While I appreciate the update, what about using twitter to properly communicate those things? Not everybody is following this subreddit and reads every single comment to see an update like this by chance.
Same will be true for Twitter. The Blizzard App has a notification this issue and is our primary communication channel for incidents like this.
Hey folks, we’re investigating an issue that’s causing the new competitive season to not start properly. We’ll post updates as we have them, sorry for the hassle.
Hey folks, we're investigating an issue that's causing the new competitive season to not start properly. Sorry for the hassle, we'll post updates as we have them.
edit: We're making a temporary fix to bring competitive back online shortly, more details will be posted on our forums as well. Sincere apologies everyone, I hope the games you get in today are all big wins.
hey there, we've been investigating this issue, sorry for the hassle. As noted above, relaunching can resolve this for most people.
Cheers
Hey there Haze33E, we’re looking into this more, but any additional detail you can provide is useful. What platform were you playing on? If you restart your game does it still happen? etc.
Thanks for the report and sorry for the hassle!
Hey there, you’ll be able to play! It’ll just work. Cheers :)
Question for overwatch dev team and or also jeff kaplan. Is it a good and fun work environment to be creating and be a part of the Overwatch team? P.S. I as an Overwatch Player/Fan am thankful for your guys work.
I absolutely love working on Overwatch and the team is amazing. I'm regularly inspired by the amazing people that not only directly work on the game but also support us from other groups. Much love to folks in IT, Battle.net, Risk, Game Security, Customer Service, Localization, etc.
The community regularly inspires me. It's why you'll find me on reddit and our forums regularly outside of the AMA. Thanks for being a player and a fan, we're thankful for you! <3
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Zarya, Zenyatta, McCree
How has remote support for your team gone? Are you still using internal support to handle the case load?
Remote support is challenging. Our team regularly works together to support each other, we have chat channels for help, and people utilize that regularly for support. While engineers are often helping the team out with connectivity issues, it really has been a team wide effort to band together and solve problems.
Will there ever be an implementation to let players choose—or at least prefer—which servers they want to play on? I'm on Middle Eastern servers for example and, though the low ping is nice to have, I'm met with even longer queue times instead, and I'd personally rather play on ~150ms ping with shorter queue times than ~30ms ping with longer queue times.
Hey there! Recently we added the ability to specify the server location when creating a custom game. Currently we don't have any plans to expand this to Quick Play or Competitive, but we do see people ask for this occasionally. We have some concerns with how this would be implemented, in particular trying to avoid win trading or match fixing by abusing low population regions.
If you're on PC you can select Americas, Europe, or Asia for your region when you launch Overwatch. That will limit you to servers that are part of that region. Middle East is currently part of the Europe region, you could try to use Americas or Asia to change things up.
Cheers
/u/blizz_jlafleur /u/billwarnecke The GDC 2017 Gameplay Architecture and Netcode talk is one of my favourites, a great insight into ECS and CSP! Do you have any more technical conferences or articles planned in the future?
Hey there, that is also one of my favorite talks! There are a few GDC presentations just a bit after we launched Overwatch, if you haven't seen them all you should check them out! Right now we don't have anything planned for conferences, I think we'll need to see the impacts of covid19 further. Cheers
Read moreCopying the questions from /u/Ceiu as i'm interested too:
- Has there been any internal discussion on having some kind of public bug tracker? As a player, I find it very frustrating and difficult to report and track bugs in a meaningful way, as the forums tend to be flooded with non-issues, and reports don't seem to get any traction or attention unless you happen to post something that gets bumped repeatedly or a dev happens to see it.
- What are the scope of changes going to be for OW2? We know it'll include at least a couple new heroes and a new game mode, but should we also expect a plethora of balance changes? Have bugs in the current game already been fixed in the OW2 branch? Is the underlying engine getting an update (perhaps dropping the rollback-like key-sending netcode for explicit command events/packets)? I think back to the patch notes for a typical StarCraft update vs the massive list with all sorts of changes for the initial rel...
Hey there, I can tackle a couple of these!
We haven't seriously considered a public bug tracker. As you call out there are a few benefits that would come from having one, there is a major investment required to manage that system, and process changes for the entire development team. Our development team and QA folks are regularly reviewing bug report forums. It may not seem like issues are noticed but they're almost certainly being tracked.
We don't have a lot to share about OW2 today, but as a general strategy we fix bugs in the earliest version of the game that makes sense. We wouldn't intentionally hold off on a bug fix for OW2 unless there was some major architecture changes required to make the fix.
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<3
u/billwarnecke I really like how Overwatch has a global cast of characters, so can you talk a bit about the audio localization pipeline works (for example how you manage the sheer amount of audio for different locales and how you decide which voicelines will be in the character’s native language or not)? or any fun stories about audio features? (I love the piano in Paris!)
Hey there, great question! Localization is an important part of Overwatch and audio is just one part of that effort. When we're discussing new heroes, new maps, and lore, we make an effort to collaborate with our diverse global team early in the process. A unique aspect of localization for us is empowering our regional teams to help select voice actors and provide early feedback when we're working with content that is from their region.
In general we try to have VO in both English and native language, and tend to alternate which we use based on if the hero is on your team or the other team. There are logistical considerations, for example not all voice actors are multi-lingual.
Audio plays a huge role in Overwatch gameplay. Scott Lawlor, our audio director, and the rest of the audio team are extremely passionate about Overwatch. Their hardwork and creativity result in not a great overall audio experience but also nice touches like the piano in Paris!
My last one, I promise: what's been your biggest challenge with Overwatch to date?
Our initial launch was a huge challenge. We wanted to release on all platforms (PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4) in all regions at the same time. We put significant effort into performance profiling to ensure our servers would hold up on launch day. There was a huge amount of work involved between engineering and QA to get through the console certification process for both platforms. It was an exciting time, one I'll never forget, and I'm happy with how well it went!
To anybody: what is your favorite player-made Workshop mode?
Doomfist Parkour
Edit: Adding a bit to this, here's the top 10 for the past week!
given overwatch supports 12 players, ever thought of doing a ove raid? say 12 players v a giant raid boss.
Ideas like this are what makes workshop so exciting. We've seen some super cool custom games that implement this concept.
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I play nearly every day. I tend to prefer Zarya, McCree, and Zenyatta. I do a lot of Mystery Heroes with friends I grew up with. They live in Minnesota and I'm in California, Overwatch is one way that I try to keep in touch!
What is an unexpected way Covid impacted your workflow? Do you see it impacting the industry in the future with working from home more?
The workshop was a passion project of a few developers; are there similar projects that are currently being worked on, or some that didn't make the cut?
Who do you personally find the best designed hero in the roster?
And for a bit of a personal question; Do you have any tips on how to break into the industry in the current climate? I recently graduated and it is an awkward time, with some companies just not hiring. Have some priorities for new hires shifted? (Something like a bigger emphasis on independancy to proof you can work from home).
Great questions, here's an answer for a couple of them!
- An unexpected way covid19 has changed our day to day is the impact it has had on meetings. It took a while for people to become more comfortable in online meetings, but now they tend to be more focused and efficient. It's awesome! The engineer in me loves getting more time to write code.
- As far as tips for breaking into the industry in the current climate, I think it's a bit too early to tell how things will change long term. I hope to see a shift industry wide that is more accommodating for remote work. In general I think you should regularly look at open positions at studios you'd be excited to work at and apply as much as you can. Just experience interviewing will be helpful to land the perfect spot.
What hero would make the best scrambled eggs? Very important stuff
I've heard that the French perfected scrambled eggs (via my eggs-tensive research on the internet), and so I think it'd be Widowmaker.
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