RT @BlizzardCS: [#Overwatch] Due to a bug, players may not receive credit for Junkenstein's Revenge in the Halloween Terror event. More det…

This is an interesting point actually, what would you say is this most useful form of feedback in your opinion?

Sharing your own personal experience with the topic is always the most useful feedback we can receive. Tell us what’s causing friction, how it’s affecting your play experience, how it makes you feel.

We can pull numbers until we’re red in the face. Anecdotal feedback about player experience provides said numbers with context that’s impossible to quantify.

Hiya folks,

This issue is also is listed in the known issues thread found here

We are aware of an issue that is causing players to sometimes not receive credit for completing Junkenstein’s Revenge challenges. The team is actively working on a fix for this issue, which we expect to deploy in our next update. Until that time, we recommend supplementing your games played by playing additional matches in other modes.

We are working on a solution to ensure that all affected players receive their event rewards.

but this feels like message is in a way (and i dont mean to look mean or anything, i appreicate your communication!) propagating the fallacious sentiment that Overwatch forums are more toxic than reddit

A few thoughts on this

• with rare exception, I don’t believe that any community is wholesale more or less toxic than any other community. People are people, and people have complicated personal experiences. Everyone has bad days.
• Even communities as amazing as the Overwatch community go through difficult times. It’s 100% understandable that extended gaps in communication and engagement would manifest itself in ways that, on the surface, make it look like it’s a “toxic” space.
• As the team for whom the forums is a valuable community resource, it’s on us to help foster the kind of environment that’s a value add for both players and developers alike.

Different CMs will approach it in different ways. Personally, I appreciate the fact that we’re able to have a straightforward conversation about forum sentiment, and that I’m able to provide additional context to my presence in the community.

Your willingess to respond on the forums is already a great leap forward and things have been getting better.

I’m normally loathe to call attention to praise, however I think it’s important for you all to know that I see this and have been paying attention. I am confident that together we’re on a path to making the forums a better experience.

If you don’t mind me asking, how specifically do you plan to tackle this?

By doing exactly what I’m doing in this thread

Fair, but even then, you’d just restructure that to looking for feedback on general sentiment about the hero.

I.e. Something to guide a lot of feedback about the qualitative aspects of how the hero feels to play as and play against.

Focused feedback threads are something I can take into consideration. Normal caveats, no promises.

I tend to try to observe and be a participant in community conversation rather than leading it. I am self aware enough to understand that my presence in a thread is a way of guiding or leading community conversation, however I’d rather create space for players to help identify the best moments to jump in.

Well, maybe try posting targeted “brain storming” posts.

Like “We are looking for ideas to implement Doomfist as a Tank. We’d like to ask the community to suggest some ideas that would fit well. If it’s a really great idea, it might even end up in the game, or inspire an even better version of that idea.

This is actually the least useful kind of feedback for almost any development process. Jumping straight to the solution without having a thorough understanding of the root cause of friction minimizes the role of designers and can often lead to “fixes” that don’t take in the full width and breadth of a given area of frustration.

We do love to see player inspired designs and ideas. We tend to contextualize them in the same way we do fanart or cosplay.

It’s amazing to me how often stuff gets said that shouldn’t have to be said….

I often times find that the things that shouldn’t have to be said need to be said more frequently, if only to effectively manage expectations.

Why can’t devs engage here were most of ow players are present.

There’s a general rule of thumb that’s known by most community professionals:

• Less than 10% of all players will ever even look at your forums or owned channels

• Of that 10%, less than 10% will ever be an active participant in the conversation on these owned channels

It’s important to understand that this in no way diminishes the usefulness of community discussion hubs (like forums). Forums serve as a microcosm of the larger OW community, representing viewpoints from many different segments of players; casual, what we call “Core Players”, competitive players, representation from marginalized groups such as BIPOC or LGBTQIA+, the list goes on.

Like I said previously in other threads, the current state and sentiment of the boards is our responsibility, and improving the general tone and tenor of dialog here is one of my top current priorities.

To be clear: as a community professional, I have a responsibility to both the development team and the players to ensure that any conversation we’re facilitating is productive and as free from hostility as possible. While I understand the sentiment that we should “rise above” vitriol and toxic comments, I will not knowingly put developers in a situation where they could be exposed to high amounts of toxicity that ultimately ends up muddying the original message and conversation, just as I would not knowingly impose such a conversation upon any of you.

I think most of you know this about me, but I love the Overwatch community. This game has held a special place for me since before launch. It’s a game I play regularly with my kids, and like many of you, it’s where I spend time with friends and loved ones. I believe that the OW community is an amazing, supportive, and passionate group of players. Players who want to feel better informed about the development of the game they love so much.

As a Community Manager, I’ve spent my career managing the rigors of player sentiment and conversation. I understand the toll that this works takes on the mental health and well being of those who spend any amount of time interfacing directly with community.

@luka7doncic 👋

@JoeyStraight5 https://t.co/NgQEVK6Jvc

@BumberDavid We asked the artist who designed this skin and they said "I'll take the answer to my grave." 💀 Your guess is as good as mine.

Stylosa did but it was a 45 minute Youtube video that I’m not sure anyone wanted to sit through lol

For those that are interested, I recommend watching Stylosa’s breakdown. It’s a great synopsis of the AMA presented in a format you can have on in the background while listening to.

Would it be possible to hold future AMAs / Q & As at a slightly different time? Like the AMA in May.
When the AMA started, almost all of Europe was already in bed. in England it was 11 p.m., in Germany and France it was even midnight.

To be transparent with you: it’s challenging to schedule these earlier in the day due to the rigors of day to day development. Later in the afternoon is easier, with folks having more open schedules around then.

That said, it’s a point of feedback that I’m happy to take into consideration.

Might I suggest putting a thread here specifically for questions for developers, not discussion, that the devs can answer the ones they can at a time convenient to them. Or you can bring the good questions for them…

We’ll eventually get to the point where we can host a Q&A here in the forums. I still need to spend some more time on the boards, working with all of you, to create an environment that would lead to a productive session for all involved.

Might make it easier for you to keep communication open without having to slog through 100 threads to find valuable questions.

Absolutely, however I do want to acknowledge the intrinsic value of us actually responding to player lead conversation. The ultimate goal should always be for us to be a part of the conversation, not necessarily always leading it.

I wanted to ask if it’s possible to announce these AMA’s in the future in the Forum too? I missed it, cause I wasn’t awake and didn’t followed the Competitive Overwatch Reddit

For future AMA’s it’s likely.

For this one, we specifically targeted the r/Competitiveoverwatch subreddit with minimal lead up in an effort to garner high quality questions, giving Geoff and Josh the chance to provide meaningful answers to hot questions in the community right now.

Thank you for putting all of this together Baja.

We hope everyone found the contents of yesterday’s AMA informative and useful

Missing this would be a grave mistake. ⚰️ Knock 'em dead as Coffin Bastion (Legendary). Overwatch Halloween Terro… https://t.co/2tUd1eNFu9

if it was still 6v6 and he was a off tank i can kinda see it? my guess is that hes going to use his CC to push enemies into bad positons or something.

Yep, this can still be a big part of his kit. For example, one thing we're testing is for Rocket Punch to create an area knockback around a target he impacts, creating a new ability to knock multiple enemies away (or into walls!).

i just hope i can still do rollouts and stuff because that is what made doomfist challenging and very fun to play.

Doomfist's high mobility is a huge part of his kit and that's not going to change. In fact, its part of what makes him potentially a good tank, being able to initiate fights for your team.

if he doesnt work as a tank in ow2 is he going to remain as a DPS with the same kit?

This is tricky tbh. In a world where almost all crowd control has been removed from non-tanks, Doomfist would be a huge outlier. Maybe there is a world where he can still exist as a DPS with less displacement and crowd control effects, but it would certainly be a challenge to make that work.

Was there any feedback from the pros playing the playtest that you didnt expect? Is there any you are already planning on acting on?

Yep, we had a good mix of things we expected and things we didn't expect. Probably the biggest surprise for me was just how good they thought Sombra was in this iteration. We had been playtesting those changes for at least a few weeks and while she felt strong, she never really felt like she taking over our games or anything.

Obviously when you get her in the hands of pros with amazing game sense and coordination it makes confirming kills a lot easier. We've since focused a bit on her numbers and tweaked her down a bit to try to keep her under control while still allowing her new kit to play well.

Finally, theres been a bit of talk about Zarya's bubble cooldown in OW2 as it exists now. Has there been any talks of potential changes to this, such as an async cooldown for each bubble?

I think there is a good amount of iteration to still be done with Zarya. I think Josh already touched on some Zarya stuff in another thread but I would definitely say she is not set in stone. She was always going to be a bit tricky to tweak in this 5v5 environment and im sure she'll see some more changes over time.