JeffreyKaplan

I’m glad you’re enjoying it. The feedback is really polarizing. Seems mostly negative to me so far but that’s anecdotal.

FWIW, queue times are amazing. On average, less than 3 minutes. Damage queue times are currently 1 minute. 1.5 minutes in KR, our most impacted region…

But we’ll see how it settles. I’m not expecting this to go live given the community’s mostly negative reaction so far. But who knows.

No. Mostly the card will just appear with little to no warning and won’t get a developer update.

We’'ll probably leave this up for a few days. A week at most. We want to cover a few “prime times” in each region as it will help with data collection. For example, at the time that I am posting this it is prime time on the east coast in the US.

Once the card comes down, the next changes coming to it will most likely be balance changes (things as extreme as 3-2-1 will be rare). I would expect the card to come up “every few weeks” and stay up for a few days, if that answers the question.

A bit confusing… but the PTR will also be coming up, possibly even during the duration of this current experiment. There are certain things that can only be tested on PTR and cannot be tested in an experiment. For example, if we wanted to make a change to Mei’s Ice Wall collision we would need a PTR for that. Purely random example… um yeah.

It’s an interesting suggestion but the more “buckets” we add, the slower matchmaking will be. Overall, we want to reduce queue times, not impact them further. Hope this makes sense.

It’s both. For PvE we add a full story arc told through story missions (even though it’s a linear story I am reluctant to all it a campaign because it’s co-op, not single player). We’ll also have Hero Missions (which are highly replayable PvE backed by a progression system). The closest analogy (although neither is quite accurate) is Adventure mode in Diablo III or World Quests in WoW (again, not a great analogy but indicative of the level of replay we’re hoping for).

For PvP we’re adding a completely new pool of PvP maps including a new game mode call...

going to go get some tea now. thanks for all of the great thoughts and thoughtful questions.

we’ll make changes as needed.

thanks again! <3

your feedback…

these are separate things that will not affect each other.

we’ve considered having the system only apply to players above a certain rank (diamond? masters?). it’s definitely on our minds.

totally. we’re so excited for this. we’ve wanted this for so long. it was a ton of work but it’s going to be really cool. plus i am super excited to get console players involved with testing changes (right now they cannot play the PTR)

1. hammond
2. mei
3. tracer

this is a very hard problem to solve but we have some ideas. any solution is more long term, though. possibly OW2 or later. sorry i know that’s not the answer you wanted but it’s actually very complicated with the way consoles work and the rules regarding account creation.

we’ll still use the PTR for major patches and major changes. for example, if we were testing a new hero or map, that would be on the PTR and not in the Experimental Card.

the experimental card uses a different data set and was engineered by people far smarter than i am. it’s going to work and be magic and nothing could possibly go wrong… right? =]

not in this version. interesting idea though.

you know that i can’t ><

ooooh sounds like fun… we should let you all try, huh?

it’s curated by us. so it will be a combination of targeting metas that players are being vocally negative about (recent examples: double barrier, goats) and slightly encouraging other playstyles (i.e. “more mobile” comps might be fun for a week…)

but i am sure we’ll refine our approach over time.

we would never limit the pool to just one tank. you’ll never be forced to play a single tank, such as D.va as described above… if you love playing all the other tanks, you’ll be fine.

we’re curating the list ourselves. we have some philosophies and guidelines we’ll be following (and evolving as we hear your feedback). we will do our best to be judicious and make sure no hero is getting the “horizon” treatment, as with our map pools…

we work closely with OWL on all decisions. we’d just chat with them.