JeffreyKaplan

If you’re in Quick Play and you leave during Assemble Heroes you’re not punished.

Hi there! I think it’s awesome that you enjoy Total Mayhem so much. I am extra critical of it because I literally implemented that mode (I don’t get to do a lot of implementation on the game anymore… and I miss it!). I made the mode very early on, when our technology was nascent. We didn’t have a lot to work with and it was a very simple thing to put together. All in all, I don’t think it plays well and has a host of problems. I feel like it’s the type of mode that belongs more in Custom Game. I get that people enjoy it – and that makes me happy… but if it weren’t for it’s legacy, I would simply retire it permanently to a Custom Game mode.

Lots of people like a lot of different modes and we try to make space for as many of them as we reasonably can. Hopefully more people will go to Custom Game for these type of modes.

Sorry we haven’t been doing these as frequently. We do have more planned for this year.

We recorded one last week that will go live next week (I think?)…

if we did role queue, we would do separate SR’s. this is one of the things i think would be really fun (plus make the game way more balanced and improve matchmaking)

regarding symmetra main question… our live ops producer has 700 hours on her.

Thanks for the suggestion! It’s actually one we’ve debated on the team. One concern we have is anytime we – the OW team – make assumptions about what you want to do without giving you some agency in the situation. Our concern is, we believe there are a number of players who want to or like to play different roles but because they are thinking of “the good of the team”, they flex to needed roles. A player like this, under your design suggestion, is going to end up always having to play tank or support. We really want to avoid design solutions that further reinforce players being forced to play roles they don’t intend to.

I hope this explanation makes sense. To use myself as an example, by your suggestion, I am a “tank main” because most of my play time is on tanks. But I really love playing healers and damage heroes as well. I would be worried if the game just assumed I should be playing tank all the time, because I did it so much previously (mostly to be a good teammate, not ...

We’re testing some under the hood changes on the PTR that affect the matchmaker. These changes are only enabled in the Arcade. We needed to put load on Arcade modes to load the matchmaker.

Quick Play will be up soon. In the meantime, you can join a custom game.

Thanks for your patience.

Rialto balance stats for the past month:

49.35% Attackers, 50.65% Defenders

Respawn did such a good job with the Ping System in Apex Legends. It works really well.

Back in early development of Overwatch, we actually had a very similar ping system. Ours was inspired from MOBA’s like League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm.

We eventually removed it because of a few issues.

1. With 6 people on the team, it got very spammy if more than a few people were using it
2. The geography of Overwatch maps as well as the engagement distances is fairly constrained. This made pinging upwards challenging and often frustrating. An example is standing at the gate of point A of Temple of Anubis and trying to ping the upper ledge above the gate entering point B. Our engagement distances tend to be in the 10-30 meter range (for perspective it’s about 45 meters all the way across the entire dojo in Hanamura B). In Apex, you have very long engagement distances and very big maps… it makes it easier to ping below you

It would be fun to r...

We don’t currently perceive Genji to be a balance problem.

When the pros play Overwatch at the Blizzard Arena, it looks just like it does for you and me at home. They don’t see the team coloring of the HUD or the Visual FX. They don’t even see the team uniforms. It’s the spectator functionality and the broadcast that makes the game look that way.

You can use some color blind settings to adjust the way things look for you at home, but it’s not quite like the OWL view.

Well, just speaking for myself here, but I expected 1 to 2 tanks and 1 to 2 supports with more variance. I also expected more hero switching. Naively, I didn’t expect “maining” and “one-tricking” to be so dominant.

We imagined a world where players would be ok with Torbjorn on defense but not playing him on attack. The maining/one-trick mindset led to us having to rework those characters to fit with how the game eventually evolved to be played. I guess what I am saying is we hoped to be able to create more highly situational characters with the thought that players would switch in situations where those characters weren’t as viable.

We like the direction things evolved and in hindsight, it seems obvious that they would evolve that way. It’s not that one direction is good or bad… they’re just different directions and we adapted to what the playerbase was doing, rather than fighting against their instincts.

We actually tried a mode we called “411” because it limited comps to 1 tank, 1 healer and the rest DPS.

It was not fun and we didn’t enjoy it. The way the game is tuned, the importance it placed on the lone tank or lone support was too significant. Also, we’ve all evolved as players since 2016 and we’re much better these days at melting the tank or melting the healer than we used to be. Once your lone tank or healer died, it felt like you were forced to completely regroup with no chance of pulling out a win.

It was a good experiment for us to try and led to a lot of good discussion. But yeah, wasn’t fun…

We actually tried falling damage in early development of Overwatch. We ran into problems with characters like Widowmaker, Reaper and Pharah. With Widowmaker, it felt strange and unintuitive to be able to grapple to high places but not be able to jump down without taking damage. We found ourselves grappling back down to lower points, which was awkward. Pharah was really odd. If you didn’t feather your jets right before touching the ground you would splat. And with Reaper, we kept teleporting to high locations with no ability to get safely down.

For awhile, we kept exempting characters from fall damage. But pretty soon, it felt arbitrary who would take fall damage and who was immune so we removed the mechanic completely.

We worked on a balance patch this week. We’re hoping to put that patch on the PTR next week. The last time I said that, it was late and everyone flipped out. So please, don’t flip out if things slip… they often do.

Also, there’s another cool little surprise coming next week. Excited!

(sorry no details at this time as changes are still in flux… the PTR will get notes when it goes out… no dev update)

I’ve been playing OW so long, I can remember when…

…Tracer used to shoot laser beams out of her eyeballs because we did not have a VFX system (or artist!) to render bullets yet.

Hey… sorry!

We don’t like being silent… that’s not our intention. we’ve been trying to show up more on various streams (we have our creator’s residency now here at Blizzard where streamers hang out with us) plus we did a bunch of streams at Blizzcon. maybe you missed those?

We’re also in a bit of a “head’s down” mode trying to get a lot of work done. we also had a few people traveling over the thanksgiving holiday (we’re based in the US) and took advantage of the slow week to allow developers to work on whatever they wanted. the end result was pretty cool. we explored new game modes, new features and new engine tech. it was all really rough but some of the prototypes will actually turn into features someday.

I guess, mostly, we don’t have a big newsworthy thing to announce or talk about right now so we’re more focused on “getting stuff done” rather than anything else.

Roughly, this is a sample of some of what we’re working on:

–top secret stuff i’m...