Overwatch Dev Tracker

Jumping in late for this one since I had some meetings earlier but wanted to respond to this.

Can't speak for everyone but for some insight into the hero design team we've had a significant amount of time dedicated to creating the talent trees (we previewed some of these at Blizzcon).

For context there are about 40-50 talents split into 3 trees per hero and each of those trees has a few talents that are a similar complexity to creating a new ability for a hero.

Heroes in OW usually have 3-4 abilities and a weapon so prototyping a new hero is actually faster than making the talents for one (in terms of design time and scripting - not counting all the real production and art that has to happen).

There are 36+ heroes to do that for and then we've also got the PvP side with all the 5v5 rebalancing, hero reworks, and new hero development on top of that.

Yeah, Bronze 5 is 1-1099.

Overlapping abilities is always an interesting discussion topic for our team. We're generally okay with it but it really depends on what the ability mechanic is.

For example we've found many players are not excited by stacking barriers. Healing is an ability mechanic that stacks and prevents dying but is fine until the values get too high and consistent, so it's really a question of degrees.

We'll see if stacking or alternating AoE speed boost becomes too problematic or conversely if it opens up new and interesting gameplay strategies. There is currently a cap on maximum speed boost which if I recall correctly is 75% (that value could change in the future)

Can you give more details on skill rating? We know your removing the number, but how will it work? Will it consider your current number? And how does it compares to the new rank?

The conversion of Skill Rating (SR) to the 5 new sub-tiers within the current Skill Tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster) is straightforward. Each Skill Tier was previously 500 SR, and each of the new 5 sub-tiers correspond to what was 100 SR. So, if you were previously between 2000-2099 SR, you would be considered a Gold 5 player in the new system. If you achieved the Master tier with 3733 SR, you’d now be a Master 3 player.

Sure! When you look at the history section of your profile, you’ll be able to quickly see key information for your recent games. The initial implementation of game reports will include basic information such as the map, game mode, result, and heroes you played. Within the report you can view statistics for all the heroes you played, and a snapshot of the final in-game scoreboard. We’re also starting to design additional features for the future like teamfight statistics and a timeline to show when key events in the game took place.

We actually tried this out early on in OW2 development. The nice thing about it was that it reduced the effectiveness of the AD strafing spam. This made hitscan heroes much more consistent with their damage output, which wasn't a problem since we could balance around that.

The main problem was that players were so used to how responsive movement feels in OW1 that it was too jarring to make a big a change there and after trying smaller and smaller increments, it kind of got to the point where there wasn't much tangible benefit to aiming but movement still felt "laggy" so we got rid of it altogether.

There was a backend issue with hotfixing (updating without a full patch) that was causing a lot of players to crash when trying to play the experimental card. No ETA on when that will be resolved but many of those changes will also be in the upcoming beta.

In general the broad goal is to provide a wide range of playstyle options. There isn't really a big shift in that regard towards being weighted more toward healing/damage/utility etc. We do need to make sure they fit well into 5v5 and are able to have a significant impact on the outcome of a match but that can be achieved in a variety of ways depending on the individual hero kit. Future support heroes could lean more on mechanical skills while others can be geared toward rewarding timing and positioning more than testing things like aiming.

We have no current plans to enable aim assist for console or players who are playing in parties with PC players. There are significant enough gameplay differences between console players using gamepads with aim assist, PC and console players using gamepads without aim assist, and PC players using mice and keyboards that we also don’t allow PC and console players together in competitive play.

Can confirm Junker Queen does a normal Quick Melee if she doesn't have the knife in hand.

We’ve worked through a few more iterations to give Moira additional utility. It’s not in the upcoming beta build yet but I believe we’ll be able to patch it in at some point for you all to try out.

That’s where the game originally started, for example Symmetra used to be a support with no healing but granted shields instead. We found that healing in general is so powerful and broadly useful that trying to design pure utility supports is a difficult task when it comes time to tune their ability strength to stack up against healing.

It’s possible we try it again at some point but at the moment we try to give all support heroes some amount of healing, though playing with the ratio of healing/utility/damage a hero has can make for unique and very different feeling gameplay experiences.

No official plans at the moment but I’d love to have more of the MEKA Squad in the game. I’m also a big fan of them!

The biggest and most obvious difference between Push and Escort is that the path that TS-1 can traverse is much longer to allow for multiple team fights to occur before a team could win the map. At the same time, it's very important that run times from spawn locations don't become too long. So that led us during map design to explore paths for TS-1 that looped around such as in Colosseo, or snaked back and forth such as New Queen street. During early playtests, we quickly realized this also meant there were a lot more flanking opportunities and cool places for team fights to occur. We all thought that was really cool, and created a very different feel for Push than our previous escort maps.

I wouldn't necessarily call it a rework since it’s more tuning than changing the mechanics but the general goal of the changes is to help improve her mobility and enable her to better react to the faster pace of 5v5. Can't go into all the details but there are things like a shorter teleporter build time and faster secondary fire projectile speed.

We won't be performing a complete MMR reset for Overwatch 2, but we do plan on lowering the MMR of accounts who haven't played in a while as part of a new "decay" system. A complete reset would mean that games would be completely imbalanced for weeks or longer across the entire service, and we don't think that will be a great experience for everyone.