Aaron Keller, Blizzard Entertainment

Two weeks ago, we talked about balance and matchmaking in our blog update. Matchmaking has continued to be a big topic in the community, and it's something we've been focused on internally. If it's important to you then it’s important for us to talk about, so I'd like to update you all on what we're seeing and doing.

One note before we begin - I think we're at risk of sounding like a broken record with our communication on matchmaking. "We're working on it and it's getting better" isn't the best message, especially when players are still experiencing bad matches. So, I w...

A few weeks ago, we published the first in this series of updates on the game. It’s crazy how much has happened since then! We launched Season 3, announced a collab with One-Punch Man, and I’m now dating Genji! I feel so lucky…

I wanted to dive into two topics today. Season 3 balance and the matchmaker.

We feel that the start of Season 3 is in a much better state of balance than the start of Season 2. We hear from players that balance is the best it’s been since the launch of OW2, while the game feels fresh based on all the changes made. It’s been great watching that discussion, and to foster it, I’d like to give a bit more details and a bit less commentary.

Let’s look at the support role first. On the positive side, most supports are viable in nearly every skill tier. Brigitte has really popped this season and has the highest win rate for nearly all skill tiers except for Top 500, where Zen takes the lead, with both averaging out to a nearly 55% w...

Hello! We're back with another update. We've put out a loooooot of info in the past week, so I don't have as many concrete details to share today. We're going to talk about a few random topics, including values around collab development.

Let's start the update with a...non-update...related to Season 3 balance. While you're reading this on Friday, this piece was written on Wednesday for us to have the time to localize it globally. We don't have a pulse on the balance for Season 3 yet, as our changes have only been live for a few hours. Our aim is to get balance information out to you all on or before my next update and if it looks like there are big issues with balance our intention would be to fix them before the mid-season patch.

The team is also talking about the Arcade. We feel like there are a few issues with this area of the game. Some of the game modes can have very long queue times. This is exacerbated by the fact that we have challenges that requir...

Hi all! We’re back a little earlier than we had originally planned. Think of this as a bonus Dev Chat!

We’re going to mostly focus on maps and level design this go around.

Off we go!

Map Pools… You were right. We were wrong. Map Pools are going away starting in season 4. We aimed to provide a bit of freshness each season and concentrate the number of maps that people were playing, however player sentiment around map pools was pretty low, the map roster doesn’t have enough maps where we truly need them, and the impact they had on seasonal identity was fairly low. Additionally, the cadence for maps leaving and returning to the pool didn’t align with the time it took to make changes to the maps. Gibraltar was supposed to return in Season 4 but the playtesting and iteration we were doing for the map started calling that deadline into question. There’s the possibility that we bring map pools back in the far future when we have...

Hi everyone!

This piece is aimed at looking at some of the topics that have come up in the community over the course of Season 2. This won‘t be comprehensive enough to look at everything that players are talking about, but our intent is to do this every few weeks, so we will be able to start diving into smaller topics as we go. Also, the goal here is to keep you up to date on what we’re thinking and planning, but not necessarily to be the source for all the reasoning and detail behind those decisions.

So let’s get to it!

The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. There was confusion around players’ real rank and how that translated to their skill level, difficulty forming groups with friends, and a negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar). We will be implementing some changes in S3 and quite a few more in S4 all aimed at creating more clarit...