blizz_smercer

Yeah, Bronze 5 is 1-1099.

Can you give more details on skill rating? We know your removing the number, but how will it work? Will it consider your current number? And how does it compares to the new rank?

The conversion of Skill Rating (SR) to the 5 new sub-tiers within the current Skill Tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster) is straightforward. Each Skill Tier was previously 500 SR, and each of the new 5 sub-tiers correspond to what was 100 SR. So, if you were previously between 2000-2099 SR, you would be considered a Gold 5 player in the new system. If you achieved the Master tier with 3733 SR, you’d now be a Master 3 player.

Sure! When you look at the history section of your profile, you’ll be able to quickly see key information for your recent games. The initial implementation of game reports will include basic information such as the map, game mode, result, and heroes you played. Within the report you can view statistics for all the heroes you played, and a snapshot of the final in-game scoreboard. We’re also starting to design additional features for the future like teamfight statistics and a timeline to show when key events in the game took place.

We have no current plans to enable aim assist for console or players who are playing in parties with PC players. There are significant enough gameplay differences between console players using gamepads with aim assist, PC and console players using gamepads without aim assist, and PC players using mice and keyboards that we also don’t allow PC and console players together in competitive play.

The biggest and most obvious difference between Push and Escort is that the path that TS-1 can traverse is much longer to allow for multiple team fights to occur before a team could win the map. At the same time, it's very important that run times from spawn locations don't become too long. So that led us during map design to explore paths for TS-1 that looped around such as in Colosseo, or snaked back and forth such as New Queen street. During early playtests, we quickly realized this also meant there were a lot more flanking opportunities and cool places for team fights to occur. We all thought that was really cool, and created a very different feel for Push than our previous escort maps.

We won't be performing a complete MMR reset for Overwatch 2, but we do plan on lowering the MMR of accounts who haven't played in a while as part of a new "decay" system. A complete reset would mean that games would be completely imbalanced for weeks or longer across the entire service, and we don't think that will be a great experience for everyone.

I can answer a few of these!

Why no backfilling or pauses in Competitive?

There's no backfilling because we're pretty sure no one would want to do it. If you ever backfill in a game and lose shortly afterwards, you're not happy. If we allowed players to backfill without consequences to their SR, its giving them a license to throw or act negatively. There's simply not a lot of great options there.

As far as pauses, and I think you're asking about pauses due to disconnect/leaves, we have to consider cases where players might abuse the rules in an attempt to harass someone or waste people's time. The best way to try and minimize leaves is to not provide any kind of outside motivation for them to occur. We're never going to be completely leave free, due to internet outages, personal emergencies, random acts of chaos by cat, we just want to make sure and minimize them as much as possible.

Is there a reason for the "minimum draw"...

Good questions.

We're definitely looking to combat what I will refer to as "abusive" alt accounts, ie players who repeatedly create new accounts just so they can play against lesser skilled opponents. Part of this is improving the matchmaker's ability to determine your skill even faster, detecting those that repeatedly abuse alt accounts and taking action against them, and looking at ways to limit access to additional accounts. We can't go into all the details here, but it's something that's being actively worked on.

Do remember that many "smurfs" are just friends who want to play together but aren't of the same skill. The matchmaker doesn't just simply average their SR together when considering how to matchmake them, and its also good to remember that the other player might not be a smurf at all. They might just have gotten a lucky streak of head shots. Skill is not a static thing, it ebbs and flows, and we all have our moments we feel like gods of Overwatch and ...

We've tried and discarded quite a few abilities during development of our heroes, it's a very natural part of the process. Sometimes the ideas are better fits for other heroes, sometimes they just don't work and we chalk that up as a lesson.

Here's one I worked on for Torbjörn:

Torbjörn had something we referred to as the "Claw Trap" that he deployed similar to Widowmaker's Venom Mine, but instead of dealing damage the trap grabbed a hold of you and prevented the enemy from moving outside a fixed radius of the trap. You could move freely around next to the trap, but couldn't move far away until you destroyed the base of the trap. It had some fun moments as it could do things like stop a charging Reinhardt or prevent Pharah from launching high into the sky, but it really caused a lot of confusion. After a bunch of iteration, we decided to go in a different direction.

We are planning to do an update on the endorsements system in the future, so it's great hearing your feedback on this. To clarify one element on the system, you won't really decay if you don't play for a week or so. You naturally decay a certain amount when you play a game based on your current endorsement level, with higher endorsement levels decaying faster and requiring you to earn more endorsements per game. That's what makes higher endorsement levels harder to get.

As far as golden guns, we have no plans for providing them as rewards outside of earning them in competitive play.

That's an interesting idea, and how players interact with barriers is something we're always looking at closely. This might not as be required with the new 5v5 teams that only have one tank, and therefore less barriers on the field. We'll keep an eye on it as we continue to work on hero and gameplay balance.

Thanks!

2/2/2 Role Queue will become 1/2/2 Role Queue due to the move to 5v5, and we'll probably still have Open Queue but that's not set in stone yet since hero balance will be quite different in OW2.

We might have an Arcade card that still has 6 player teams in the future, we'll honestly have to evaluate all of them with an eye towards how they work with the new hero balance.

Making Overwatch a better, more positive place to play for everyone is super important to us. While we've made a lot of progress with player reporting, thank you messages for reporting bad behavior or abusive chat, endorsements, etc., we're always looking to do more.

We definitely know it can be difficult for women of all ages to use voice chat, as the abuse and harassment takes away your enjoyment of the game (and as you noted, your SR!). I hear this from the women on the OW team, across Blizzard, and in our community.

There are some initiatives under development that we hope will directly address these issues, but I can't quite talk about them yet.

In the meantime, everybody please continue to report players who are being abusive through the in game reporting mechanism, whether they're being abusive to you personally, or anyone else. The reports do matter, and as a community we can make Overwatch a more positive place for everybody.

We've certainly seen a lot of requests to reset MMR and SR for competitive play, but there are a lot of negatives associated with actually doing it. For instance, a hot topic amongst the community is Smurfing and how they can disrupt games by being much higher skill than everyone else in the game. Well, resetting everyone's MMR would basically have the effect of turning every Masters and Grandmasters player into a smurf with an incorrect SR. Match quality would be really bad for months, or possibly even longer.

Everyone has streaks of wins and losses, and most active players do hover around the same SR. Honestly, the trick to improving your SR is not actually worrying about your SR, but just playing games with a mind towards improving your play. If you have a favorite hero, pick an aspect of their kit to concentrate on improving. Play some games where you concentrate on more macro-oriented skills like making sure to attack together with your team. Think about the hard ques...

Making adjustments to achievements is extremely tricky, and we have to do it on a case by case basis. We've had to change a few due to some heroes getting larger reworks where an achievement became literally unobtainable, but making very difficult to earn achievements easier can feel bad for those who have put in the time and energy to earn them.

Several cool questions here, so let's go?

Are there any current plans to continue to improve the player behavior experience for the game?

Funny you ask that, but we're going to make the penalties for leaving competitive games a bit more severe in an upcoming patch. (More details then!) We're ALWAYS looking to improve the player behavior experience, and there's several interesting initiatives for identifying bad player behavior that are currently in the pipes. We'll be able to talk more about them when they get closer to being real.

Have we thought about creating community moderation tools to allow players to review matches for suspected disruptive behavior?

It's been discussed, but we'd rather look into more internal solutions to try and identify disruptive behavior like throwing, feeding, etc. Community involvement is still super important though, as reports players who do bad things helps us tremendously. Please continue to do that, it really helps...

One of the things we're always looking at are ways to provide positive notes to players after they finish a game, even when they lose. The medal system was one of those, along with the card voting system during the end of round.

However, the medal system provides only view of the match results, when why someone earned gold, silver, or bronze can be way more complicated than just reflecting your skill. This is one of the reasons we want to look into systems that can help you understand key questions like "Did I play well?" and "Did I do something awesome?" whether you win or lose.

That might be an improved medal system, or something else. We'll see!

Sure! There were several factors in the decision to switch to the more flexible queue system we currently have.

1. There were concerns that a 6 stack only competitive queue would prevent some players from participating. While they do want to play competitively, improve their skills, and test themselves, there are many reasons they might prevent them to play as a team with others.
2. Six player only teams solved some matchmaking problems (you're responsible for finding teammates, not the matchmaker), but would create others such as making it more difficult to find fair matches at extremes of SR.
3. Requiring you to find your five teammates to play can be a logistical issue. Let's face it, queueing solo is just really convenient. You can do it at any time of the day, when your teammates are sick or on vacation, etc.
4. Finally, let's face it... If we didn't have a solo queue the first thing people would of asked when we introduced competitive play would ...