What’s up, everyone?
This is Jeff from the Overwatch Team here with another Developer Update.
Yes, we’re still in the quarantine.
I hope you and all of your loved ones are doing OK,
and everybody’s hanging in there.
Now, I know there’s a lot you want to be updated on.
One of the top things that we’ve been hearing about
and reading about from the community
is a desire to know more about what’s going to happen
with the Competitive Open Queue that’s currently in the Arcade.
Now, we know it’s ending very, very soon, and so there’s a lot of questions
of whether or not this mode is ever going to come back,
or what’s going to happen with it.
So I want to answer all of that right now.
It’s actually been fascinating to watch the response to Competitive Open Queue.
Across the world, and as you know, Overwatch is a very global game,
people play Competitive Open Queue in very different ways.
So, for example, in Korea,
Competitive Open Queue in the Arcade
is the second most popular mode being played right now,
while in North America,
Competitive Open Queue is less popular than Mystery Heroes,
or even Workshop modes being played in the game browser.
So, as you travel the globe, there’s a different response to the mode.
Now, we do want to bring Competitive Open Queue back,
and we have a plan for it, and I want to share that with you now.
And it’s a little complicated, so I apologize for that.
We just hadn’t anticipated the success of the mode to be what it was.
So, here’s what’s going to happen.
Very shortly, Competitive Open Queue will come down for a little while.
We are going to work very quickly, as quickly as we can,
to bring back another shortened Arcade version of Competitive Open Queue
that will go live sometime in June.
We’re thinking probably mid-June, but don’t hold me exactly to that date.
But we’ll have a very short Competitive season for Open Queue
that will probably land in mid-June.
Then, in early July,
when Season 23, the normal Competitive season starts,
Competitive Open Queue will now become an official mode
that will be supported alongside the Role Queue Competitive queue,
if that makes sense.
So, what it will look like to you as a player
is you will go to the Play menu, off of the main menu of Overwatch.
You’ll select the Competitive Card.
Then, underneath the Competitive Card will be two options.
One will be for the Role Queue,
which is the official Competitive mode
that the game will be tuned and balanced around.
So that means we’re tuning and balancing around 2/2/2 compositions.
But alongside of that will also be Competitive Open Queue.
It will no longer be an Arcade mode.
It will sit side-by-side with Competitive Role Queue.
So, expect that with the beginning of Season 23,
which should be in early July.
So, hopefully that all makes sense.
You’re going to have a short competitive season in the Arcade
sometime in June,
and then you’ll get it officially for Season 23,
and you’ll be able to play Open Queue.
And we understand players like different ways of queueing.
Some people love the Role Queue, some people don’t.
Now you have a choice.
One of our main goals for the year was fast-balancing,
and lots of experimentation and iteration,
and we hope this shows that effort towards experimentation and iteration
that you were really hoping for.
Now, some people have voiced concerns about queue times.
In all of our studies,
in all the statistics that we’ve been tracking on the queueing,
we actually see that queue times are better
when the Open Queue exists.
So we actually think this will improve queue times,
because there’s a lot of people who want to play damage characters
in 2/2/2 Role Queue,
and a lot of them are attracted to the Open Queue,
and it takes some of the pressure off of…
Both queues actually perform better when they exist.
That’s what we’ve seen so far, so we’re not worried about queue times.
In fact, we feel like this is something that helps queue times,
it doesn’t hurt them.
Now, I mentioned experiments.
We’re also bringing up the Experimental Card again,
and it should be up very shortly.
I don’t have an exact time, but within this Developer Update,
you know, within the next day or two you’ll see an Experimental Card.
Fun balance changes coming with this one.
A lot of balance changes targeted to make Bastion more viable.
And I know many of you are just dying to see more Bastion in your matches.
So we’ll see how this goes.
I’m sure you’ll all be very vocal about feedback.
Lots of changes to support heroes.
Some are getting brought down a little, some are getting brought up a little.
For example, Ana is getting balanced to tune her healing down a little bit,
while Mercy is just getting a healing…
just a throughput bonus, just purely a buff.
So you’ll see that coming.
We’ve also put Zenyatta’s Discord Orb back to what it used to be,
back up from 25% to 30%.
And we’re trying a bunch of changes with Moira.
So we’d like to hear what you have to say about those Experimental changes.
There are more heroes involved than the ones I just mentioned.
Junkrat’s also getting some changes, so that should be interesting.
Check it out. It will have patch notes.
You will be able to check them through the game, which is cool.
So, that is coming very soon as well: Experimental Card.
And then there’s one more point I wanted to talk about
before I wrap up this Developer Update, and that was the changes to hero pools.
Now, most of you already know, because this already exists in the live game,
but we’ve decided that hero pools will no longer apply
to matches below 3,500 Skill Rating.
So, a lot of people phrase this as,
“If I’m a 3,500 Skill Rating player,
it applies to me or it doesn’t apply to me.”
But we think of it in terms of the matches set as
a 3,500 or higher match will have a hero pool.
This will be coming back in the next few weeks.
It will be coming back to matches that are 3,500 and up.
And for the vast majority of us who are below 3,500 in…
below 3,500 matches, we will not have hero pools.
Also, when the Overwatch League season is in flight,
the hero pools will be determined based on usage from the Overwatch League.
Those are the best players, really defining how the game is played,
so we’re going to pull that data from the Overwatch League.
And when Overwatch League is not in season,
we’ll be pulling from the top players in Top 500, Grandmaster, et cetera.
So that’s how that’s going to work.
You’re probably already very familiar with that.
So, anyway, I hope this update is good for you.
I hope this is all the information you want.
As always, we’re going to be tracking all of your comments
all over the Internet.
We love to hear what you say.
We hope you’re all hanging in there.
Thank you so much, and we’ll give you another update soon. Bye.
