the future today. We’d love to be able to answer as many questions as possible, so let’s try to make them count
• We welcome questions on a variety of topics, but we just ask that you remain respectful – We’re here to help!
• Reply to this thread with your questions – Other threads or platforms and any sort of direct messaging are not included in this even...

We actually provided some insight into the recent Experimental Moira changes within the forums: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/experimental-mode-recap-%E2%80%93-july-27/531690

Yes! We will create a new pinned thread within the r/Overwatch subreddit when the AMA begins on 7/30.

Hey everyone we’re testing a fix for this issue now. We know this one feels particularly bad, sorry for the hassle.

Cheers