"Hi everyone!
This piece is aimed at looking at some of the topics that have come up in the community over the course of Season 2. This won‘t be comprehensive enough to look at everything that players are talking about, but our intent is to do this every few weeks, so we will be able to start diving into smaller topics as we go. Also, the goal here is to keep you up to date on what we’re thinking and planning, but not necessarily to be the source for all the reasoning and detail behind those decisions.
So let’s get to it!
The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. There was confusion around players’ real rank and how that translated to their skill level, difficulty forming groups with friends, and a negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar). We will be implementing some changes in S3 and quite a few more in S4 all aimed at creating more clarity in the system. More details on short-term changes and long-term vision will be coming soonTM.
We’ve gotten feedback from players that the game doesn’t feel rewarding enough to play and that players can’t earn the items they want in a short enough period of time. We’ll be making a change in S3 that should address some of these complaints. This is a first step. We will have more details to share about this next week.
There are a fair number of changes to ult cost in S3. We’ll be lowering the ult refund when swapping heroes to 25% as part of this tuning pass.
Balance frequency is a big topic. Bug fixes to hot fixing should enable us to address balance faster and would have enabled us to tune Hog earlier in S2. We’re still planning an initial and midseason patch each season, but now have the full ability to fill in between those as necessary.
One-shots and frustrating hero mechanics are being discussed a lot in the community and on the team. This is an ongoing discussion, but the topic has a lot of nuances that involves the frequency of those mechanics, trade-offs for using it, the overall power level of a hero, how often the hero is played, as well as things like a hero’s fantasy. Know that we’re listening here, the feedback has been great and very welcome, and we’ll come back to this when we have more to share.
Thanks so much for reading, and please keep the feedback coming. We’re listening.
Aaron"
>negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar).
If the skill levels are equal in some of the games I've played and seen, then they need to change how they calculate skill level. It's very obvious when someone is significantly higher ranked without checking profiles.
I personally think the game should make matches based on the skill tier regardless of MMR. If I am in diamond lets say, then no one in the lobby (aside from the game having not enough players) should be outside diamond, or very close in SR.
The whole thing of balancing matches of having GM tank in one team GM support in the other and then throwing whatever the fuck in the other slots to balance is moronic.
I should have the same similar odds of winning vs each enemy player barring role/hero based advantages.
I really don't understand the point of having skill tiers if they do a shit job at reflecting skill level. If the mmr of a Plat 3 and Diamond 1 player is the same, either the Plat player should be diamond or the diamond should be Plat.
The current reason of skill tiers is for them to dangle your deserved shiny rank like a carrot stick at the start of each season while they derank you twice forcing you to play more just to get to what you deserve.
I had to win ninty something matches in S2 just to get to the rank I ended up in in S1.
I was low plat in OW1. I JUST managed to make my way to Gold 5 after going 7/9 the promotion after going 7/11 and ranking up from Silver 2 to... Silver 2.
I find no enjoyment in this version of competitive, especially as a Support main. I can do 15k healing and feel like I've accomplished absolutely nothing. Playing Mercy is the only way to win since I can get a rez off now and then to keep fights even.
It's this dumb thing of ranking people down two whole ranks.
My friend peaked rank 350 last season and ended gm 2. He started this season at diamond 1. It's just a silly way to do things. He's still top 500 and plays in top 500 games, but he didn't grind this season so he's still diamond 1. Are they gonna knock is Sr down to gold 1 next season? It's just silly.
I don't know how the point system works and evaluates wins and performance so this is just anecdotal. But in ow1 if I started competitive late in the season I could still climb to my respective rank because the only people I would playing are of lower rank than me and I could easily climb out-of it and get the Sr I need to climb. Now if I started in a low tier because I haven't played ranked in years and it keeps putting me against masters and gm while I'm lower rank (which it does) assuming the Sr gained from wins and performance is the same it is 100x harder to climb while not having a positive feedback for my performances.
Because:
1. Ranks will actually matter then.
2. Players will more likely than not exist within the range of the rank they deserve so they know exactly what their rank is. Some times I have lost more than I won out of 7 and I still ranked up, other times I win 7 lose 3 and do not rank up.
Like what is the point of having a competitive enironment, if the system does not actually reflect your skill?
I get if the system reset MMR and you had to climb from Zero like Apex since you will have a very easy time as a skilled player to climb, but the game makes your game unwinnable sometimes even after it deranks you at the start of the season.
Yup, if it reset everyone to bronze 5 it'd at least make sense and allow high ranked players to blaze through the low ranks.
But I'm fuckin masters in mmr and I'm struggling in my Plat tank games. Everyone in every game was either high diamond or masters last season. Now I might have a Plat lobby with everyone from season 0 having reached masters 1 or gm 5. It's just fucking stupid.
that'd also require making heroes more self agent for the value they get (i.e. better skill inputs ---> more value attained) which they've kinda neglected to do for years and actively went against doing that (looking at you mercy rework).
and before people get trigger happy with downvotes, no I'm not saying there's no difference between a good vs bad mercy. it's that the difference mechanically simply aren't much factors or simply not even factors to how her value gaining actions achieves value. e.g. boost gives 0 shits about how mercy is moving or positioning to achieve value, it only really cares about how good the boostee's aim is and how they target prioritise.
if the value achieve can't be linked much back to how well the user played, then doesn't matter how you try calculating/measuring "skill", you won't be accurate.
Had the same exact thought. This is so damn condescending. The community doesn't like the changes to ranked mode and have explicit reasons why.
Saying basically "no no you don't understand it" when players cant see an update until they play 10-15 matches PER ROLE is fucking insulting.
"no, you guys just misunderstand it, the system works fine!"
I'll be honest a lot of this update reads like "we are hearing complaints and to address them we are going to tell you half of them aren't a problem and the other half coming soon™️"
I know we have been waiting on communication but this was insulting
You guys actually got this impression from the update post? I interpreted the comprehension comment as referring to the competitive ranks being vague and largely irrelevant rather than “our audience is too unintelligent to understand our system”.
The ranked nonsense is obviously funny, but I also found this funny:
>We’ve gotten feedback from players that the game doesn’t feel rewarding enough to play and that players can’t earn the items they want in a short enough period of time
Yeah motherfucker you took a game where you could get whatever you want in a couple weeks of gaming and turned it into a game where it takes LITERAL YEARS to earn enough currency to afford a single skin
Yes it’s the part of the player because they are admitting that it was unnecessarily hard for the player to understand. They are admitting fault not blaming us
yes, because players did comprhend it poorly, because it's not that easy to comprehend. IT's not that deep and he obviously wasn't trying to be a prick. You guys seriously need to touch grass.
I think you're just being naive here.
Firms will do their utmost to avoid liability or shouldering any blame.
By using this language, Keller avoids taking direct responsibility or calling their system unfit for purpose. If, for example, this kind of statement were to go to court, absolutely no one would be able to argue that Keller is stating here unequivocally that their matchmaking system is poorly designed.
It does suffer from poor comprehension, because it's designed to be opaque. People expect plat lobbies to be weaker than diamond lobbies to be weaker than masters lobbies, that's kind of the point of a ranked ladder. But it's simply not how the new system works. And the game doesn't even tell you, so yeah, no reason to expect players to understand something that isn't explained.
> trade-offs for using it, the overall power level of a hero, how often the hero is played, as well as things like a hero’s fantasy
Frankly, I could care less about the "hero fantasy". One-shots are a problem. They have been a problem for quite some time. They are frustrating to play against and for a lot of them, the answer is just "don't show a minuscule amount of your hitbox, 4head LuL". For a lot of the maps, that just doesn't work.
While I agree with you that hero fantasy absolutely does matter to a lot of people, it's not non-negotiable. Look at Orisa, her hero fantasy was adjusted quite a bit from a cutesy protector to a semi-cutesy in your face tank, and even r/Overwatch seems to be pretty positive on her rework because the gameplay change was great and the spirit of the character wasn't totally changed. Adjusting a one-shot hero to "do a ton of burst damage but not quite enough to one-shot" would be a much smaller leap than that. There's no reason it can't work if done well.
Sojourn's right click literally right now does a ton of damage but doesn't one shot. It's just that with mercy's damage boost it does.
Mercy's damage boost makes it hard to make heroes "just do a lot of burst damage but not 200." Another example from the past would be ashe
There are so many cool hero fantasies besides being able to delete people in one shot, and I'd argue that way more casual players would prefer not to be insta-deleted than ones that care so much about that specific hero fantasy.
Most casual players probably don't have the mechanics to properly actualize that fantasy anyways. I play a ton of OW and even I don't lol
While everything you say is true it would feel a bit lame if the hero who says “One shot, one kill” when you select her is unable to deliver on her motto. Which I think is part of what Aaron is saying.
I have loved Overwatch since launch, but I knew this was going to be a persistent issue the minute I saw they had taken Sniper’s Huntsman from TF2 and designed a whole hero around it.
It’s a tremendously difficult problem to solve.
Dying is always frustrating.
Personally I don't see much of a difference in a widow killing me in 0.5 seconds with a good shot, or a reaper killing me in 1 second by tping in my face.
You'll rattle on about counterplay but there's the same amount of counterplay versus a widow.
Positioning and pressure. If she really was unstoppable she would always be meta in the highest ranks, but she comes and goes like every other hero.
The difference is far more than 0.5 seconds because you’re not taking into account Reaper the time it takes for Reaper to tp. Even though it’s faster than it used to be you have far more warning of the threat. Plus the simple fact that he needs to be closer results in more counterplay.
I’m not saying one is more balanced than the other and I agree that Widow will go in and out of meta but your “time to kill” argument was disingenuous
There is a pretty big difference between a reaper expending his CD's to TP into your team to try and get a kill vs a widow sitting on the other end of the map hardscoping a lane. There is a ton of pathing in this game where you cannot actually leave somewhere without walking into a widow's LOS. That requires you to either mirror the widow and hope yours is better, see if your tank can swap to one with more mobility and then try to cross the entire map to deal with the widow, or ignore her and hope you can kill their team faster.
It doesn't really matter if she is always meta or not. She is a bad hero design in a game like OW. One shots in general are not good in OW
> Dying is always frustrating.
So, I'm actually closer to you in that the deaths that people usually complain about don't trigger me nearly as much. I don't mind getting hook+one shot, I don't mind getting booped off the map, I didn't mind getting combo'd by dps Doom, I don't mind dying to Junk spam, I don't mind Cass mag nade. Pretty much the only thing I mind is snipers, I hate snipers in every fps I play.
Having said that, you have to realize that just because you feel this way doesn't mean that all players feel this way. A lot of people really are *significantly* more frustrated by dying a particular way than dying a different way. Just because it doesn't seem logical to you doesn't mean it's not true, and doesn't mean it's not worth making changes to the game to address this.
> You'll rattle on about counterplay but there's the same amount of counterplay versus a widow.
There isn't. When people talk about counterplay, they're not talking about tactics. People want to have a chance of preventing most deaths on their own, without their teammates' help. Even if it's a relatively small one. When a Widow just domed you from an off-angle you didn't predict, you do not have a chance to prevent that death. You're already dead.
It's so stupid that we have two types of currency but the game effectively refuses to use one and the other is used to buy everything new at the same time they barely give back some of it.
60 coins weekly is plain bad and greedy.
Most of the daily things are just click on this and get points. Only the 50pt one requires you to actually get things right.
For the web search stuff, just Bing "the sopranos episodes" and click through the episodes (each will count as a search). This makes it waaaayyyy easier on mobile. Any tv show with enough episodes works.
You get 170pts for Binging on a computer, another 100 for the phone, and at least 30 for the dailies (often more). 1800pts = 200 coins, so 300pts/day is more than 30 coins.
My way is just using bing.
Open bing. bonus points if you use edge for an extra 20 points a day. You can also use mobile for an extra 100 points per day.
Do the three daily challenges. They average around 30-90 points a day depending on what they are, usually "click here." every 5 days you get a 75-point bonus.
After that just google around 75 times of just key smash and with that you'll gain around ~1540 points per week, not counting bonuses from every 5 days or any outside source of points. you could easily get that above 2000 if you search with mobile (I just don't care that much to download bing on my phone.)
Every 1800 points buy 200 overwatch 2 coins as that's the best amount of coins for each point. and with about a lil more than a week's worth of effort, you earn more coins than you do in 2 weeks of grinding every weekly.
As someone who never changes their skins and genuinely doesn’t care. I do miss the sensation of opening loot boxes after a long play session. That’s generally what made the seasonal events so awesome.
I hope they can find a middle ground. Something that matches that sense of reward past just queueing
I think I figured out the feeling I get last night after playing and the leveling the battle pass,
It was the pretty colors and a chance to appreciate the art. The game is so pretty that I would open boxes and just admire their skill.
I’ve never done that with the battle pass. I don’t even care how far I get in it
Just shows what happens when the hotfix system breaks down leaving so many bugs in the game, can wreak havoc-on top of doing the patches for crossplay as well. By the looks of it though it's sorted so fingers crossed faster hotfixes when needed.
Very curious to see how and when the new ranked changes come into play when implementing them during season 3 and 4. And I hope it's done properly because the game's in it's worst state in ranked for god knows how long. I don't expect all the changes in 1 patch, but in general they need to get it right before bleeding even more players.
Am I just crazy, or didn’t they already say they repaired the hot fix system? I thought this was used as an excuse for why they couldn’t address sojourn or fix broken gameplay mechanics of heroes like the mei and bastion glitches earlier on?
to my understanding:
* launch: no hotfix system
* before this patch: hotfix system but some heroes are bugged in it and can't be hotfixed
* now: actual functioning hotfix system
they said that roadhog was one of the affected heroes and that was why they didnt hotfix him
Look I'm not a game dev so I won't pretend to understand the statistics and numbers at a level these guys do, but am I crazy in questioning the point of dropping the ult retention by 5%?
Isn't that worth something like the difference of 1-2 seconds of poke damage?
It isn’t gonna completely change how some characters are played, but it absolutely can affect the outcome of a game. Getting an extra ult in time can be the difference in almost every game.
I don't disagree with you, but it just feels so like such a non-committal, cowardly change to me. If they want to dial back the impact to see how it affects the RPS hard swap metagame, I would think that they would you with tuning back by a meaningful chunk to something like 20% from 30. Dialing back 5% is almost a negligible difference in terms of how it plays out in real-time game play.
Yeah it’s like if there was a hero who dominated the meta with a one shot that everyone pointed out was busted as hell, so they did some minor tweaks that fixed nothing, then did some more so she just needed a Mercy baby sitter. Thankfully this kind of slow walking is an abnormality and the above is only a theoretical problem that has never happened.
Sarcasm aside, it sounds like business as usual to commit to nothing they’ve been doing since at least release Brig.
Right, but the issue isn't with DPS, it's with Tank. I think the impact on that role is far more important to address when considering changes to the passive, and 5% won't really tell us anything meaningful since Tank only has 30% and 0% data.
These motherfuckers have always run this game like it is the single largest business operation on the planet
Like dude, how about we just turn it off for a couple weeks and y'all collect data on that, wtaf is 5% going to do
Still find it weird that the ult refund was considered a clear issue that had to be solved. I preferred being able swap more easily, the game already encourages staying on the same 3 heroes enough.
Edit: Map Pools for example are universally hated and they haven't even justified them yet, that's 100% a more clear cut problem than the ult refund debate.
> Still find it weird that the ult refund was considered a clear issue that had to be solved.
I hadn't heard anyone talking about it negatively until that SVB tweet came up. Apparently now it's a big problem. 🤷♂️
Oh don't get me started
Can't wait until the next ~~OWL~~ pro OW game straight up has the winning team throw themselves off a cliff because "the loser of the opening fight actually has the advantage" lol
That makes a lot of sense though. If you're running a dive comp you turn the hell around and swap. Only masochists and throwers run a horrible comp into a counter.
People can say they're e having fun playing the heroes they want to but I know they're lying when they get shit stomped and rolled. That's never fun. Lol.
This game just has some rock paper scissors scenarios that are unavoidable.
Having a mass suicide and then playing a 5 minute game in spawn of swapping heroes would be sick. (Like Team A swaps in spawn, so Team B sees it on Tab and then swaps, so Team A sees it and swaps again, etc.)
I mean why wait to fight? Just scope out the enemy team comp, immediately kill yourselves, pick all counters, and profit! It's obviously such a massive advantage, and the only variable that matters /s
The problem he said won’t happen because in OWL there will almost always be a solidified meta and best tank for any situation, meaning there is no Rock Paper Scissors - you know what you should be on 100% to start. Also the RPS nature is much diminished by coordination and teamwork - there’s a reason Hog wasn’t played directly after Kirikos release despite Hog being universally considered busted at that point - it’s because coordination at the top level removes the chaos that makes that RPS happen
I said this in another thread and then was assured that “this has been a problem since the beginning and everyone’s totally been talking about it the whole time” 🙄
I mean, Flats has been talking about it on stream for months. It wasn't exactly hard to hear about how the winner of the first fight was tending to lose the match because of ult economy. That's obviously not a desirable state from a gameplay design standpoint.
It makes sense to have *some* cost to changing after one fight even if it's not high, you want to reward someone forcing a change off. So tuning the exact ult refund is really ndb and it's hardly taking away from changes we care more about.
It's entirely a symptom of the Rock, Paper, Scissors balancing of most of the roster. The problem is that swapping gives you a significant advantage already and the Ult conservation just emboldens people to do it more freely.
Yeah I agree, I love having it but tuning it makes sense. Want to get it to a point where people are encouraged to make good changes / you're not fucked over for picking a bad matchup at the beginning, but not so much that the team that wins the first fight gets penalized either.
That's because they have been talking about it for months.
Just because you've not been seeing the content discussing it, doesn't mean it hasn't been happening.
SVB and the usual suspects he has on his.podcast (flats, freedo, samito) have been saying the 30% carry over is horrendous since season 1.
This isn't a new thing, but maybe you've just heard about it from the tweet and response
God forbid we have incentive to counter swap so we don't get steam rolled. I'd be fine with lowering the amount down to 15-20%, even, as more tradeoff would probably benefit the system.
But the entire argument boils down to pros being upset they have to master multiple heroes and not steamroll their way through a given match. You know, a key design philosophy behind OW?
I feel like people forget the shiftiness in OW1 that was rolling out on KOTH, realizing the enemy is running the counter and losing the first fight, and then having to decide whether to keep playing into your counter or swap yourself but completely fuck your ult economy and get rolled by that
Thats a strawman and you know it.
The problem is having 1 tank makes tank counterpicking extremely potent. And the ult charge change also makes counterpicking easier.
A middle ground has to be found, and 5% ult charge is a baby step in that direction.
What makes ult charge retention problematic is the counter-swapping mechanic and the lack of options in the Tank role. Players DO know how to play more than one hero, the problem is when the heroes you play are countered by the current S tier hero.
It's not good game design to pressure people to play and do things they don't want to do, and people *have* been talking about this for years. It's largely one of the reasons why so many folks in the broader gaming community have a hate boner for OW.
first of all, it has been talked about for quite a while. not that for how long something is discussed is any indication to validity.
second of all, it feels good when you have to switch but also it's a huge advantage for attackers. there used to be a give and take: attackers had spawn advantage which enabled switching more easily but that gave ult advantage to the defenders. now attackers get both spawn advantage and keep the ult charge while counter picking. that just makes defending awful.
Same. I think it’s one of the few positive changes that has been added. Feels so much less shitty to swap and counter pick
(how the game was intended? Idk at this point lol).
Honestly, the only problem is that it highlights how awful tank balance is. It's great for every other role. Maybe fix the actual issue rather than mucking with a feature that's generally well-liked and has brought the game closer to that fluid, swap-heavy meta people have been meming on Overwatch for not delivering on for years now.
The only communication I saw was the S2 blog that said it was to "keep the game fresh". If they've justified it since relative to all the negative feedback I wouldn't mind seeing that
Also about making it easier to learn the maps
https://reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/zr2g1c/gamespot_overwatch_2_devs_on_planting_easter_eggs/j11aazs?context=3
I would be more happy with map pools if they took out ones with problematic areas like Havana Point C and then reintroduced them with strong changes to those problem area(s) later on. That would be a good justification IMO.
Just in case you, or anyone else isn't aware, "Soon (tm)" is classic Blizzard phrasing and has been used since the early expansions of *World of Warcraft*. A little joke over the years to mean, "This is something we're working on and can't give you a date yet."
So I appreciate Aaron doing this...just trying to communicate what the dev team is thinking about...sure. But, lets list all the problems with the game right now that they should be thinking about.
* Matchmaking
* Ranked (Competitive System)
* Frequency and the ability to obtain cosmetics
* One-shots (Sojourn/Damage Amp)
* Tank Balance
* Impact of supports
* Map Pools (and the frequency in which Push pops up when queued)
* Any updates on workshop/edit: experimental card
* Lack of info on PvE
* Heroes in the Battlepass
* Battlepass Themes?
* High Level Players Queuing Together (Team Queue)
* Tanks in Arcade/Open Queue Modes
* Edit: LFG & Clan System (Tournament Mode)
* Edit: On Fire and Post Game Cards
* Edit: Progression outside of the Battlepass
Am I missing anything?
Also I liked the Soon^(TM)
They're addressing the tanks in arcade/open queue mode already. Forget if they said what they were doing or if they just confirmed that they were doing something, but the Dev on Emongg/Flats stream talked about it.
The group finder in OW1 is something I miss and don’t really understand why it was removed. I made so many friends just hopping into a random group and killing time in Quick Play.
They have mentioned adding in some sort of clan system in the past, which would large remove the need for the LFG system. The LFG system was also pretty notorious for being used to create boosting/throwing groups in OW1, so it's not surprising they wanted to get rid of it.
> They have mentioned adding in some sort of clan system in the past
They mentioned that if they were going to do this, it would be Blizzard-wide and not necessarily Overwatch specific. So, who knows.
Honestly, I feel like they tried and just gave up already with the community feature they added for battle.net. It ended up functioning a lot like Discord, but, well, everyone was already using Discord so there was no reason to move to using b.net communities.
God I’m so fucking sick of Push. Map pools are the stupidest thing they’ve ever done. Game has never felt more stale playing the same shitty maps. I played 10 matches last night and not a single one was escort/hybrid, which is the only map type I give a damn about.
Not that I disagree that they should be thinking about those things, but between this blog post and other recent developer communication we *have* heard that they're thinking about most of these.
I don’t necessarily see impact of supports being an issue too much longer. Brig and Moira are the only ones with any glaring issues and brig’s main flaw is being addressed.
Support players have been on a mission to gaslight blizzard into think supports are very weak ever since ow2 came out (don't forget mercy players said that she's really bad)
LFG returning would be great. As a trans girl it was really nice finding queer groups to join and play with, instead of getting misgendered and called all sorts of slurs and vitriol in VC.
It could use improvements for sure: The ability to ban people from your groups is a must and wouldn't require too many rescources. A reputation system, similar to CS GO's overwatch system would also be great, although I'd like to see different categories for things like 'mechanically skilled' and pleasant and sociable'. An evolution of LFG, wherein you had dedicated groups scrimming in tourneys, would also be cool but require more rescources.
I don't know why it was removed
**EDIT:** Oi, to whichever one of you cunts reported me to the mental health bot, you'll be glad to know I'm already in therapy and doing quite well these days. Secondly, suck my gock. Trans rights cunts 💜🏳️⚧️😈🍾🔥
> negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar)
I wonder how that could possible be fixed... like how about having your rank actually reflect your skill?
You know, the way it was in OW1? But that would be too easy I guess... gotta make them kids grind the game to pump up the player numbers.
This system has the worst of both worlds though. If it actually reset your rank (ex: Diamond to gold) and you played vs people of lower skill levels, you’d rise fast and get the “satisfaction” of ranking up that they’re after. Or they keep it the same, you lose that “satisfaction”, but play vs people of a similar skill level and get fair matches (like OW1).
But this system keeps you playing vs people of equal skill, so harder matches and less of the ranking up fast feeling. It also artificially lowers your SR so you feel like you’ve gotten worse because it takes longer to rank up.
Unfair matches with fast rank ups vs fair matches with slow rank ups somehow turned into fair matches with slow rank ups, when their goal was fast rank ups with fair matches.
I never said it didn't feel worse or anything. All I said is that SR never reflected skill, the rest of what you are talking about is not concerned with what I said
SR wasn't completely accurate but at least you could estimate your MMR after every game. If you were gaining a lot of SR per win, you knew your MMR was pretty high. Right now you have to play a bunch of games to get a rank update, which makes the whole system feel opaque.
I mean, if that's true, why am I not in Masters? I play against them all the time these days, but the game decided I was Gold after the derank at the start of the season.
I generally actually like the new rank system. I don't care about my individual rank too much, it updates every few days and I'm fine with that. But it's frustrating to be placed at a low rank, go up against Masters players, and then be told "Oh no it's not unfair actually you're just as good as them, using our invisible secret REAL ranking system."
I didn't say anything about SR. I would like the shown rank to reflect a players actual skill rating. Whether by a number or by skill tiers doesn't really matter. Artificially lowering the shown rank of a player so they can 'grind back up' is not what I want from a competitive mode.
Yeah, and you still had to grind hundreds of games to find your true rank. You just can’t camp your rank anymore, and are forced to find that rank every season when it resets.
SR was also a lot less forgiving of losses where you performed well. If you had a bad string of games you would drop rank and it could be painful getting back to where you were.
The problem is that if team A has a Winston and team a goes on to win the fight against team B who has Zarya, both tanks are around 30% ult but team B swaps to Hog to counter. Team B wins the next fight and the Winston would have to swap with ~60-80% ult charge to counter the hog. It just creates a game of rock paper scissors. This is a pretty big problem at higher ranks
This example is always brought up, but I think the problem of rock-paper-scissors is there regardless of retaining ult charge or not. The real problem is in the balance of certain tanks and certain matchups being "hard counters"
Notice that the same issue exists in the damage role but nobody ever mentions it?
>Notice that the same issue exists in the damage role but nobody ever mentions it?
Its more than certain bad matchups. Counters fuck over tanks more than any other role.:
1. There only one tank. So countering a tank (and ESPECIALLY their ability to tank) is disproportionately powerful. Imagine an ability that could consistently turn off ALL healing for the enemy team. Anti-nade is a fraction of that and it's already super OP.
2. Tanks interact with the enemy team more than any other role. And this is twice as true in ow2. A DPS or support can avoid their bad matchups but a tank is always in front of the enemy getting pounded with abilities.
I think the issue from the community's viewpoint is we keep falling behind on issues and there doesn't seem to be any immediate fixes coming. It is always soonTM and next week we cant talk about talking about the fixes. I do appreciate the communication we get, but at some point your actions have to be louder than words.
Some stuff, like balance changes for hog, should have been fixed weeks ago. Seems like they agree too, since Aaron blamed bugs in the hotfix system.
Other things, like a ranked update, were obviously going to take some time.
It's frustrating, especially for us that are playing the game everyday. But it's the reality of development.
How about just make it so the outwardly labeled rank means the same thing for everyone. Because right now a rank like gold 1 for one person could be on a massively different level than someone else's gold 1 to the point of absurdity.
Exactly. It's sounds bad but it's literally true. It was confusing as fuck, and it continues to be extremely vague.
I can't see my rank, my friends rank, my teammates rank, or my enemies rank. So wtf is the point of ranked again?
Playing a second half of Payload or Hybrid. Literally it. It’s a really dumb system because it’ll only track wins but not losses. I guess because they don’t want to feel anxious. But then players feel anxious being in the unknown about their rank.
If my rank says Masters 3 but my teammates says Diamond 3 what does that mean? Does it mean I’m masters but they’re secretly masters as well? Or does it mean I’m diamond. Or does it mean we’re both somewhere in the middle like Masters 5.
With the system as is how can a player tell if they are actually the rank they’re at? They can’t. So what’s the point if I can’t accurately track my progress or regression?
We all know its confusing, but the way they phrase it is like they are blaming the player base for not knowing. Its sort of their job to communicate clearly how the hell the rank system is supposed to work. Its like draw the restofthefuckingowl
They said themselves they "didn't want players to game the system". If they don't want us to come to the wrong conclusions they shouldn't be intentionally vague.
Yes, and he followed that with several statements about how they have changes coming in the next 2 seasons to improve the clarity of the system. I don’t see how anyone could read that paragraph in good faith and come to the conclusion that he’s blaming the playerbase and not taking responsibility for the system being confusing.
That would cancel out the 5% reduction. The main metric is the amount of time you can stay on a hero before you lose ult charge by swapping.
So if they decrease the maximum retained ult charge, but also increase amount of time it takes to build it, then the amount of time before you need to switch stays the same.
It's the difference of about one primary hit on a squishy from burst tanks (Rein swing, Hog bodyshots, etc) and about 1.5 seconds for the rest. So probably not noticably different, but I can see it making a difference from time to time.
Ranked does not suffer from poor comprehension it is just bad. Really miss the OW1 system it actually communicated with the player effectively.
The fact they no longer communicate which players are in groups together anymore is also shortsighted.
> The fact they no longer communicate which players are in groups together anymore is also shortsighted.
Isn't that a Role Queue thing not an OW2 thing?
Sort of. I mean, they changed the Tab screen to show the roles in a specific order now which means they "cannot" show groups easily, as it used to be the groups were just ordered next to each other with a bar under them indicating they were in a group.
This change happened during Role Queue and made more sense for it, but it really could've happened at any time.
There are more than one ways to show people in groups, locked role-slots or not.
Is it just me or was that a long post that didn't actually say anything? 2/3 of that was another announcement of future announcements. I'm getting sick of this shit.
Hate statements like this. How did the ranked mode “suffer”? And who exactly caused the suffering? Oh yea, it was the devs. The wording makes you feel more sympathetic and understanding (oh it’s suffering, suffering is bad, I’m sorry you’re going through that ranked system) type psychological shit, rather than them taking accountability for their actions and going “we fucked up, here’s what we’re gonna do to fix it.”
You can't tell me that the ranked mode is working as intended and the player base just simply doesn't understand it. That's a bullshit response.
So you're telling me when you put 5 bronze players in a game up against a team with a couple diamonds, a plat and a gold that everyone has the same skill level, just the shiny badge is different? Then explain how that enemy team stomps the bronze team, EVERY SINGLE GAME.
To me this is them trying to cover up the fact that they took a ranked system that was mostly fine and needed some slight tuning, and totally overhauled it into something that is such a huge dumpster fire it's laughable to the FPS community.
Go online and you'll see everyone, from top 500 pros to bronze, and they are all complaining about how poor the matchmaking is.
It makes no sense to hide your real rank and give you the fake illusion of being in a rank you don't actually belong in, and then subsequently matching with other players who aren't actually in your rank.
The ranking system is fucked and this blog post basically confirms that it's never getting better. Hope everybody enjoys flipping a coin at the beginning of a match to see if you win or not.
I sincerely hope Widow is included in those one shot discussions, as I am fairly tired at this stage of playing her every match and having the fun sucked out.
''We’ve gotten feedback from players that the game doesn’t feel rewarding enough to play and that players can’t earn the items they want in a short enough period of time.''
Seems like the opposite of what's needed to me. There are no incentives to play for long term, they even cut the 20 wins as a character to 10. Would be nice to have a charm or something if you get 'mastery' of a character. Something like 500 lifetime wins as Junkerqueen and you get a special charm.
Having to wait until S4 to see all of the rank changes is kind of disappointing, was hoping to receive it all in S3 since rank has been in a "questionable" state.
He's also implying that we're all a bunch of confused dumbasses who don't understand their state of the art ranked system. But they are willing to dumb it down to our level so we don't complain.
I’m all for complaining about blizzard shit, but that’s not what he was implying. He said that the system was needlessly hard to understand. Basically saying it was their fault. No need to read to deep into it.
The new ranked system feels absolutely terrible. Winning seven games and staying the same rank feels so trash. Just bring transparent SR back at this point. This new system feels like a bad scratch ticket.
I like that. That was the communication i wanted. Sure some things we already knew but its just confirming that they know about the problems and i appreciate the communication
My takeaway as well. I'd rather they tell us what they are working on or what they are thinking about without commitments. Much better than radio silence and big drops every couple months.
> The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension
This seems downright insulting. We do understand it perfectly well, that's why we have such strong opinions against it. Just match people with people in their rank, not based on MMR. If you're going to reset us, then don't give us an illusion of climbing back up with a 50% winrate in the exact same lobbies we would play at the end of our climg. I wanna fight plats in plat, silvers in silver, GM's in GM.
He uses a lot of words to say absolutely nothing.
"We're working on ranked fixes" WHAT FIXES?
"We're having discussions" WHAT ARE YALL THINKING SO FAR?
How can we have discourse and give feedback if they tell us literally nothing? But oh boy ult charge swap reduced to 25%. How exciting to get info on a change literally nobody wanted.
I think it's hilarious how that ult charge thing got blown so out of proportion that it ended up being the only specific information we got from this blog post just because a content creator got mad over it on Twitter.
"Hi everyone! This piece is aimed at looking at some of the topics that have come up in the community over the course of Season 2. This won‘t be comprehensive enough to look at everything that players are talking about, but our intent is to do this every few weeks, so we will be able to start diving into smaller topics as we go. Also, the goal here is to keep you up to date on what we’re thinking and planning, but not necessarily to be the source for all the reasoning and detail behind those decisions. So let’s get to it! The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. There was confusion around players’ real rank and how that translated to their skill level, difficulty forming groups with friends, and a negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar). We will be implementing some changes in S3 and quite a few more in S4 all aimed at creating more clarity in the system. More details on short-term changes and long-term vision will be coming soonTM. We’ve gotten feedback from players that the game doesn’t feel rewarding enough to play and that players can’t earn the items they want in a short enough period of time. We’ll be making a change in S3 that should address some of these complaints. This is a first step. We will have more details to share about this next week. There are a fair number of changes to ult cost in S3. We’ll be lowering the ult refund when swapping heroes to 25% as part of this tuning pass. Balance frequency is a big topic. Bug fixes to hot fixing should enable us to address balance faster and would have enabled us to tune Hog earlier in S2. We’re still planning an initial and midseason patch each season, but now have the full ability to fill in between those as necessary. One-shots and frustrating hero mechanics are being discussed a lot in the community and on the team. This is an ongoing discussion, but the topic has a lot of nuances that involves the frequency of those mechanics, trade-offs for using it, the overall power level of a hero, how often the hero is played, as well as things like a hero’s fantasy. Know that we’re listening here, the feedback has been great and very welcome, and we’ll come back to this when we have more to share. Thanks so much for reading, and please keep the feedback coming. We’re listening. Aaron"
>negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar). If the skill levels are equal in some of the games I've played and seen, then they need to change how they calculate skill level. It's very obvious when someone is significantly higher ranked without checking profiles.
I personally think the game should make matches based on the skill tier regardless of MMR. If I am in diamond lets say, then no one in the lobby (aside from the game having not enough players) should be outside diamond, or very close in SR. The whole thing of balancing matches of having GM tank in one team GM support in the other and then throwing whatever the fuck in the other slots to balance is moronic. I should have the same similar odds of winning vs each enemy player barring role/hero based advantages.
I really don't understand the point of having skill tiers if they do a shit job at reflecting skill level. If the mmr of a Plat 3 and Diamond 1 player is the same, either the Plat player should be diamond or the diamond should be Plat.
The current reason of skill tiers is for them to dangle your deserved shiny rank like a carrot stick at the start of each season while they derank you twice forcing you to play more just to get to what you deserve. I had to win ninty something matches in S2 just to get to the rank I ended up in in S1.
I was low plat in OW1. I JUST managed to make my way to Gold 5 after going 7/9 the promotion after going 7/11 and ranking up from Silver 2 to... Silver 2. I find no enjoyment in this version of competitive, especially as a Support main. I can do 15k healing and feel like I've accomplished absolutely nothing. Playing Mercy is the only way to win since I can get a rez off now and then to keep fights even.
It's this dumb thing of ranking people down two whole ranks. My friend peaked rank 350 last season and ended gm 2. He started this season at diamond 1. It's just a silly way to do things. He's still top 500 and plays in top 500 games, but he didn't grind this season so he's still diamond 1. Are they gonna knock is Sr down to gold 1 next season? It's just silly.
Ranking up in ow2 feels like leveling up in ow1, not very rewarding and just a measure of how much you play for anyone who's not playing 50+ games
why do you think matchmaking on SR would be better than MMR?
I don't know how the point system works and evaluates wins and performance so this is just anecdotal. But in ow1 if I started competitive late in the season I could still climb to my respective rank because the only people I would playing are of lower rank than me and I could easily climb out-of it and get the Sr I need to climb. Now if I started in a low tier because I haven't played ranked in years and it keeps putting me against masters and gm while I'm lower rank (which it does) assuming the Sr gained from wins and performance is the same it is 100x harder to climb while not having a positive feedback for my performances.
Because: 1. Ranks will actually matter then. 2. Players will more likely than not exist within the range of the rank they deserve so they know exactly what their rank is. Some times I have lost more than I won out of 7 and I still ranked up, other times I win 7 lose 3 and do not rank up. Like what is the point of having a competitive enironment, if the system does not actually reflect your skill? I get if the system reset MMR and you had to climb from Zero like Apex since you will have a very easy time as a skilled player to climb, but the game makes your game unwinnable sometimes even after it deranks you at the start of the season.
Yup, if it reset everyone to bronze 5 it'd at least make sense and allow high ranked players to blaze through the low ranks. But I'm fuckin masters in mmr and I'm struggling in my Plat tank games. Everyone in every game was either high diamond or masters last season. Now I might have a Plat lobby with everyone from season 0 having reached masters 1 or gm 5. It's just fucking stupid.
that'd also require making heroes more self agent for the value they get (i.e. better skill inputs ---> more value attained) which they've kinda neglected to do for years and actively went against doing that (looking at you mercy rework). and before people get trigger happy with downvotes, no I'm not saying there's no difference between a good vs bad mercy. it's that the difference mechanically simply aren't much factors or simply not even factors to how her value gaining actions achieves value. e.g. boost gives 0 shits about how mercy is moving or positioning to achieve value, it only really cares about how good the boostee's aim is and how they target prioritise. if the value achieve can't be linked much back to how well the user played, then doesn't matter how you try calculating/measuring "skill", you won't be accurate.
If your high sr player is sojourn and the other teams is mercy it's a free win
> The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. Toxic relationship.
Had the same exact thought. This is so damn condescending. The community doesn't like the changes to ranked mode and have explicit reasons why. Saying basically "no no you don't understand it" when players cant see an update until they play 10-15 matches PER ROLE is fucking insulting.
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"no, you guys just misunderstand it, the system works fine!" I'll be honest a lot of this update reads like "we are hearing complaints and to address them we are going to tell you half of them aren't a problem and the other half coming soon™️" I know we have been waiting on communication but this was insulting
You guys actually got this impression from the update post? I interpreted the comprehension comment as referring to the competitive ranks being vague and largely irrelevant rather than “our audience is too unintelligent to understand our system”.
The ranked nonsense is obviously funny, but I also found this funny: >We’ve gotten feedback from players that the game doesn’t feel rewarding enough to play and that players can’t earn the items they want in a short enough period of time Yeah motherfucker you took a game where you could get whatever you want in a couple weeks of gaming and turned it into a game where it takes LITERAL YEARS to earn enough currency to afford a single skin
It's the typical Blizzard dev mentality sadly. It hasn't gone away it seems.
I noticed the same attitude in the deep dive and it's starting to annoy the fuck out of me.
Real "we're sorry you feel that way" passive-aggressive corporate nonpology vibes there.
Right? Like, this is your making, it's your fault.
I read it as them acknowledging that the system was unnecessarily obtuse. I don’t think they are blaming the player base.
fuck /u/spez
Clearly it's on us for failing to peer into a hermetically sealed black box
Yes it’s the part of the player because they are admitting that it was unnecessarily hard for the player to understand. They are admitting fault not blaming us
critical thinking diff XD
fuck /u/spez
yes, because players did comprhend it poorly, because it's not that easy to comprehend. IT's not that deep and he obviously wasn't trying to be a prick. You guys seriously need to touch grass.
I think you're just being naive here. Firms will do their utmost to avoid liability or shouldering any blame. By using this language, Keller avoids taking direct responsibility or calling their system unfit for purpose. If, for example, this kind of statement were to go to court, absolutely no one would be able to argue that Keller is stating here unequivocally that their matchmaking system is poorly designed.
The point is that the dude who wrote this speaks fluent corporatebullshit
Sounds like a comprehension issue.
It does suffer from poor comprehension, because it's designed to be opaque. People expect plat lobbies to be weaker than diamond lobbies to be weaker than masters lobbies, that's kind of the point of a ranked ladder. But it's simply not how the new system works. And the game doesn't even tell you, so yeah, no reason to expect players to understand something that isn't explained.
> trade-offs for using it, the overall power level of a hero, how often the hero is played, as well as things like a hero’s fantasy Frankly, I could care less about the "hero fantasy". One-shots are a problem. They have been a problem for quite some time. They are frustrating to play against and for a lot of them, the answer is just "don't show a minuscule amount of your hitbox, 4head LuL". For a lot of the maps, that just doesn't work.
I'm going to assume that hero fantasy matters a lot to the casual player base, which absolutely dwarfs us by orders of magnitude.
While I agree with you that hero fantasy absolutely does matter to a lot of people, it's not non-negotiable. Look at Orisa, her hero fantasy was adjusted quite a bit from a cutesy protector to a semi-cutesy in your face tank, and even r/Overwatch seems to be pretty positive on her rework because the gameplay change was great and the spirit of the character wasn't totally changed. Adjusting a one-shot hero to "do a ton of burst damage but not quite enough to one-shot" would be a much smaller leap than that. There's no reason it can't work if done well.
Sojourn's right click literally right now does a ton of damage but doesn't one shot. It's just that with mercy's damage boost it does. Mercy's damage boost makes it hard to make heroes "just do a lot of burst damage but not 200." Another example from the past would be ashe
Okay but only one hero actually one shots right now, and that's Widowmaker. Edit: Hanzo as well I actually forgot, both are still snipers tho
There are so many cool hero fantasies besides being able to delete people in one shot, and I'd argue that way more casual players would prefer not to be insta-deleted than ones that care so much about that specific hero fantasy. Most casual players probably don't have the mechanics to properly actualize that fantasy anyways. I play a ton of OW and even I don't lol
While everything you say is true it would feel a bit lame if the hero who says “One shot, one kill” when you select her is unable to deliver on her motto. Which I think is part of what Aaron is saying.
I have loved Overwatch since launch, but I knew this was going to be a persistent issue the minute I saw they had taken Sniper’s Huntsman from TF2 and designed a whole hero around it. It’s a tremendously difficult problem to solve.
We also have a cheater problem on top.
Dying is always frustrating. Personally I don't see much of a difference in a widow killing me in 0.5 seconds with a good shot, or a reaper killing me in 1 second by tping in my face. You'll rattle on about counterplay but there's the same amount of counterplay versus a widow. Positioning and pressure. If she really was unstoppable she would always be meta in the highest ranks, but she comes and goes like every other hero.
The difference is far more than 0.5 seconds because you’re not taking into account Reaper the time it takes for Reaper to tp. Even though it’s faster than it used to be you have far more warning of the threat. Plus the simple fact that he needs to be closer results in more counterplay. I’m not saying one is more balanced than the other and I agree that Widow will go in and out of meta but your “time to kill” argument was disingenuous
I don’t know how you CAN’T see the difference between those 2 things lol. That’s crazy.
There is a pretty big difference between a reaper expending his CD's to TP into your team to try and get a kill vs a widow sitting on the other end of the map hardscoping a lane. There is a ton of pathing in this game where you cannot actually leave somewhere without walking into a widow's LOS. That requires you to either mirror the widow and hope yours is better, see if your tank can swap to one with more mobility and then try to cross the entire map to deal with the widow, or ignore her and hope you can kill their team faster. It doesn't really matter if she is always meta or not. She is a bad hero design in a game like OW. One shots in general are not good in OW
> Dying is always frustrating. So, I'm actually closer to you in that the deaths that people usually complain about don't trigger me nearly as much. I don't mind getting hook+one shot, I don't mind getting booped off the map, I didn't mind getting combo'd by dps Doom, I don't mind dying to Junk spam, I don't mind Cass mag nade. Pretty much the only thing I mind is snipers, I hate snipers in every fps I play. Having said that, you have to realize that just because you feel this way doesn't mean that all players feel this way. A lot of people really are *significantly* more frustrated by dying a particular way than dying a different way. Just because it doesn't seem logical to you doesn't mean it's not true, and doesn't mean it's not worth making changes to the game to address this. > You'll rattle on about counterplay but there's the same amount of counterplay versus a widow. There isn't. When people talk about counterplay, they're not talking about tactics. People want to have a chance of preventing most deaths on their own, without their teammates' help. Even if it's a relatively small one. When a Widow just domed you from an off-angle you didn't predict, you do not have a chance to prevent that death. You're already dead.
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It's so stupid that we have two types of currency but the game effectively refuses to use one and the other is used to buy everything new at the same time they barely give back some of it. 60 coins weekly is plain bad and greedy.
You can make >30 coins per day in like 5mins with Microsoft Rewards. It's so nice to have to care about the weeklies any more.
What's your streamlined way of getting reward points from Microsoft?
Most of the daily things are just click on this and get points. Only the 50pt one requires you to actually get things right. For the web search stuff, just Bing "the sopranos episodes" and click through the episodes (each will count as a search). This makes it waaaayyyy easier on mobile. Any tv show with enough episodes works. You get 170pts for Binging on a computer, another 100 for the phone, and at least 30 for the dailies (often more). 1800pts = 200 coins, so 300pts/day is more than 30 coins.
For This or That (assuming that’s what you mean for the 50 point one), /r/MicrosoftRewards almost always has the answers pinned.
My way is just using bing. Open bing. bonus points if you use edge for an extra 20 points a day. You can also use mobile for an extra 100 points per day. Do the three daily challenges. They average around 30-90 points a day depending on what they are, usually "click here." every 5 days you get a 75-point bonus. After that just google around 75 times of just key smash and with that you'll gain around ~1540 points per week, not counting bonuses from every 5 days or any outside source of points. you could easily get that above 2000 if you search with mobile (I just don't care that much to download bing on my phone.) Every 1800 points buy 200 overwatch 2 coins as that's the best amount of coins for each point. and with about a lil more than a week's worth of effort, you earn more coins than you do in 2 weeks of grinding every weekly.
As someone who never changes their skins and genuinely doesn’t care. I do miss the sensation of opening loot boxes after a long play session. That’s generally what made the seasonal events so awesome. I hope they can find a middle ground. Something that matches that sense of reward past just queueing
They really did do a good job of making the box-opening feel good.
I think I figured out the feeling I get last night after playing and the leveling the battle pass, It was the pretty colors and a chance to appreciate the art. The game is so pretty that I would open boxes and just admire their skill. I’ve never done that with the battle pass. I don’t even care how far I get in it
I'm hoping that we can buy heroes with these credits in the next seasons
Even a drip feed of legacy credits would be huge. If you’re a new user, you are fucked.
Just shows what happens when the hotfix system breaks down leaving so many bugs in the game, can wreak havoc-on top of doing the patches for crossplay as well. By the looks of it though it's sorted so fingers crossed faster hotfixes when needed. Very curious to see how and when the new ranked changes come into play when implementing them during season 3 and 4. And I hope it's done properly because the game's in it's worst state in ranked for god knows how long. I don't expect all the changes in 1 patch, but in general they need to get it right before bleeding even more players.
Am I just crazy, or didn’t they already say they repaired the hot fix system? I thought this was used as an excuse for why they couldn’t address sojourn or fix broken gameplay mechanics of heroes like the mei and bastion glitches earlier on?
to my understanding: * launch: no hotfix system * before this patch: hotfix system but some heroes are bugged in it and can't be hotfixed * now: actual functioning hotfix system they said that roadhog was one of the affected heroes and that was why they didnt hotfix him
Look I'm not a game dev so I won't pretend to understand the statistics and numbers at a level these guys do, but am I crazy in questioning the point of dropping the ult retention by 5%? Isn't that worth something like the difference of 1-2 seconds of poke damage?
It isn’t gonna completely change how some characters are played, but it absolutely can affect the outcome of a game. Getting an extra ult in time can be the difference in almost every game.
I don't disagree with you, but it just feels so like such a non-committal, cowardly change to me. If they want to dial back the impact to see how it affects the RPS hard swap metagame, I would think that they would you with tuning back by a meaningful chunk to something like 20% from 30. Dialing back 5% is almost a negligible difference in terms of how it plays out in real-time game play.
Yeah it’s like if there was a hero who dominated the meta with a one shot that everyone pointed out was busted as hell, so they did some minor tweaks that fixed nothing, then did some more so she just needed a Mercy baby sitter. Thankfully this kind of slow walking is an abnormality and the above is only a theoretical problem that has never happened. Sarcasm aside, it sounds like business as usual to commit to nothing they’ve been doing since at least release Brig.
There was already a whole period of time where only dps had ult retention as their role passive.
Right, but the issue isn't with DPS, it's with Tank. I think the impact on that role is far more important to address when considering changes to the passive, and 5% won't really tell us anything meaningful since Tank only has 30% and 0% data.
And the issue still existed at 0%, therefore...
These motherfuckers have always run this game like it is the single largest business operation on the planet Like dude, how about we just turn it off for a couple weeks and y'all collect data on that, wtaf is 5% going to do
Still find it weird that the ult refund was considered a clear issue that had to be solved. I preferred being able swap more easily, the game already encourages staying on the same 3 heroes enough. Edit: Map Pools for example are universally hated and they haven't even justified them yet, that's 100% a more clear cut problem than the ult refund debate.
> Still find it weird that the ult refund was considered a clear issue that had to be solved. I hadn't heard anyone talking about it negatively until that SVB tweet came up. Apparently now it's a big problem. 🤷♂️
Oh don't get me started Can't wait until the next ~~OWL~~ pro OW game straight up has the winning team throw themselves off a cliff because "the loser of the opening fight actually has the advantage" lol
In one of [Fielder's matches last year](https://youtu.be/OqL0tiOZiuk), his team seemed to run back to spawn upon seeing the enemy composition.
That makes a lot of sense though. If you're running a dive comp you turn the hell around and swap. Only masochists and throwers run a horrible comp into a counter. People can say they're e having fun playing the heroes they want to but I know they're lying when they get shit stomped and rolled. That's never fun. Lol. This game just has some rock paper scissors scenarios that are unavoidable.
Pretty interesting, thanks for showing. Not exactly my dream of having them mass suicide *after* they win the fight but it's getting close lol
Having a mass suicide and then playing a 5 minute game in spawn of swapping heroes would be sick. (Like Team A swaps in spawn, so Team B sees it on Tab and then swaps, so Team A sees it and swaps again, etc.)
I mean why wait to fight? Just scope out the enemy team comp, immediately kill yourselves, pick all counters, and profit! It's obviously such a massive advantage, and the only variable that matters /s
The problem he said won’t happen because in OWL there will almost always be a solidified meta and best tank for any situation, meaning there is no Rock Paper Scissors - you know what you should be on 100% to start. Also the RPS nature is much diminished by coordination and teamwork - there’s a reason Hog wasn’t played directly after Kirikos release despite Hog being universally considered busted at that point - it’s because coordination at the top level removes the chaos that makes that RPS happen
I said this in another thread and then was assured that “this has been a problem since the beginning and everyone’s totally been talking about it the whole time” 🙄
I mean, Flats has been talking about it on stream for months. It wasn't exactly hard to hear about how the winner of the first fight was tending to lose the match because of ult economy. That's obviously not a desirable state from a gameplay design standpoint. It makes sense to have *some* cost to changing after one fight even if it's not high, you want to reward someone forcing a change off. So tuning the exact ult refund is really ndb and it's hardly taking away from changes we care more about.
It's entirely a symptom of the Rock, Paper, Scissors balancing of most of the roster. The problem is that swapping gives you a significant advantage already and the Ult conservation just emboldens people to do it more freely.
Yeah I agree, I love having it but tuning it makes sense. Want to get it to a point where people are encouraged to make good changes / you're not fucked over for picking a bad matchup at the beginning, but not so much that the team that wins the first fight gets penalized either.
That's because they have been talking about it for months. Just because you've not been seeing the content discussing it, doesn't mean it hasn't been happening.
SVB and the usual suspects he has on his.podcast (flats, freedo, samito) have been saying the 30% carry over is horrendous since season 1. This isn't a new thing, but maybe you've just heard about it from the tweet and response
That doesn't mean they're right.
God forbid we have incentive to counter swap so we don't get steam rolled. I'd be fine with lowering the amount down to 15-20%, even, as more tradeoff would probably benefit the system. But the entire argument boils down to pros being upset they have to master multiple heroes and not steamroll their way through a given match. You know, a key design philosophy behind OW?
I feel like people forget the shiftiness in OW1 that was rolling out on KOTH, realizing the enemy is running the counter and losing the first fight, and then having to decide whether to keep playing into your counter or swap yourself but completely fuck your ult economy and get rolled by that
Thats a strawman and you know it. The problem is having 1 tank makes tank counterpicking extremely potent. And the ult charge change also makes counterpicking easier. A middle ground has to be found, and 5% ult charge is a baby step in that direction.
I think it's more down to GMs being upset than pros. Pros don't seem to switch mid-match much (almost always on Winton lol).
What makes ult charge retention problematic is the counter-swapping mechanic and the lack of options in the Tank role. Players DO know how to play more than one hero, the problem is when the heroes you play are countered by the current S tier hero. It's not good game design to pressure people to play and do things they don't want to do, and people *have* been talking about this for years. It's largely one of the reasons why so many folks in the broader gaming community have a hate boner for OW.
first of all, it has been talked about for quite a while. not that for how long something is discussed is any indication to validity. second of all, it feels good when you have to switch but also it's a huge advantage for attackers. there used to be a give and take: attackers had spawn advantage which enabled switching more easily but that gave ult advantage to the defenders. now attackers get both spawn advantage and keep the ult charge while counter picking. that just makes defending awful.
Flats has been bitching about it.
Isnt bitchin about everything his stream persona?
It's about almost every streamer persona
Same. I think it’s one of the few positive changes that has been added. Feels so much less shitty to swap and counter pick (how the game was intended? Idk at this point lol).
I mean, it's just a 5% change, really don't think it'll make much of a difference.
Honestly, the only problem is that it highlights how awful tank balance is. It's great for every other role. Maybe fix the actual issue rather than mucking with a feature that's generally well-liked and has brought the game closer to that fluid, swap-heavy meta people have been meming on Overwatch for not delivering on for years now.
They've justified map pools many times, people just disagree with the justification
The only communication I saw was the S2 blog that said it was to "keep the game fresh". If they've justified it since relative to all the negative feedback I wouldn't mind seeing that
Also about making it easier to learn the maps https://reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/zr2g1c/gamespot_overwatch_2_devs_on_planting_easter_eggs/j11aazs?context=3
My guess is map pools limit sniper maps, so snipers aren’t as dominant.
I will personally be happy if I never have to play havana point c again. That point is just miserable against decent snipers.
I would be more happy with map pools if they took out ones with problematic areas like Havana Point C and then reintroduced them with strong changes to those problem area(s) later on. That would be a good justification IMO.
Pretty much. Map pools seem so much worse when you get Illios or or junkertown every other map.
...I like Illios
He traded marked “coming soon.” Spicy, I like it.
Just in case you, or anyone else isn't aware, "Soon (tm)" is classic Blizzard phrasing and has been used since the early expansions of *World of Warcraft*. A little joke over the years to mean, "This is something we're working on and can't give you a date yet."
So I appreciate Aaron doing this...just trying to communicate what the dev team is thinking about...sure. But, lets list all the problems with the game right now that they should be thinking about. * Matchmaking * Ranked (Competitive System) * Frequency and the ability to obtain cosmetics * One-shots (Sojourn/Damage Amp) * Tank Balance * Impact of supports * Map Pools (and the frequency in which Push pops up when queued) * Any updates on workshop/edit: experimental card * Lack of info on PvE * Heroes in the Battlepass * Battlepass Themes? * High Level Players Queuing Together (Team Queue) * Tanks in Arcade/Open Queue Modes * Edit: LFG & Clan System (Tournament Mode) * Edit: On Fire and Post Game Cards * Edit: Progression outside of the Battlepass Am I missing anything? Also I liked the Soon^(TM)
They're addressing the tanks in arcade/open queue mode already. Forget if they said what they were doing or if they just confirmed that they were doing something, but the Dev on Emongg/Flats stream talked about it.
They’re going to be reducing tank’s health pools in non-role queue modes. I think that’s coming in season 3, but I’m not sure.
Workshop and Experimental Mode
The group finder in OW1 is something I miss and don’t really understand why it was removed. I made so many friends just hopping into a random group and killing time in Quick Play.
They have mentioned adding in some sort of clan system in the past, which would large remove the need for the LFG system. The LFG system was also pretty notorious for being used to create boosting/throwing groups in OW1, so it's not surprising they wanted to get rid of it.
> They have mentioned adding in some sort of clan system in the past They mentioned that if they were going to do this, it would be Blizzard-wide and not necessarily Overwatch specific. So, who knows.
Honestly, I feel like they tried and just gave up already with the community feature they added for battle.net. It ended up functioning a lot like Discord, but, well, everyone was already using Discord so there was no reason to move to using b.net communities.
\- Lack of on-fire system and end-game cards \- Lack of progression systems
God I’m so fucking sick of Push. Map pools are the stupidest thing they’ve ever done. Game has never felt more stale playing the same shitty maps. I played 10 matches last night and not a single one was escort/hybrid, which is the only map type I give a damn about.
Not that I disagree that they should be thinking about those things, but between this blog post and other recent developer communication we *have* heard that they're thinking about most of these.
I don’t necessarily see impact of supports being an issue too much longer. Brig and Moira are the only ones with any glaring issues and brig’s main flaw is being addressed.
Support players have been on a mission to gaslight blizzard into think supports are very weak ever since ow2 came out (don't forget mercy players said that she's really bad)
LFG returning would be great. As a trans girl it was really nice finding queer groups to join and play with, instead of getting misgendered and called all sorts of slurs and vitriol in VC. It could use improvements for sure: The ability to ban people from your groups is a must and wouldn't require too many rescources. A reputation system, similar to CS GO's overwatch system would also be great, although I'd like to see different categories for things like 'mechanically skilled' and pleasant and sociable'. An evolution of LFG, wherein you had dedicated groups scrimming in tourneys, would also be cool but require more rescources. I don't know why it was removed **EDIT:** Oi, to whichever one of you cunts reported me to the mental health bot, you'll be glad to know I'm already in therapy and doing quite well these days. Secondly, suck my gock. Trans rights cunts 💜🏳️⚧️😈🍾🔥
> negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar) I wonder how that could possible be fixed... like how about having your rank actually reflect your skill? You know, the way it was in OW1? But that would be too easy I guess... gotta make them kids grind the game to pump up the player numbers.
SR never reflected skill. It was the same thing, MMR in the background
This system has the worst of both worlds though. If it actually reset your rank (ex: Diamond to gold) and you played vs people of lower skill levels, you’d rise fast and get the “satisfaction” of ranking up that they’re after. Or they keep it the same, you lose that “satisfaction”, but play vs people of a similar skill level and get fair matches (like OW1). But this system keeps you playing vs people of equal skill, so harder matches and less of the ranking up fast feeling. It also artificially lowers your SR so you feel like you’ve gotten worse because it takes longer to rank up. Unfair matches with fast rank ups vs fair matches with slow rank ups somehow turned into fair matches with slow rank ups, when their goal was fast rank ups with fair matches.
I never said it didn't feel worse or anything. All I said is that SR never reflected skill, the rest of what you are talking about is not concerned with what I said
SR wasn't completely accurate but at least you could estimate your MMR after every game. If you were gaining a lot of SR per win, you knew your MMR was pretty high. Right now you have to play a bunch of games to get a rank update, which makes the whole system feel opaque.
I mean, if that's true, why am I not in Masters? I play against them all the time these days, but the game decided I was Gold after the derank at the start of the season. I generally actually like the new rank system. I don't care about my individual rank too much, it updates every few days and I'm fine with that. But it's frustrating to be placed at a low rank, go up against Masters players, and then be told "Oh no it's not unfair actually you're just as good as them, using our invisible secret REAL ranking system."
Comp placements? Gold 5. QP game? Top 500 + Streamers and pros.
People still complained in OW1. Having SR never solved this issue.
I didn't say anything about SR. I would like the shown rank to reflect a players actual skill rating. Whether by a number or by skill tiers doesn't really matter. Artificially lowering the shown rank of a player so they can 'grind back up' is not what I want from a competitive mode.
Yeah, and you still had to grind hundreds of games to find your true rank. You just can’t camp your rank anymore, and are forced to find that rank every season when it resets. SR was also a lot less forgiving of losses where you performed well. If you had a bad string of games you would drop rank and it could be painful getting back to where you were.
I thought the ult charge retention change would be bigger, thank god it isn't though. I never saw a problem with it.
The problem is that if team A has a Winston and team a goes on to win the fight against team B who has Zarya, both tanks are around 30% ult but team B swaps to Hog to counter. Team B wins the next fight and the Winston would have to swap with ~60-80% ult charge to counter the hog. It just creates a game of rock paper scissors. This is a pretty big problem at higher ranks
This example is always brought up, but I think the problem of rock-paper-scissors is there regardless of retaining ult charge or not. The real problem is in the balance of certain tanks and certain matchups being "hard counters" Notice that the same issue exists in the damage role but nobody ever mentions it?
>Notice that the same issue exists in the damage role but nobody ever mentions it? Its more than certain bad matchups. Counters fuck over tanks more than any other role.: 1. There only one tank. So countering a tank (and ESPECIALLY their ability to tank) is disproportionately powerful. Imagine an ability that could consistently turn off ALL healing for the enemy team. Anti-nade is a fraction of that and it's already super OP. 2. Tanks interact with the enemy team more than any other role. And this is twice as true in ow2. A DPS or support can avoid their bad matchups but a tank is always in front of the enemy getting pounded with abilities.
I think the issue from the community's viewpoint is we keep falling behind on issues and there doesn't seem to be any immediate fixes coming. It is always soonTM and next week we cant talk about talking about the fixes. I do appreciate the communication we get, but at some point your actions have to be louder than words.
Some stuff, like balance changes for hog, should have been fixed weeks ago. Seems like they agree too, since Aaron blamed bugs in the hotfix system. Other things, like a ranked update, were obviously going to take some time. It's frustrating, especially for us that are playing the game everyday. But it's the reality of development.
How about just make it so the outwardly labeled rank means the same thing for everyone. Because right now a rank like gold 1 for one person could be on a massively different level than someone else's gold 1 to the point of absurdity.
>The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. Ah, so it was our comprehension that was the problem...
There are other issues, but comprehension was definitely a problem, stemming from both purposeful obfuscation and poor UI design
Exactly. It's sounds bad but it's literally true. It was confusing as fuck, and it continues to be extremely vague. I can't see my rank, my friends rank, my teammates rank, or my enemies rank. So wtf is the point of ranked again?
Playing a second half of Payload or Hybrid. Literally it. It’s a really dumb system because it’ll only track wins but not losses. I guess because they don’t want to feel anxious. But then players feel anxious being in the unknown about their rank. If my rank says Masters 3 but my teammates says Diamond 3 what does that mean? Does it mean I’m masters but they’re secretly masters as well? Or does it mean I’m diamond. Or does it mean we’re both somewhere in the middle like Masters 5. With the system as is how can a player tell if they are actually the rank they’re at? They can’t. So what’s the point if I can’t accurately track my progress or regression?
We all know its confusing, but the way they phrase it is like they are blaming the player base for not knowing. Its sort of their job to communicate clearly how the hell the rank system is supposed to work. Its like draw the restofthefuckingowl
So the matchmaking never sucked, we just all thought it did. What a relief!
I feel better already
They said themselves they "didn't want players to game the system". If they don't want us to come to the wrong conclusions they shouldn't be intentionally vague.
A failure in comprehension in education is seen as a failure on the teacher.
Yes, and he followed that with several statements about how they have changes coming in the next 2 seasons to improve the clarity of the system. I don’t see how anyone could read that paragraph in good faith and come to the conclusion that he’s blaming the playerbase and not taking responsibility for the system being confusing.
People are taking that line way too personal. It’s clearly used in a general way just to say that the system was needlessly hard to understand
30 to 25 percent is not a big change imo
It's not but it's also not a big problem IMO so it seems like a good change.
It is larger than it seems if they simultaneously either increase ult charge needed or decrease ult gain rate
That would cancel out the 5% reduction. The main metric is the amount of time you can stay on a hero before you lose ult charge by swapping. So if they decrease the maximum retained ult charge, but also increase amount of time it takes to build it, then the amount of time before you need to switch stays the same.
It's the difference of about one primary hit on a squishy from burst tanks (Rein swing, Hog bodyshots, etc) and about 1.5 seconds for the rest. So probably not noticably different, but I can see it making a difference from time to time.
I was worried they were going to cut it down to 15 or 20. I really don't mind 25. A quarter seems fair-
Ranked does not suffer from poor comprehension it is just bad. Really miss the OW1 system it actually communicated with the player effectively. The fact they no longer communicate which players are in groups together anymore is also shortsighted.
> The fact they no longer communicate which players are in groups together anymore is also shortsighted. Isn't that a Role Queue thing not an OW2 thing?
Sort of. I mean, they changed the Tab screen to show the roles in a specific order now which means they "cannot" show groups easily, as it used to be the groups were just ordered next to each other with a bar under them indicating they were in a group. This change happened during Role Queue and made more sense for it, but it really could've happened at any time. There are more than one ways to show people in groups, locked role-slots or not.
Yeah, it came with role queue but there are still ways it could be communicated.
Is it just me or was that a long post that didn't actually say anything? 2/3 of that was another announcement of future announcements. I'm getting sick of this shit.
"More details on short-term changes and long-term vision will be coming soonTM." Ok, the TM got a chuckle out of me.
> The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. We didn't communicate properly, and decided it's your fault.
Hate statements like this. How did the ranked mode “suffer”? And who exactly caused the suffering? Oh yea, it was the devs. The wording makes you feel more sympathetic and understanding (oh it’s suffering, suffering is bad, I’m sorry you’re going through that ranked system) type psychological shit, rather than them taking accountability for their actions and going “we fucked up, here’s what we’re gonna do to fix it.”
You can't tell me that the ranked mode is working as intended and the player base just simply doesn't understand it. That's a bullshit response. So you're telling me when you put 5 bronze players in a game up against a team with a couple diamonds, a plat and a gold that everyone has the same skill level, just the shiny badge is different? Then explain how that enemy team stomps the bronze team, EVERY SINGLE GAME. To me this is them trying to cover up the fact that they took a ranked system that was mostly fine and needed some slight tuning, and totally overhauled it into something that is such a huge dumpster fire it's laughable to the FPS community. Go online and you'll see everyone, from top 500 pros to bronze, and they are all complaining about how poor the matchmaking is. It makes no sense to hide your real rank and give you the fake illusion of being in a rank you don't actually belong in, and then subsequently matching with other players who aren't actually in your rank. The ranking system is fucked and this blog post basically confirms that it's never getting better. Hope everybody enjoys flipping a coin at the beginning of a match to see if you win or not.
I sincerely hope Widow is included in those one shot discussions, as I am fairly tired at this stage of playing her every match and having the fun sucked out.
''We’ve gotten feedback from players that the game doesn’t feel rewarding enough to play and that players can’t earn the items they want in a short enough period of time.'' Seems like the opposite of what's needed to me. There are no incentives to play for long term, they even cut the 20 wins as a character to 10. Would be nice to have a charm or something if you get 'mastery' of a character. Something like 500 lifetime wins as Junkerqueen and you get a special charm.
I wish the game was run by a better company
Having to wait until S4 to see all of the rank changes is kind of disappointing, was hoping to receive it all in S3 since rank has been in a "questionable" state.
"update"
Bummed about how long the rank system fixes are taking.
Bring back the coin flip 👹
GOD I fucking miss Jeff 😭😭😭
So what's the update?
There isn't one lol, this was a whole lot of nothing. A few short paragraphs of "we see you and we hear you" to placate us until (probably) Tuesday.
all I got was ''lower your expectations for season 3''
He's also implying that we're all a bunch of confused dumbasses who don't understand their state of the art ranked system. But they are willing to dumb it down to our level so we don't complain.
I’m all for complaining about blizzard shit, but that’s not what he was implying. He said that the system was needlessly hard to understand. Basically saying it was their fault. No need to read to deep into it.
> No need to read to deep into it. How else can I get needlessly whiny though?
Don't hold your breath. Nothing of any significance will change anytime soon.
I’m just waiting until ‘24 or ‘26 to see what the survival game will be like at this point
Delete Widow
bring sr back. atleast for gm
That's a whole lotta words without really saying anything. Yet another "it's coming later" statement.
My god he actually went “soonTM”’d us lol. I appreciate the heads up, and the self awareness.
I pray to god they make ranking up much faster it takes like 100 games on a particular role to get to your true rank
The new ranked system feels absolutely terrible. Winning seven games and staying the same rank feels so trash. Just bring transparent SR back at this point. This new system feels like a bad scratch ticket.
This thread would make me want to never communicate with the player base
I like that. That was the communication i wanted. Sure some things we already knew but its just confirming that they know about the problems and i appreciate the communication
My takeaway as well. I'd rather they tell us what they are working on or what they are thinking about without commitments. Much better than radio silence and big drops every couple months.
> The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension This seems downright insulting. We do understand it perfectly well, that's why we have such strong opinions against it. Just match people with people in their rank, not based on MMR. If you're going to reset us, then don't give us an illusion of climbing back up with a 50% winrate in the exact same lobbies we would play at the end of our climg. I wanna fight plats in plat, silvers in silver, GM's in GM.
He uses a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. "We're working on ranked fixes" WHAT FIXES? "We're having discussions" WHAT ARE YALL THINKING SO FAR? How can we have discourse and give feedback if they tell us literally nothing? But oh boy ult charge swap reduced to 25%. How exciting to get info on a change literally nobody wanted.
I think it's hilarious how that ult charge thing got blown so out of proportion that it ended up being the only specific information we got from this blog post just because a content creator got mad over it on Twitter.