Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – February 25, 2020

A new patch is now live on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.

To share your feedback, please post in the General Discussion forum
For a list of known issues, visit our Bug Report forum.
For troubleshooting assistance, visit our Technical Support forum.

ASHE’S MARDI GRAS CHALLENGE

Get ready for Ashe’s Mardi Gras Challenge and some special, unlockable in-game content! Wins in Quick Play, Competitive Play, or Arcade will earn you themed sprays, player icons, and a new epic skin: Mardi Gras Ashe!

Tune in to participating Twitch broadcasters while they’re playing Overwatch any time through March 9th to earn a total of 6 Ashe’s Mardi Gras Challenge sprays and icons!

To learn more about Ashe’s Mardi Gras Challenge, click here.

GENERAL UPDATES

New Feature: Hero Pools

We will be introducing Hero Pools starting in Season 21 of Competitive Play. Much like Map Pools, rather th...

Patch 1.45 Known Issues

Disclaimer: This is not a complete list of all currently tracked issues affecting this build of Overwatch, rather this is a targeted list of some known specific issues with this release.

HEROES

Ashe

• Ashe’s ankle can bend unnaturally when on uneven terrain.

Bastion

• Brick Bastion’s ammo can appear unusually large when destroying Mei’s Ice Wall.

Hanzo

• The sword on Hanzo’s Huang Zhong skin moves too much when viewed in Hero Gallery.

Orisa

• Orisa’s Supercharger is not properly destroyed if the ground underneath it falls away.

Sombra

• Sombra’s Translocator is not properly destroyed if the ground underneath it falls away.

UI

• The indicator that notifies healers that a teammate is at critical health is slightly misaligned on console.
• The in-game “Patch Notes” button does not prompt a confirmation window before opening the patch notes in a new window.

MISC

• Spectators in 3P view do not hear ultimates being cast.
• When using Simple 3P Spectator Camera and spectati...

Thanks for the advance notice Mr. Reed. Can’t wait to show the Capture the Orb gamemode I have built (PTR Code: J1YM8) ! The new workshop actions and features made it possible!

Thanks to everyone who helped us test the new Workshop features in the 1.45 PTR. We were able to fix many of the issues that you identified, and we hope that this leads to a smoother launch of 1.45.

If you have Custom Game creations that you would like to carry forward to the live game, please copy them out of Overwatch and into a text file (since user data from the PTR is not carried over into live). You can copy your mode by going into the Settings for your Custom Game and clicking the Copy button in the upper-right. You can then paste the mode as text into any text editor.

Once the patch goes live, you can restore your mode by copying your saved text onto the clipboard, navigating to the Custom Game Settings, and clicking the orange Paste button in the upper-right.

Thanks again for the help, and happy scripting!

I guess that as well, that or this patch will go live and 1.46 will come up next week.

I am happy because I was planning the afternoon for another hero balance comparison video and now I have the night off!

Overwatch PTR Patch Notes – February 13, 2020

A new Overwatch patch is in development and now available for testing! To share your feedback or report any issues, please post in the PTR Feedback or PTR Bug Report forums.

Please note that the below patch notes only include changes currently available for testing on the PTR. While many of these changes may also be available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in a future patch, the PTR is PC-only and only reflects changes coming specifically to that platform.

BUG FIXES

Workshop

• Fixed a bug where disabling certain flow control actions (If, Else If, Else, etc.) could lead to incorrect execution and incorrect editor indention
• Fixed a bug where an Else If block followed by an End would cause a rule to prematurely abort if the Else If condition were false
• Fixed a bug where the Loop If Condition and Abort If Condition actions considered the value of the conditions from the beginning of the frame instead of their current value
• Fixed a bug where the C...

Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – February 12, 2020

A new patch is now live on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.

To share your feedback, please post in the General Discussion forum
For a list of known issues, visit our Bug Report forum.
For troubleshooting assistance, visit our Technical Support forum.

HERO UPDATES

Brigitte

Repair Pack

• Armor over-heal reduced from 75 armor to 50 armor
• HPS decreased from 60 to 55

Developer Comment: On top of the high utility Brigitte brings to her team, she also dishes out a ton of healing and armor. We’re reducing some of this healing and armor to help keep her in line with the other healers.

Symmetra

• Photon Projector (Secondary Fire)

• Damage increased from 120 to 140

Developer Comment: Increasing Photon Projectors max damage allows Symmetra to play more effectively at a safer range when necessary.

Widowmaker

Widow’s Kiss

• Full charge time for scoped shots increased from 0.7...

What I have seen is that a lot of users are making threads not relevant to Overwatch which includes making posts about threads getting flagged. As always please make sure your content is in line with the Blizzard Forum Code of Conduct and the Overwatch Forums Posting Guidelines.

TIME TO CARE LIKE NEVER BEFORE!

Hi Spinky, here are some answers to your questions:

• It’s cheaper to have a global rule with a condition that checks if the Host Player is doing something rather than using Ongoing - Each Player with a condition that compares against the Host Player. The latter is checking 12 things (one for each player) instead of just 1 thing.
• I haven’t measured it, but it probably doesn’t make much difference whether you use a global variable or Host Player. I’d recommend the latter since you don’t have to worry about updating a variable that way.
• If you know the duration of the Wait in advance, and if it’s fairly long (that is, more than a few frames), then using a Wait and a Loop is better than using a condition since a condition just notices that it has a continuously-changing value and, seeing that it does, performs a check every frame. However, if you are going to be checking every frame anyway (or almost every frame), then a condition is cheaper since you don’t have the overhead of executing a...

We’ve fixed this on our end, along with the bug that caused Nearest Walkable Position to fail near the statue on Chateau. We hope to push this to PTR some time this week. Thanks for the report!

Thanks for the report! I had a look at the issues you guys have reported here. For the actual damage events, damage events currently only process when both the Attacker and the Victim are proper players. So the below comment is correct:

However, you did catch an issue! In all game modes, your damage events (when both Attacker and Victim are Event Player) are actually triggering. However, it looks like there’s an issue where Big Message(…) is failing specifically in the Practice Range game mode. I’ll look into that particular issue in a future patch.

Overall - it looks like your damage events are triggering properly, re...

Thanks for the report! We’ve fixed this on our end and hope to push it to PTR later this week.

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.

Nevermind! I actually tracked this down. Keep an eye out for a fix in a future update. Thanks again for the report!

Thanks for the report! Do you happen to have any additional details on what exact steps you took to reproduce the crash? I tried to reproduce by pasting in subroutines in various indices and I couldn’t hit it yet. I’m still looking, but any additional info/example scripts would be greatly appreciated!

In the first example, restricting at the event level is much less expensive than restricting via a condition, so rule(“B”) is less expensive.

The second example is interesting. In the first version, the server does a big spike of work up front and then never does anything again, leaving all the heavy lifting to be done by the client apps (since continuously changing values on effects and HUD elements are evaluated on the client). In the second version, both the server and client do some work whenever each player’s A switches between 42 and not 42. It’s hard to say which is “better”. Obviously, if the initial spike on the server in the first version is enough to trigger the server load threshold, then the second version is your only choice. If not, and you’re struggling with server load otherwise (and you don’t mind shifting some of the cost to the client), then the first version might be what you want. Overall, I think the second version is more desirable unless A is changing so fast t...

When testing Workshop scripts, the answer to the question “why did my server shut down?” is almost always due to what we call “server load”, which is a measurement we take to determine how much processing power a given game instance is consuming. In order to accommodate a large number of instances, we must shut down individual instances that have started to use too much of the available processing power.

So why does this happen? The short answer is that too many Workshop actions are executing. Sometimes it’s because a high number of actions have occurred over several seconds. Sometimes it’s because an extremely high number of actions happen on a single frame.

Not all actions impact server load the same amount, however. Creating and destroying dummy bots, for example, is very costly, while modifying variables is relatively inexpensive (especially starting in patch 1.45). The values you provide actions will affect server load as well. For example, the ray casting values are very expensiv...

There’s a post coming very soon that should be helpful. Stay tuned!