blizz_winter

Balancing a new scoring system like this internally is tough, and we definitely erred on the side of making it easier to attain than harder to attain because we wanted players to get to see it and play with it.

We agree with this feedback though, and today's patch makes it more difficult to attain and to maintain, so let us know how it feels with these changes!

To your other point, the system is designed to be compelling to players at all MMRs (including our highest). This is difficult too, because lower MMR players don't usually have the same stats as higher MMR players. I think with our first pass we landed pretty squarely on "too easy and too common for everyone".

Yeah, I was oversimplifying that explanation.

As a Competitive player it wouldn't feel very rare at all. When we test internally we mostly test in custom games and very frequently in a one-off fashion for discussion and team balance afterwards. Obviously as a dev team we don't have enough players to queue for Competitive internally with good matchmaking, so normally we test that mode in custom games for things like On Fire. I take the blame here for not pushing for more playtests with the Competitive ruleset for On Fire.

We fixed this bug the day after Season 5 launched internally because it immediately started appearing online and the cause was pretty obvious, but this one slipped past us.

We agree it is too easy to gain On Fire with this reworked version of the scoring system. We've made several tweaks and fixes (including a fix for the bug in the OP) in the mid-season patch that should address this concern and others we've seen online. If it still feels too trivial (or if it now feels too difficult) to gain On Fire after the patch please let us know!

Thanks for the report! Here's what went wrong:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/14wex9n/comment/jrj6w33/

This is essentially correct, and it's a bug. If you gain Fire score in the last frame of the previous round (because you're playing Control in Quick Play or because you're in most Competitive game modes) and that made you On Fire or you were already On Fire, then Fire persists to the next round.

Gaining Fire score in the final frame of a round isn't too difficult if you're playing a hero like Mei or Moira and you're dealing continuous damage to enemies as the round ends, or you're on the objective and gaining score for being there.

Unfortunately this one was just rare enough that we didn't catch it internally, but it will be fixed in the mid-season patch *very* soon!

We've got several other fixes and tweaks to Fire coming with that patch that are intended to address many of the complaints mentioned in this thread. Thanks for all the reports and feedback that continue to help us make this rebuilt version of On Fire better!

Tracer has more ping lines now, and we've modified the delay for spamming pings on enemies. I know we left it like this for too long, but it was changed in Season 5.
Let us know if it's still too annoying on live!

You can send me a message.

Thanks for the description. We removed this shortcut feature for mouse and keyboard last season, but I see now that it was not removed when using a controller. My apologies for that oversight.

I can't make any promises with regards to the timing of removing this feature for controller, but I will work on removing it there too.

We disabled that movement based shortcut in season 3 for mouse and keyboard, so she might have more luck trying it again today.

Hey all, in the mid-season patch we're adding a new setting that will control whether contextual pings for Group Up and Need Healing would be used when aiming at an allied hero. The default will be "Off".

Contextual pings were a feature OW1, but as someone with thousands of hours in OW1 I didn't know this until players in the OW2 beta started pointing out that they weren't getting their intended "I'm with you" prompts anymore when aiming their Group Up comms at allies. When I reimplemented this feature for OW2 just before launch I made some mistakes, like letting this ping type pass through walls and letting it go an effectively infinite distance. This meant that before Season 4 we had that happening way too often.

Those bugs are all fixed now, but I realized a few months ago (because of reddit posts like these) that the number of players that wanted this feature is likely much smaller than the number of players that do not want this feature, hence why we've take...

We agree that we can do more to disincentivize leaving games, especially at the end of competitive seasons. We’re considering making ranked penalties partially carry over from season to season and we’d like to make sure that leaving games is never optimal for progressing challenges regardless of whether you’re in ranked or unranked.

It’s certainly a complex issue, but we do suspect that some aspects of OW2 can lead to the game feeling more one-sided than OW1 did in some cases.

We’ve been looking at all sorts of issues that affect how one-sided our games feel. We know that leavers cause matchmaking to feel bad in Quickplay because our priority is to get a player into the match as quickly as possible, and this doesn’t always mean the player that is backfilled is as good a fit for that match as the one that left. We think we can improve our process here in the future.

Addressing more punishing gameplay specifically, we know that getting back-spawned or spawn killed if your spawn room just shut down (due to an objective capture) are bigger swings since we have fewer heroes in a match. We’re working on a solution for these issues for Season 4.

We know that there isn’t a silver bullet for solving the issue of one-sided matches, but we’re attacking the problem from several angles simu...

Coin Line is being replaced with "Win 5 games in Mystery Heroes, Free-for-All Deathmatch, or any Arcade mode" in the mid-season patch along with other Weekly Challenges changes!

This should be fixed... right now! See our patch notes at https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/patch-notes/ for details.

Due to the SR Decay system we launched with in OW2 our SR distribution curve was noticeably shifted left (meaning that there were more lower ranked players than higher ranked players). Most players did not play enough games for their SR and their MMR to converge.

In Season 3 we made several changes that shifted the curve back to the right (meaning that we moved back toward our intended distribution of ranks) to begin correcting for SR Decay’s removal at the start of Season 4. Fortunately, our MMR distribution curve (MMR being the value we use to make matches) has remained the same, meaning that our ability to predict outcomes and make the best matches we can remain unchanged.

Neither A or B. Our wider matches aren’t because of any type of scarcity, they’re because the criteria we use to reject candidates are currently a bit too simple. We’re adding additional tuning knobs to correct this issue soon.

In Season 4 we’re removing SR decay, meaning that in most cases your SR and your MMR will be the same so this should directly help with this issue. We’re also working on a way to display the percentage of players in your division that you are ranked higher than, so that you have a more accurate picture of your progress toward ranking up.

We agree that confusion caused by these titles is problematic and we’re working on a solution for Season 4!

There are two issues at play here. The first is that we have reduced SR decay this Season and increased the rate that SR decay is removed when you win games in preparation for removing this system entirely for Season 4. This means that players are reaching their true ranks more quickly than they ever have in OW2. OW2 really does have a different metagame and emphasizes a different skillset than OW1 did, so it is inevitable that some players will find themselves higher ranked in OW2 than they did in OW1.

The second is that our first two seasons had a small amount of unintentional SR deflation, so we've mostly corrected that issue in Season 3. At the highest ranks (like GM where you and your friends are) we've learned we had an inaccuracy in our formula that resulted in an overcorrection.

Hey all, I want to apologize for the confusion around this feature and the fact that it's currently overzealous. The intent behind this system was to reduce the instances of voice lines being used to annoy other players and to ensure that players still get to enjoy their own voice lines. We all know how it doesn't feel great to try to pause in the middle of a match to squelch or block another player, so this was intended to help reduce that pressure.

Speaking to the system being overzealous, it's currently counting cases where you only hear your own voice lines as spam. That's a mistake on my part that I've corrected for Season 3. This means that if you never stop spamming voice lines in game now, you won't be heard again after a short time.

There is one inaccuracy about the system in this post though. There is no concept of a permanent mute in this system; but you can effectively cause this if you never stop spamming because of the aforementioned mistake. It'...