JeffreyKaplan

we want this too. more likely for OW2 at this point…

Historically, even when we have done consistent and dramatic balance changes, it takes the meta a long time to shift. We’d love it if balance or player creativity alone would shift the meta fast enough to meet player’s demands.

workshop creators will really love some of the changes Zach and Dan made to the feature. they listened to their feedback very closely and all of it is in response to what creators wanted. really proud of them for their work!

you can limit heroes in Custom Game. give it try!

we talked about a season rotation but taking a hero out of play for 2 months makes us a bit nervous. never say never but it’s not our first instinct…

regardless of if we do a different scoreboard for OW2, we definitely want to do more with stats and provide more statistics to players

no [i have to type twenty characters even though i work here]

The discussion is open for OW2.

Yes. We’ve definitely considered it. Let’s try a week and see how it feels and if we need to make adjustments we will. But yeah… we’ve talked about rotating every day. We’ve also talked about rotating every match. We don’t like going longer than a week because we want more heroes played… but open to feedback.

The card won’t be ready until end of Feb.

For now, you can test it by not playing Torb for the week.

Next week, don’t play Symmetra.

=]

only playing with ya…

For the first 5 weeks, we will be trying a range to see what feel right. We’ve architected this system so that we can update the hero pools without the need to patch. So we’ll be monitoring feedback very closely, experimenting a bit with the pool and adapting our strategy as time goes on.

Thanks for the feedback!

Oddly, we’re not viewing this change as dramatic, scary or impactful as the decision to pursue Hero Limits or our decision to implement Role Queue. Hero Pools will ...

I’ve seen a lot of discussion about hero bans the past few days and I just wanted to offer some perspective on the topic. As always, the OW has a wide variety of opinions about the concept. Interestingly, we don’t have many people on the team vehemently arguing for the feature. More of us, including myself, are reluctant to add hero bans to Overwatch. As I’ve said before, we’re not of the mindset that we’re opposed to the idea entirely and will never add them. But overall, there are a number of issues that make us want to proceed carefully.

Coming at this from a game design focus, the number one thing we ask is, “what is the problem that we’re trying to solve?” We’re not fans of just adding ideas that are in other games “just because”. We call this bottom-up design. Sometimes the right design decision for one game, is a terrible decision for another game – even if the two games are very similar. For example, with World of Warcraft we did not impose forced grouping, a slow lev...

we recently recorded a developer update. it is scheduled to come out toward the end of the month.

we’ll try to do them more frequently.

exceeding 12 players per match would cause significant technical challenges (we’re highly optimized towards 12 right now). experimenting with less than 12 is more realistic. it’s not that we cannot do it… it’s that the cost would be extremely high.

Wow, it was super weird to stumble on this thread.

In early December, we were brainstorming ways to shorten DPS queue times and the idea was proposed to try changing the role queue team composition to be 1 Tank, 3 Damage, and 2 Support. Our matchmaking engineers did some modeling around queue times, expected behaviors etc. and all indications pointed to an overall positive improvement to all queue times under a scenario like that.

From a design perspective we were reluctant for a number of reasons. Before implementing 2/2/2 role queue, we had done experiments with the team compositions being 1 Tank, 1 Support and 4 damage. The playtests under a 4-1-1 comp were terrible. The problem was the solo support. As a solo support, you felt unable to keep the rest of the team alive. Added to that, at all times, you had 5 very aggressive players prioritizing you as the target every time. As soon as the support player on one side died, the entire team would fall like a house of ca...

yes. not all will be the same lengths or carry the same level of importance… but for now, the plan is yes, intro/outro for all story missions

Both the introduction and outro that we showed at Blizzcon were not the final pieces. The planned introduction is a little bit longer. The planned outro (which is still in development and we were reviewing yesterday) is much longer and not intended to be a cliff hanger. Spoiler alert: Lucio doesn’t die. For Blizzcon, we could only final so many shots… so we did an abbreviated cliffhanger for the demo. The final piece is much longer and shows Lucio’s rescue as well as “more awesome story stuff” that sets up the next mission.

We appreciate the feedback and glad you’re asking for more and not less ;]

We’ve been seeing quite a bit of misinformation being spread about our December patch (1.43).

The patch is scheduled to go live next week. Short of some unforeseen circumstance causing a delay, we’re expecting to go live with the patch next week.

I’m guessing everyone is as excited as we are for the changes to go live as soon as possible along with Winter Wonderland.

Wow, the response to the Workshop has been overwhelming. You all are creating some amazing content!

We just got some stats that I figured you’d all be interested in.

Thanks so much for all of this great content!

First off, here are the NA/EU Charts: