User says:
What is the biggest current priority in terms of game design right now, are any more class reworks coming like for tanks a while back? Is it 2cp and Horizon/Paris reworks? Will there be changes to the current double shield meta?
Jeff says:
the most immediate priority is a balance patch aimed at the double shield meta. this will show up on the experimental card in the next few weeks.
we don’t have any reworks immediately imminent for any hero, although we are discussing some.
2cp is more of an ongoing exploration for us. we’ve tried many, many things and have yet to be satisfied with any of the results.
paris has gotten some attempts at a rework but we weren’t pleased with our results, so we paused. we haven’t started looking at horizon again yet.
User says:
What is Torbjörn’s favourite food?
Jeff says:
pizza
User says:
How often do you each actually play the game these days, if at all? Do you Main any character in particular or just go Mystery Heroes and let RNGesus decide?
Jeff says:
i play the game everyday. we have multiple playtests daily plus we play for fun on our own time. i love to play all of the heroes but some i really struggle on (doomfist, sombra, sigma). i play a lot of reinhardt, symmetra, mercy these days. i also love hanzo and mccree, although i’m not so great with them.
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“Geoff Goodman on why Sombra not being a support:” this was not the the kind of question i was looking for, dam i’m suffring even more
My question wasn’t about OW2 though
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Incoming sigma and orisa nerfs.
Doesn’t make dva more viable though.
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User says:
Who is the hero who has been the most difficult to develop or fine-tune to get the balance just right?
Geoff says:
Sombra and Genji were the two hardest heroes to make, probably.
Sombra worked very differently and had to go through major changes pretty late in her development (as I posted about earlier), and Genji started out having only his sword for a weapon (he is still refereed to as SwordNinja in our internal files, etc). His main kit initially involved invisibility, wall perching, and having an ‘execute’ animation where if he got behind you he could stun you and start this long animation which would just instantly kill you if he finished it.
The idea was he could easily pick off people who were not with their team, but otherwise it would be very difficult to use execute. This kit caused all kinds of problems though, especially his sword being his only form of attacking. Once we moved away from invisibility and instead chased the agile ninja fantasy, and made the sword his ultimate, everything started clicking into place.
User says:
How many unused concepts of heroes have you guys made?
Geoff says:
This is actually really hard to answer actually.
Most of the time heroes go through a ton of iteration, and single abilities or weapons get cut. Often times we’ll end up using an older cut idea on a new concept. For example, Orisa’s first ult was an idea where she could “teleport” away (we’d probably kit this differently though), and then ‘drop’ anywhere else on the map via drop pod or something similar. This was back when she was extremely early and we didn’t have a character yet, so I was sort of imaging a character more like Dutch from Predator (hence the mini-gun, etc). It ended up not really working for the gameplay, and really didn’t make sense once we started developing Orisa’s character.
Much later we were working on Doomfist and thought we could revist that old idea and thats how he ended up with his ult!
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the reply that will be talked about most on here if i had to guess:
- if you were to give percentages, how much do you listen to pros feedback vs the casuals?
Blizz_JeffKaplan
Game Director
link
well there are about 200 pros and 50 million casuals… but we both know you’re not asking for that percentage breakdown =]
we listen to everyone’s feedback. it’s all important. when it comes to balance, we primarily balance the game around owl, gm/masters.
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“What is Torbjörn’s favourite food?”
I knew it was going to happen.
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oh i dont disagree with the answer…but you know how the forums will take it
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How much testing goes into new maps, is it all internal or do you guys ever bring in outside opinions, how many maps have been created but never gone to the live game?
Blizz_JeffKaplan
Game Director
we test the maps a lot. for a very long time. usually if we’re patching a map into the live game, we’ll do an extended ptr period for testing (same with heroes). for maps that shipped with the game, we tested some of those for years. we don’t openly bring in outsiders to test maps early as we have a pretty comprehensive play test and map testing process. sometimes, depending where we’re at in a dev cycle, we might bring a map to a trade show (i.e. blizzcon, gamescom etc.) before it goes live.
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An official response on Superjump and how it’s NOT going to be removed. 
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Someone with a reddit account ask them if the matchmaker is rigged so they can finally tell all the people here it’s not so they’ll stop saying it.
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Praise geoff goodman, I’m gonna save that on my computer in case I need to post it in any superjump related threads.
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How much of the Overwatch universe lore do you want/plan to show the world? I find every single hero very much amazing in their own regards, but I don’t see enough background stories or interesting details. 
Blizz_JeffKaplan
Game Director
we have many years of lore planned for the overwatch universe. there are so many aspects that we’re excited about – far reaching plot lines and individual character arcs. there are also a lot of heroes, places and world groups we want to tell more stories about. we’re also excited about telling stories in new ways and using new mediums.
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And now Genji players can stop whining and comparing it to his old Ledge Dash because Geoff outright said they remove tech that’s “overpowered” and calls Ledge Dash overpowered, implying Mercy’s isn’t. 
He also calls the Genji dash a bug and inconsistent but says superjump isn’t 
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The major takeaway is that they don’t see superjump as problematic (unlike genji’s ledgejump) enough to remove from the game and to try and make a workaround with her slingshot mechanics. 
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Bill Warnecke gave a couple matchmaking answers:
- I want to question the mechanic wherer a new account loses much more SR than an older one, where an older one would lose 25 SR, the new one could lose up to 100. This is supposed to help the smurfing problem? wouldn’t it keep smurfs down after some dumb loss, and make the problem worse? Why not flip the switch and award more SR for a win on new accounts? I honestly feel that, although not perfect, it’s better, because if someone gets boosted to a higher rank than their skill or gamesense, they get pummeled and sent back down until they stabilize, and smurfs shoot right back up.
BillWarnecke
Lead Software Engineer
link
Hey there, this is a good question. The matchmaking system gains confidence in its evaluation of your skill as you play more games.
- Can the matchmaking system tell the difference between level 1 and 101?
Because each time I pass over the next star threshold, I start getting into matches with complete beginners for a while.
BillWarnecke
Lead Software Engineer
link
Hey there, the matchmaker COULD be aware of the level of a player but it isn’t something that we currently take into account when matchmaking.
The reason we don’t specifically take level into account is because it’s an indicator of time played on a specific account and not the skill level at which someone performs. While it is true the more you play the more skill you’re likely to gain, it’s also true that skill gain will be reflected in the matchmaking values as well.
Cheers
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Everyone please bear with me as I update the AMA, I am posting the responses as quickly as possible in the starting thread so refresh the page as needed.
I am basically refreshing each individual user’s comment feed one at a time, making the updates then move on to the next dev.
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hehe…same 
finding responses in the actual thread is pretty much impossible
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