Overwatch Dev Tracker

Hey, thanks for trying to clarify this! I’m definitely hearing a ton of feedback over the last day and am learning a bunch from this experience.

I came to share my personal viewpoint, listen to the community, and try to make the game better together. I’m truly not attempting to callously disregard anyone’s concerns and say everything is fine.

I’m aware there are distinct increases in power across several aspects of the game such as raw healing output, the introduction of new heroes and mechanics, or things like Wrecking Ball’s extreme mobility. I don’t think this is inherently negative as balance is relative across a large number of factors. There have also been losses of power such as the recent barrier changes.

The idea I was trying to express (and failed to, clearly…) is that I don’t personally feel like there is an unreasonable amount of excessive power creep that makes the core gameplay not feel like Overwatch anymore.
For example, GO...

Yes pick rates are definitely important to consider when trying to interpret win rates. The win rates I’m looking at are from un-mirrored competitive ladder stats (specifically for PC players on patch 1.43 at the GM+ MMR range), meaning games where the hero is not being actively played on both teams.

We don’t balance solely off of stats anyway but they help inform us when something could be really out of whack or can give us a slightly more unbiased lens when trying to identify the root causes of gameplay issues.

Stats don’t do a great job of telling us subjective things like how fun something is, player feedback does. We can try to infer a little bit of that from pick rate but there are too many competing factors.

The most common feedback I’ve been reading recently is that Baptiste and Mei are very overpowered (there are some upcoming changes to these two as well) and Genji/Soldier are clearly the weakest heroes.

When I looked into the current patch stat...

Dropping by with a fun fact!
Looking at GM players for the current patch (1.43), Genji and Soldier: 76 are #6 and #7 in terms of win rate for damage heroes (out of 16 total).

They’re not doing quite as poorly as the general community sentiment would imply. Game balance perceptions/opinions are often repeated and perpetuated enough that they start to become accepted as fact by many players.

We also should remember that things like win rates and hero power/effectiveness can fluctuate significantly depending on the players’ skill level. If someone complains that Reaper is too strong and another says that Reaper is too weak, they could both be correct for their current skill level.

When making balance changes we typically look at the high end potential of player skill for a hero but also try to keep in mind if a given change would be a significant detriment to the overall gameplay experience in lower ski...

Can we expect other changes to other heroes like Mei, Hanzo, Doomfist? I know these heroes are most commonly talked about here on the forums. Baptiste too but Jeff Kaplan addressed him yesterday. I’m looking very forward to the next patch.

We’ve actually been playtesting a Boosters cooldown reduction recently.

It sounded kind of intimidating on paper (tested a 3 sec CD first) but in practice hasn’t been that crazy and allows D.Va to play the midfield more freely, which works well with the current 10 meter Defense Matrix range.

Some version should make it to the next PTR cycle.

Season 20 of Competitive Play is here, introducing a new map pool to the Competitive playlist.

Unlocked at level 25, Competitive Play is designed for those players who want to put their skills to the test, and offers a more serious experience than our Quick Play or Arcade Modes.

GETTING STARTED

Before you can kick off your competitive career, every player will be required to complete five placement matches in a selected role to obtain their seasonal skill rating for that role. Players will earn separate skill ratings (SR) for each role in Competitive Play, for a total of three distinct SRs. This rating will be a number between 1 and 5000, with higher values indicating a greater skill level. Players will also be assigned a tier per role based on their rating—Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, or Grandmaster – and climbing into the next tier is possible as you improve.

Skill ratings and tier icons will be visible at the ...

Stylosa made a 10+ minute video the first time they did this: