Hey everyone,

Season 16 of Competitive Play is here!

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.

To begin your competitive journey this season, click on the “Play” button, select “Competitive Play” from the submenu, and you’re ready to enter a match. You can join on your own or in a group, and Overwatch’s matchmaking system will automatically find the best game possible for your skill level.

GETTING STARTED

Before you can...

Yikes, copy/paste mistake. Fixed!

Overwatch PTR Patch Notes – April 30, 2019

A new Overwatch patch is in development and now available for testing! To share your feedback or report any issues, please post in the PTR Feedback or PTR Bug Report forums.

Please note that the below patch notes only include changes currently available for testing on the PTR. While many of these changes may also be available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in a future patch, the PTR is PC-only ...

Hello everyone!

Starting with Season 16 of Competitive Play, Grandmaster players (players with SR >4000) will no longer be able to queue for competitive matches in a party size larger than two. In an effort to have higher quality and more fun matches for everyone, Overwatch actively tries to place parties of similar sizes together to create fair matches. For the vast majority of players this feature of the matchmaking system works reasonably well. For our Grandmaster players, making fair matches is always more difficult simply because there are fewer players of their skill level to place together. It’s even harder if we allow Grandmasters to queue with larger groups. We believe this change will help create better quality matches for all Grandmaster players.

Thank you and please continue to share your feedback about Competitive Play!

Wow, this is a lot of great feedback, please keep it coming! Dan and I are overwhelmed with the amount of enthusiasm for the feature, and we hope we can keep working with the community to make the Workshop a great tool for everyone.

As the requests here range from small to large, we’ll need some time to organize and prioritize the work. We’re currently working on improving stability and adding a few improvements. For instance in the next patch we’ve disabled the AFK timer when you’re in a custom game that has workshop scripting in it.

Obviously we can’t add everything on the list, so thank you for patience while we figure things out!

Patch 1.36 Known Issues

• Disclaimer: This is not a complete list of all currently tracked issues affecting this build of Overwatch, rather this is a targeted list of some known specific issues with this release.

WORKSHOP

• AFK timer is active when editing scripts while in your Custom Game.
• The scripting action Disable Build in Game Mode does not work in Team Deathmatch and CTF.
• The scripting action Wait(Restart When True) displays a GUID instead of text.
• Sometimes the Actions list displays three numbers after the decimal instead of two.
• Workshop Inspector does not open when playing Wrecking Ball.

HERO GAUNTLET

Dorado

• Players can see navigation lines during the start-game countdown.

Paris

• Players can see navig...

Make sure you’re using the “Ongoing - Each Player” event and you’re passing in “Event Player” as the player to disable respawning for. If instead you’re using “Ongoing - Global” and “All Players”, the action will only get run once (assuming your condition list is empty) before anyone has actually joined the game, and new people who join won’t have their respawning disabled.

Apologies for the lost work, I know how frustrating it can be to have to implement everything a second time. We’re working on stabilizing the workshop so this kind of thing doesn’t happen in the future.

An autosave/recovery option is a really good idea, we had discussed something similar ourselves, as sometimes we also forget to save the scripts as a preset. Until then, I recommend saving early and saving often!

Providing damage amount is a fairly popular request, so we’ll definitely look into adding it. Thanks for the suggestion!

So this should be going out in the next patch on PTR, so please keep an eye on it. Keep in mind that we just patched in “Hero Gauntlet” on PTR, which won’t have this fix in it yet.

Hi everyone!

It has been so amazing to see the awesome, creative game modes that have come out of the Workshop since we released it yesterday. For a while, we’ve been using Workshop to create a game mode called “Hero Gauntlet”, where you play through a set list of heroes in a deathmatch environment and the first player to get through the list of heroes wins. We noticed quite a few of you are making something similar, so we’re releasing Hero Gauntlet as both a preset and an Arcade card. We hope that you can use this as a base to build off for your own game modes. This mode also showcases some things you might want to use in your own scripts, like preloading heroes, which makes games load faster on all hardware.

We really hope you enjoy this game mode!

Overwatch PTR Patch Notes – April 25, 2019

A new Overwatch patch is in development and now available for testing! To share your feedback or report any issues, please post in the PTR Feedback or PTR Bug Report forums.

Please note that the below patch notes only include changes currently available for testing on the PTR. While many of these changes may also be available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in a future patch, the PTR is PC-only and ...

We don’t let you enter custom strings yourself, but there are quite a few strings that you can combine to get you close.

If you have any suggestions on strings you think would be useful to yourself and others, please share them! We can definitely add more strings to the list we already have.

If you want to explain the rules to players of your game, there is a new “Description” field you can put your specific instructions in. Just look on the right side of the settings page inside Custom Game.

You can achieve an anti-heal effect by using “Set Healing Received” with a percentage of 0. (The “Fire Dome” preset does this.) Poison you can achieve with “Start/Stop Damage Over Time”, and Discord can be made with “Set Damage Received”.

Most of the numerical limits for Actions are there for a good reason, unfortunately. We know that there is a desire to make them more permissive, and we’ll keep monitoring the situation to see if there’s a way for us to change them without causing issues.

The best way currently is to perform a line-of-sight check (“Is In Line of Sight”) with a nearby position. If it fails, then there’s probably a wall between your start and end positions. You’ll want to ignore barriers when you do this.

We’ve had some issues with Last Text ID. I’ve fixed them internally, but I don’t think they’re in the latest patch for you guys just yet. You should get them tomorrow, hopefully.