Because of unforeseen circumstances, we needed to push the start of the event back by just a few days.

Personal opinion, but the art team really sleighed it with this year’s Legendary skins.

Player?

I’ve only joined the team/Blizz around 6 months ago. I was fortunate enough to have a good friend on the team who invited me to one of our internal friends and family tests before announce/beta. My first experience with Overwatch was watching my kids sitting next to Metzen’s kids, loving every minute.

I’ve been a fan of the game ever since.

The forums are always much more critical of us than the broader community. This likely has to do with the profile of player who tends to be more engaged on a platform like fora (hyper engaged, core fans), whereas the other platforms tend to be a bit less serious in nature.

I get it.

The community team goals include hosting regular, consistent, community events. It’s a bit too early to wave the flag of success (we’ll be measuring overall impact in an internal retro), but early indicators about this ExC have been positive, with a significant amount of feedback from creators and core players alike feel that it’s a welcome update that makes the game feel more vibrant than it has in awhile.

We’re going to continue to push forward with community events, without significantly impacting dev work.

I won’t hide the fact that we have a different kind of relationship with content creators that we have with the forums. Both Jodie and I spend an equal amount of time managing relationships with current and former OW content creators as I (and soon Jodie) do here on the forums (oftentimes more here, depending on the week).

Each part of the community has different needs, and those needs are addressed in different ways. When it comes to creators, we treat and view them as valued partners in community building. They’re player advocates (to a surprising degree), community evangelists, and some of our most stringent critics. In some cases, their platform is significantly larger than the average player. In the case of the vast majority of creators, they have less notoriety and recognition within our community than you, HANA (I’ve quoted, responded to, and interacted...

We’re continuing to communicate feedback to the development team about game balance and the live service.

I do understand where your frustration comes from. We’re going to continue to explore ways to keep the live game fresh and vibrant, while having minimal impact on the work that T4 is doing towards the future of Overwatch. Experimental Cards are a great tool to introduce variety and different twists on the game in a relatively low risk manner.

Content Creators are players of the game. The easiest thing to do is to lump them all together as some ubiquitous entity but that does a disservice to the individuals who dedicate a large portion of their lives, and in many cases livelihoods, to their audience and the OW community. Their reasons for creating content, and their motivations when playing Overwatch are as varied as all of yours.

I do understand th...

Hiya folks,

We have temporarily disabled Numbani in the Quick Play, Experimental, and Competitive game modes while we investigate an issue. We will provide an update here once we have an ETA on re-enabling the map.

edit 12:30 PM PST: also disabled in Experimental Mode

Already under consideration for the next one.

Thanks for the suggestion

The ExCard is live once again!

It officially released @ 11 AM PST today, however we had a bug that necessitated us pulling it down temporarily. I’ll update ASAP when we have more news.

To provide some additional insight…

• Without being overly pedantic, this ExCard was a result of feedback from both content creators and core players that they’d like to see the ExCard more active, interesting, and fun
• Content creators did a large portion of the work here. Geoff, Josh, and Co. (Hero Balance and Design) gave some guidance, and provided feedback on the proposed changes, however the bulk of the effort came from Flats, Somjuu, and Violet. This means it had a minimal impact on our development and testing schedule. The majority of this work was able to be handled by non-development team.
• On a personal level, I’d love it if we were able to do more of these on a more regular schedule. By keeping them fun, thematic, and over-the-top, we avoid content creators who propose changes getting an undue amount of salt
• If there are content creators you think could bring some pretty cool and creative design ideas to the table, please let us know! We’re measuring how players engage with t...

We ran into some issues with the card that didn’t manifest during testing. We’ve pulled the card down for the moment while we look into it. I’ll update as soon as I have additional info.

I mean, someone asked if we had a secret, private, ExCard. This is neither secret or private

This ExCard was neither secret or private

It just hadn’t been announced yet.

Baja Blast Zero is literally the only reason I go to Taco Bell.

There is no private, secret, clandestine, or even slightly sketch Experimental Card.

Hiya folks,

We’re going to be out of the office all next week (22 Nov - 26 Nov), in celebration of American Thanksgiving. If you celebrate, I hope you have a wonderful holiday with your friends, family, and chosen family. This year, I’m incredibly thankful to our community for supporting our teams, holding our feet to the flame, and loving Overwatch.

This does mean that we’ll likely be radio silent for the most part, barring unforeseen circumstances. I’ll still be checking in on a daily basis, however mostly in a monitoring capacity.

Thank you everyone. Have a happy turkey day.

This was a small patch to fix an issue that was causing client crashes for some players.

Future such articles will be closer to the actual event. We’re a relatively new-ish team (between Jodie and myself), so there’s a lot of processes we’re learning/catching up on.

I covered this previously, however we intentionally hosted this AMA with minimal lead time and promotion. For any future AMAs that are meant for the broader community, or if we decide to host forum specific events, we will promote them accordingly.

The information in this post is pretty well known in the English speaking community. We created this article, and plan on doing similarly for any future AMA’s or Q&A’s, primarily for our non-English speaking regions where it’s more challenging to get details like this.