RT @VonHollde: Face Changer Sombra is done! @PlayOverwatch #OverwatchFanart Now I can breathe again DIOS MIO THIS WAS HAAAARD https://t.co/…
Tomorrow is the eta. Cheers
I’ve seen a lot of discussion about hero bans the past few days and I just wanted to offer some perspective on the topic. As always, the OW has a wide variety of opinions about the concept. Interestingly, we don’t have many people on the team vehemently arguing for the feature. More of us, including myself, are reluctant to add hero bans to Overwatch. As I’ve said before, we’re not of the mindset that we’re opposed to the idea entirely and will never add them. But overall, there are a number of issues that make us want to proceed carefully.
Coming at this from a game design focus, the number one thing we ask is, “what is the problem that we’re trying to solve?” We’re not fans of just adding ideas that are in other games “just because”. We call this bottom-up design. Sometimes the right design decision for one game, is a terrible decision for another game – even if the two games are very similar. For example, with World of Warcraft we did not impose forced grouping, a slow leveling curve and a punishing death penalty with level loss “just because” the other successful MMO’s had those features at the time. And as a player of those other MMO’s, I thought they were the correct decision for those games. But not for WoW.
When I hear why people want hero bans, the conversation usually revolves around a few reasons (I’m sure there are more):
People do not like that the meta stagnates. They believe with hero bans, they will be able to “ban out” the meta heroes thus moving the meta. In general, the meta not moving is perceived by the player-base as bad
People are frustrated with the balance of certain heroes. With hero bans, they feel like they can “ban out” the heroes they are frustrated with
People do not like playing against certain heroes. With hero bans, they feel like they can “ban out” a hero they don’t want to play against
As a team, we agree with and understand that players want the meta to be more fluid and move more frequently. Even though the vast majority of players only experience the meta through OWL, feedback from GM’s, streamers and YouTubers, we get that the perception of a stale meta is not good for the game. We absolutely have plans to help move the meta more and we’ll be talking about these in an upcoming developer update. We get it. We agree. Make the meta move faster. Ok.
But just implementing hero bans does not mean the meta will move. Studying other games, the end result is usually a “ban meta”. The downside of a ban meta, is that players are often at odds with each other when someone on their team bans an “off-ban-meta” hero. The same frustrations that players experience with the meta exist in a ban meta. Hero bans are not a silver bullet solution to making the meta move. If the problem we are trying to solve is that the meta needs to change more, hero bans might actually make the problem worse, not better. We do a have a solution in mind – an actual system – that we’ll talk about (next week’s dev update) but it is not hero bans.
In regards to players wanting to ban for balance reasons, the way we plan to address this is with more frequent balance updates. The upcoming dev update will go in depth into the plan and shed light on how we’re going to accomplish this. So we agree that there are balance issues. We agree balancing needs to happen more frequently. We disagree that hero bans are a good solution to balance problems. To us, removing a hero from play because of balance reasons feels like a sledgehammer.
The other reason I listed was that people do not like playing against certain heroes. To this, I am going to give an answer that is not going to be very popular. Basically, it’s a PvP game. You don’t get to pick what the enemy team does. The challenge is overcoming the enemy team with teamwork, ingenuity and skill. It feels really off to me that the other team dictates how or what I play. So if your reason is that you don’t want to play against certain heroes, I think we’ll agree to disagree on this point. We’ve changed out minds in the past. But that’s where we’re at for now.
I hear a lot of people attack hero bans because they only want to play one hero, or “one trick”… To this, I think our stance is pretty clear. Overwatch is a game about mastering many heroes. We don’t expect you to master them all, but you should play a few of the characters. Now, we don’t explicitly prevent you from only playing one hero. But we also don’t encourage it. We think the game is more fun for everyone involved if you play at least a handful of the heroes. That’s how the game is designed. So defending “one tricking” does not factor in for us when it comes to our opinion on hero bans. We want the meta to move more and one tricking contributes to meta issues. Again, we’re not against one-tricking but we’re not going to overly enable or encourage it. That’s our stance.
There are a few other reasons, we’re reluctant to pursue hero bans at this time as well. We’ve been really pushing for faster match times (there’s a lot going on under the hood on this one). Our philosophy is the game is better if you have quicker matches. The sting of defeat is much less if the match took less time. We’re constantly talking about ways to speed up rounds of OW to allow you to play more. Introducing a “ban phase” to the start of every OW round would add significant time. Your overall time spent on an average night of OW actually shooting stuff would be less. This concerns us a lot. There is also a huge development cost to adding the feature as well (the time commitment would be significant). This last reason is not the one that’s driving our decision making. If we thought it was right for the game (like with Role Queue) we would absolutely make the investment.
I’m looking forward to sharing next week’s development update with you all… I think it will clarify things a bit. But in the meantime, I wanted to tell you where we’re at with hero bans specifically since so much misinformation is being spread right now. I hope those of you in favor of the system don’t go too “doomsday” over this news without having the full picture. Information will be available next week on the plan to balance faster and keep the meta moving. We agree on the problems. That’s the important thing.
Let’s up the tempo. Get in the rhythm as Samul Nori Lucio (Legendary)! Overwatch’s Year of the Rat celebrations a… https://t.co/PKkTdSpBID
RT @mikekoizumi: Excited to share some storyboards I did for Overwatch: Zero Hour. I worked alongside @BFDbdai (director), Mio Del Rosario…
Congrats on the Victory!
For folks who stumble upon this thread, the network icons that appear on the left give the clues to what is happening here. We have some detail about what they mean in a support article.
Hopefully things cleared up naturally, but if not, head over to our tech forums and hopefully we can help out.
Cheers
@wahoob95 💛
@LebronNew Hope you get it too!
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. Dance over your enemies as Mask Dancer Moira (Legendary)! Overwatch’s Year o… https://t.co/9Tdx5rtug9
This bug requires a matching client and server update, we’re hoping to release it late this week. For a bug fix release where we do both client and server it’s important we get all major issues resolved for the update because of how the console certification process works.
Sorry this one isn’t as fast as we’d like to turn it around. Cheers.
Hey there, Overwatch 2 will ship on all platforms that we already ship Overwatch on. No need to worry. Cheers
Hey there sorry we haven’t communicated out about this bug yet. We’re working on a fix for the bug and working to repair accounts that were affected. No eta but we’re actively working on it.
Hey all!
In the most recent patch, we added a feature to the live game that changed the player death camera behavior to pan towards the player that just killed you. Previously, this was a quick snap. Our intention for changing the camera behavior is to make it easier to quickly tell at a glance if the person that killed you was behind you or to your side. Unfortunately, we’ve received feedback that this addition is causing motion sickness for some of our players. In an effort to address this, we’re working on a “Snap Death Camera to Killer” toggle option in the Gameplay options menu that will allow players to disable this feature. We expect this update to be coming soon - please keep an eye on patch notes for more information.
As always, thank you for the feedback!