MorEdel

Here are some questions from members of Russian Overwatch fan-community OverFire:

1) Can you share some insights on Paris & HLC reworks? Horizon already underwent a rework in the past, so which parts of this map you consider especially problematic? Any hints on when we’ll be able to test new version of those maps?

2) Long-time players have enormous amount of credits and really have nothing to spend them on. Do you think this problem should be solved somehow (perhaps reset credits/introduce new currency in sequel) or we can safely hoard credits for future?

3) Question for Overwatch art department: what is your opinion on fan-skins, showing “alternative life” of some heroes (ex. Talon Mercy, Overwatch agent Zarya etc.)? Do you think it would be a great idea to introduce something like that in the game or such skins would be too confusing?

4) How do you choose which hero gets new skins for event/promotional challenges like “Maestro Sigma”. Is your choice based on popularity of a hero or how many skins a hero already has?

5) Some players don’t like to be matched against premade groups — have you ever thought about introducing pure solo-queue to avoid such situations?

6) A couple of months ago Jeff Kaplan said that level borders will go away in OW2. Why do you think this system is problematic?

7) Can we see more of early pre-alpha Overwatch footage? Those videos you've shown at BlizzCon 2017 were amazing!

Thank you for the game & your answers!

1. aaron did a lot of work on paris but we're still not happy with it. horizon is not on the...horizon (oof bad pun)
2. we always encourage players to spend their credits on things they want. there's nothing on the immediate horizon you need to be hoarding these for outside of event loot boxes
3. i'm not an artist but we like exploring alternate versions of heroes such as "Junker D.Va" sometimes
4. for maestro sigma in particular, that actually started with our composers and audio director. adam, derek and scott had all of this amazing music and we were brainstorming ways of getting it to players. we came up with the idea of "albums" that we were going to release (note: plural) and we thought that doing a mini-event around the first album would be really fun. then we thought about which character would make sense to have a musical skin (obviously lucio was discussed). our animation department had done the amazing conductor emote which was going to be a normal event unlock. we decided to use the ...

WyomingMyst

Hello Overwatch Development Team,

Are there any current plans to continue to improve the player behavior experience for the game (increase penalties for leaving Competitive matches, harder crackdowns on abusive chat, etc.) and has there been any consideration to allow community-level moderation in the game where players review random matches for suspected disruptive behavior (similar to Counter Strike: Global Offense’s “Overwatch” program)?

Also, what is Jeff Kaplan’s favorite kind of milk tea?

For context, as one of the forum MVPs on the official forums, I have seen constant debates of the following issues:

• The perception of “smurfs” – I agree with original statements from Jeff Kaplan that smurfs are more of a perceptual problem if anything, but can be rooted in disruptive behavior such as throwing games for no reason. Note that I consider the concept of a smurf as some who deliberately manipulates the skill rating on an account to play in a lower rank. I don’t consider smurfs are the same as having an alternate account where the player is trying their best with no restrictions, but I do consider “Unranked to GM” challenges that play in a limited fashion (such as only with one hero) harmful and disruptive to the community.
• From what I have seen, players are more frustrated than ever with teammates leaving matches (especially in Competitive Play). I think there would have to be some context to how often players appear to be deliberately leaving and appear to be disconnecting (I know we can’t tell if a player forcefully disconnects versus a technical issue). Still, it seems like the leaver rules have had little challenges actually to deter leaving in all game modes or deter players from trying to play Competitive with known technical issues.
• It’s been two years since the introduction of the Endorsement system and Looking-for-Group tool. While both made an impact in our community behavior, it feels like our mentality is starting to numb in regards to promoting cooperative play and grouping up. As a personal example, I gave up trying to get to Endorsement Level 5, and Loot Boxes are not an incentive to me anymore.

Thanks for considering my questions. Please continue to stay safe!

UPDATE: (I didn't realize Scott answered my original questions so I reverted my edits)

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!

"Smurfs" are another topic w...

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Every day! I'm mostly playing whatever hero I feel like needs to be looked at more, or has recent changed we're testing etc. Though if i'm just picking to try to win, I find myself mostly going for Ashe/Widow/hitscan in general. Or Junkrat, I still have a lot of fun flying around with Junkrat.

Jesterskull25

Symmetra is mostly used in OWL just for the teleporter. Have you considered reworking her into a healer in the future? She’s already being picked like a Support. If not this, what do the developers think Symmetra needs?

I touched on this in another answer earlier but the tldr of it is: We tried it once, and it didn't work out very well. That said, the door isn't fully closed on this yet, its possible we'll re-try her as a Support (healer) in the future.

Your_mthr

is there any possibility of overwatch to have an event with any non-blizzard game ? ex:with street fighter where doomfist as balrog and zen as dhalsim and widow maker as crimson viper etc. with a minigame

i think everyone on the development team would be extremely excited to do these sorts of things. they usually get bogged down by business/legal types....

but yeah, if they left it up to the dev team we'd be all over it

nimbusnacho

No offense meant. I love you guys but... it doesnt feel like an 'option'. feels random.

Try putting them on the left side of your screen for charge, and the right side of your screen for boops.

DarkPenfold

What are the most commonly-requested hero buffs, nerfs, or reworks that you’ve actually tested internally but never pushed to PTR / Experimental, and why were they discarded?

Our tools are pretty robust so its pretty easy for us to whip up some changes and run a playtest to see how they feel. We've done quite a bit of tests of all kinds of tweaks, some small some big, that come from the community.

For example, we tried Symmetra as a Support hero where her turrets healed instead of dealt damage. This was sort of fun but was kind of frustrating as a Symm player because Overwatch moves so fast. We started trying to tune the turrets to have super high range, or being able to have a ton of them out, etc. It ended up just feeling like a mismatch, but honestly i'd be up for taking another crack at it at some point. Maybe if she had some other primary way to heal and the turrets were just a way to provide auxiliary healing it might have gone better.

Its hard to think of other specific examples off the top of my head right now, but I know there are more things that we've specifically tried out and ended up not doing. There are some other popular ideas, such as M...

2ndbestsnever

Scoreboards? Guilds?

the tab screen was an almost religious debate during the development of the game. i think many of us feel like there are other options for us to explore. a big fundamental change is more likely for ow2 than the current live game. but in general the team is interested in giving players more/better ways to examine their own performance. again more likely on an ow2 timeframe.

guilds is a feature that we've always been excited about. many of us worked on world of warcraft and specifically worked on the guild system there. so it's something that's near and dear to us. we have some really cool ideas of how something like that could work with overwatch. unfortunately, from a tech and design standpoint, the feature would be an extremely heavy lift (at least to do it right -- the way we'd want to do it). so not on the near horizon but definitely on our wishlist.

Joefus76

Have you ever considered in the past doing a skin art contest and the winner gets their skin in the game?

Back when we are working in the office we have a hallway dedicated to fan art. It varies from entry level to professional level, and it is all inspiring. I regularly spend time looking at this art and seeing what the community is coming up with. We're always inspired by the community and it's art, but we don't have immediate plans for that kind of contest right now

eathdemon

given overwatch supports 12 players, ever thought of doing a ove raid? say 12 players v a giant raid boss.

Ideas like this are what makes workshop so exciting. We've seen some super cool custom games that implement this concept.

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2CP is often viewed as the most controversial Overwatch map. Was there ever any plans to allow players to "skip" 2CP or perhaps avoid certain map types like they can avoid players?

I often hear people say "well, if you could skip 2CP then no one will play it" isn't that just a sign that 2CP is poorly designed? What can be done about it in the now?

our first goal is to make the mode something that everyone enjoys. you can see by today's experimental card that we try various things to iterate on the game -- just some of them don't work.

for ow2 we have some ideas that will allow for more player agency but nothing is set in stone yet so i don't want to commit to any promises.

and in the spirit of being open, i think the criticism of 2cp is fueled a bit by the echo chamber of certain communities, when overall the maps and modes are not as universally hated as some would have you believe.

SpriteGuy_000

Question from the r/Overwatch Discord:

Lightningkid11#1486: Can we get/are we ever going to get an Overwatch league style dev clash? With casters and everything? that would be so cool

I think we did do this at BlizzCon just before we shipped where we played some streamers. Back then it was great because we were the best Overwatch players in the world! :) I don't think we would fare as well, these days. But it would be a lot of fun. Fun side story: When we were in the final year or so of dev for Overwatch, we put in some somewhat long hours at the office. As a lark, our QA set up a multi-week tournament across the team to give us a moment to take a break, eat pizza and watch tournament games, shoutcasted by two teammates. The tournament games were SO much fun and drove us to push harder on spectator features and the plans for the league.

ConchRoss

Have any solutions been looked at for "border bullying"? My friend is max rank and is constantly being picked on because of how much he has played. Possibly a system where you can choose what border you would like to have displayed if you've already passed that border in levels? Thanks so much for this AMA! Looking forward to the future of OW!

the border system will go away with overwatch 2. we want to make sure to recognize your accomplishments but we'll be doing something different for the sequel.

Inferuniti

If Ashe can get a golden Bob, is it possible to have golden Torbjorn Turret along with Symmetra’s Turrets?

Golden guns are an ever-evolving topic. On some of the more original characters we ran into tech challenges when trying to add gold versions. One thing to know is that we came up with the idea of golden guns after some characters were already made. Example – Torbjörn turret was made to go molten core before we knew about golden guns. When we tried to apply the golden shader it broke molten core. As time goes on, workflows and tech improves, we get more and more flexibility of where we can add gold to a character.

SteamyTortellini

How much testing goes into new maps, is it all internal or do you guys ever bring in outside opinions, how many maps have been created but never gone to the live game?

we test the maps a lot. for a very long time. usually if we're patching a map into the live game, we'll do an extended ptr period for testing (same with heroes). for maps that shipped with the game, we tested some of those for years. we don't openly bring in outsiders to test maps early as we have a pretty comprehensive play test and map testing process. sometimes, depending where we're at in a dev cycle, we might bring a map to a trade show (i.e. blizzcon, gamescom etc.) before it goes live.

MazaMantis

Has the team ever experimented with making 2CP/Assault "ticks" every 25% instead of 33%?

we've tried all sorts of balancing points, including 6 ticks. it solved some issues but created others. the more ticks, the more the defending team feels obligated to sit on the point....

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I play nearly every day. I tend to prefer Zarya, McCree, and Zenyatta. I do a lot of Mystery Heroes with friends I grew up with. They live in Minnesota and I'm in California, Overwatch is one way that I try to keep in touch!

Tricky-Cow1825

Will cross play ever be a thing with overwatch?

this is something we're passionate about and exploring.

colorfulchew

What is your best "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" for Overwatch?

This is actually something that comes up fairly often. In general I like to try to keep 'tech' in the game if we can, but sometimes its some weird bug that can cause a lot of other problems, is super unreliable, or is just straight up overpowered.

For example, the Genji ledge dashing bug was cool but both extremely overpowered and also really inconsistent/buggy feeling (which makes sense I guess, as it was a bug). That one we opted to just remove instead of trying to work out way to implement it as a feature, mostly because Genji already has really strong mobility and we didnt want to add more onto that.

Mercy's glide jump though was something that wasn't really intended but we ended up having to fix for unrelated reasons. When we did that, we went ahead and implemented it as a real feature of the hero so it works a lot more consistently now etc. She also has the big vert super jump which is a lot more tricky to pull off but we haven't really adjusted or changed anything about that...

FireTheEagle

• What is an unexpected way Covid impacted your workflow? Do you see it impacting the industry in the future with working from home more?

• The workshop was a passion project of a few developers; are there similar projects that are currently being worked on, or some that didn't make the cut?

• Who do you personally find the best designed hero in the roster?

And for a bit of a personal question; Do you have any tips on how to break into the industry in the current climate? I recently graduated and it is an awkward time, with some companies just not hiring. Have some priorities for new hires shifted? (Something like a bigger emphasis on independancy to proof you can work from home).

Great questions, here's an answer for a couple of them!

- An unexpected way covid19 has changed our day to day is the impact it has had on meetings. It took a while for people to become more comfortable in online meetings, but now they tend to be more focused and efficient. It's awesome! The engineer in me loves getting more time to write code.

- As far as tips for breaking into the industry in the current climate, I think it's a bit too early to tell how things will change long term. I hope to see a shift industry wide that is more accommodating for remote work. In general I think you should regularly look at open positions at studios you'd be excited to work at and apply as much as you can. Just experience interviewing will be helpful to land the perfect spot.