I would be willing to give tank Mei a try if she gets to keep freeze in some form besides her ultimate.
Ideally I would like her to stay dps but change freeze into an ability with a long cool down.
New Ability - Snowball - 30 seconds cool down
Limited arcing range and no radius - throws a snowball
Mei players would need aim and be careful when to use it, since it would not be up each fight.
Q: Over the last 5 years a lot of awesome new skins were added to the game. In fact, I can’t decide which one to equip on multiple heroes and swap them regularly. Have you ever considered a “Random skin” option similiar to the “Random” option for highlight intros?
Aaron Keller: We have looked at this. If we were to do it, it likely wouldn’t be completely random, because we’re not sure that’s exactly what players want. Did I just say that?!? What I meant to say was that players might want the ability to just pick from a certain subset of skins(Such as all their legendaries or their 4 favorites). It also wouldn’t change each time a player spawned for technical reasons.
Q: One of the main selling points of Overwatch 2 is the Campaign and story content, but there is a large crowd of players who either have only a very basic understanding of the lore or haven’t engaged with it at all. Consequently, there has been a bit of misinformation spreading around the community about certain key points of the story. I think this is due to the story being told outside of the game in the form of external media like comics, short stories, and animations and not being easily accessible. You kind of have to go out of your way to learn more about the world and its characters which is not something some people are so easily willing to do.
Has there ever been a plan to implement a system that could entice and better educate current, new, and returning players about the Overwatch universe?
Aaron Keller: Great question!
We are looking at this from a few angles. The first is how to include more of this content inside of OW2 itself either through storytelling in the game or through other systems that could contain and deliver this lore(whether its past OW or current OW2 story. The second is looking at ways of bringing people up to speed with media outside of the game. Both are really exciting and I can’t wait for people to see it!
Give McCree a Funky skin so we can call it McGravy
https://steampugs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/thank-you-jesus.gif
ive only been asking for this one for 4 years now…
Q: Hello! So you mentioned in this news blog that Bastion is going to be reworked “from the ground up”. Are you able to share some things you are trying with Bastion?
Geoff Goodman: Sure!
When re-approching Bastion the biggest starting point is like, “what is the core of this hero that feels like we should make sure to preserve”. Our answer to that is he is a transforming robot, with huge damage potential when he is using his various modes well. We want to make sure Bastion isn’t purely about aim-skill, but he also has a big focus on situational awareness and timing/positioning.
We’re looking at pushing his recon form’s range out by changing his recon weapon. This helps him generally be more useful, but also helps create separation between his other forms, especially sentry. For sentry form, the cost of reducing his mobility to gain huge damage is still interesting and its the heart of what makes him work. However, completely removing his mobility has proved to be too harsh of a penalty, and frankly its not realistically possible to balance him with this downside in mind (especially between different skill levels). So right now we’re testing allowing him to move in Sentry form, but just more slowly than normal. This comes with new tuning for his Sentry weapon, of course, so it isn’t quite as deadly as it is in OW1.
There is more to talk about with him down the road, but we’re still in the middle of reworking him so hopefully we’ll be able show him off in more detail down the road!
Q: As an off-tank player in a 6-stack team, playing mostly scrims, small tournaments and ranked, what can i legetimatly expect for my Ow2 experience ?
A: I would say a lot about OW2 is going to be different. The tank play will certainly change, but if you’re an experienced off-tank player im sure you’ll find great success with those same heroes in OW2 as a solo tank.
Q: Will the PS5 get a official 120 FPS patch before OW2 arrives?
John LaFleur: We don’t have any plans to do so, at the moment. We would have to invest a non-trivial amount of time to upgrade original Overwatch to recognize and separately treat the PS5 (it involves changing the platform SDK). Instead, we’re taking that time to focus on making OW2 the best we can on the next gen consoles.
Thank you for posting the Q&A
Q: Matchmaking is always a weighting of queue time vs MMR range/ team balancing. Would it be possible for users to put their own preference of this balance for themselves?
I’d always prefer to have better matchmaking at the cost of time. Even in Arcade. I’d like to have the agency to tell the system how I want it.
Bill Warnecke: Hey mutsuto, we’re unlikely to ever add this. My instincts were that this would add a lot of complexity and probably not be as helpful as one would hope. I spoke a bit with with an engineer on the team who the most knowledgeable about our matchmaking system, he noted that there are a lot of factors that contribute to matchmaking that are outside of a single person’s control. For example in role queue the amount of roles in queue are the dominant factor for matchmaking time. Also the time of day and how active your particular region is at that time plays a big part in what matches can be made.
Adding a feature like this is also unpredictable, there are likely to be knock-on effects that we’d have to work through. It’s tricky if many players set the slider to “match quickly”, maybe the “prefer quality” players would never get a match, and if we decide to eventually pull them in that would be a poor experience since it wouldn’t match your expectations based on the slider.
A key rule to matchmaking is when you introduce constraints in any way, even if they’re meant to be helpful, you generally increase matchmaking time. The matchmaker is by far one of the most complex systems we maintain, we really appreciate ideas and feedback, even if we don’t directly go with a particular suggestion.
Special thanks to Alex from our server team for helping me get some detail into this answer.
Cheers!
Q: Best Drag Race season?
Bill Warnecke: Great question! I think the first season I watched was Season 4, so it’ll always have a special place in my heart.
I was so happy to see Jinkx Monsoon participate in the Mei Gala, that was rad. If anyone knows someone at World of Wonder have them call me, I want to be a guest judge.
Q: Any hopes for 120 tick servers in the future?
Bill Warnecke: We do use 120 tick for the Overwatch League but right now we’re not seriously considering them for the main live game. We find the most significant benefit of playing on 120 tick comes only when combined with all players in a match having excellent network quality and extremely low latency.
I’ll never say never, it could happen, but not currently planned.
Q:
First of all, super happy birthday with 5 years! This Italian user loves this game very much, know that. So, here are some questions on various fronts:
Artistically and technically, what has been the most challenging skin to make so far?
We know there is a lot of sci-fi charm in Overwatch, but has it often been difficult to explain some of the game’s techniques “scientifically”? For example, if the dragons of Hanzo and Genji are not “magic”, what could they be?
I love Blizzcon skins and their crossovers. a little something for HotS too? Maybe Sigma Raven Lord?
Okay, I think I asked too much and about too many different things, SORRY! ^_^" thanks!!!
Arnold Tsang: Here are some answers to the art related questions.
Technically, it’s always a challenge to make skins for our more complex heroes (D.Va, Bastion, Wrecking Ball, Ashe). Penguin Mei was also really hard, we had to do a lot to make her head work.
Artistically, there are tons of examples but a recent one that comes to mind is Polyanitsa Zarya. The inspiration for that skin is the Russian bogatyr warriors, who wear a very specifically onion shaped helmet. We explored helmeted and non-helmeted versions, but ultimately chose the one we found more appealing. Choosing between appeal and accuracy to the reference is constantly a struggle and can be very subjective, but I like how the skin turned out!
Magic is a tricky word that means different things to different people. That being said, not everything in overwatch can or needs to be explained by technology (in my opinion).
Cool idea!
Q: 1. Can we expect the comics to come back? I mean we got the Tracer’s London Calling, but this did not give us much, the comics we had earlier seemed to give great lore bits.
Arnold Tsang: We are working on more comics!
yes. (To pineapple pizza)
Been suggesting this for years, so glad this is potentially (and finally) happening
yup…probably said this myself in 50 different bastion threads lol…great minds think alike clearly…
My face LIT up after seeing this ONE reply:
Question: Over the years you have released many skins that were only available for a limited time through the league store, weekly challenges or collaborations with charities. Are there any plans or thoughts on giving us another chance to earn these skins? I’ve seen a lot of demand for it, especially from players like me who earned or bought these skins on one platform, but switched to another and weren’t able to bring them over
Answer(OWL Commissioner): On the League store side of things, we are considering bringing back some of the Overwatch League skins from years past. Personally I’m missing the Atlantic All-Star Mercy skin and want that
Q: what was the most challenging skin to make so far?
David Kang: The most challenging skin for me was Echo’s MVP Fleta skin. We don’t usually make skins that are super Asymmetrical due to tech and art constraints. That was one of the biggest hurdle that we have to go thought in making that skin but I think it turned out great.
Q: What’s something new that the art team is looking forward to working on with Overwatch 2? As a fellow artist, the character redesigns and new maps have me more excited than ever to see what the final game will look like!
David Kang: Theres something about creating a version of a place in the real world and replicating it in the Overwatch world that makes me super excited to work on. Its definitely a challenge to implement a huge city into one tiny map but I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job so far.
Bastion gets the Tachanka treatment
Q: One of the main selling points of Overwatch 2 is the Campaign and story content, but there is a large crowd of players who either have only a very basic understanding of the lore or haven’t engaged with it at all. Consequently, there has been a bit of misinformation spreading around the community about certain key points of the story. I think this is due to the story being told outside of the game in the form of external media like comics, short stories, and animations and not being easily accessible. You kind of have to go out of your way to learn more about the world and its characters which is not something some people are so easily willing to do.
Has there ever been a plan to implement a system that could entice and better educate current, new, and returning players about the Overwatch universe?
Aaron Keller:
Great question!
We are looking at this from a few angles. The first is how to include more of this content inside of OW2 itself either through storytelling in the game or through other systems that could contain and deliver this lore(whether its past OW or current OW2 story. The second is looking at ways of bringing people up to speed with media outside of the game. Both are really exciting and I can’t wait for people to see it!
I think you’ve shared this one before
I thought I was the only one who got a sense of deju vu from that…
im 99 percent sure they did.
Q: What is one common misconception about the game (OW1, OW2, or anything else) that you hear all the time from the community that you’d like to clear up?
Geoff Goodman: For me, in the short term, i’d say the biggest misconception I see about 5v5 and 1 Tank being that off-tanks are being removed, changed, etc. But really, many off-tank heroes are getting tankier, and many main tank heroes are getting less tanky and more damage/options, so really the new Tanks are somewhere in-between MTs and OTs.
If anything, I would guess that off-tanks would have an easier time adjusting to OW2’s new Tank role than main-tank players.
Q: THANK YOU. i’m glad her freeze mechanic is still in her base kit somewhere!. is it possible that freezing with her primary fire could be a pve talent? since she already has other freeze talents (like her cold snap one) in other talents.
Geoff Goodman: I would say freezing with her primary in PvE is a minimum of what you’ll see. We have so many crazy ideas for talents for every hero, I can’t wait to show you guys more as we get closer.
Q: Have you considered moving some of the more CC focused DPS heroes into the tank role?
Obviously 5v5 is a huge shakeup. We’ve heard comments from /u/blizz_geoffgoodman and others that a general shift from DPS CC to Tank CC is expected.
Instead of removing Mei’s freeze - give her “frozone” movement speed and some rebalancing on her base health and ability health. She has always acted as an off-tank as is. I think Doomfist would be another good example.
Instead of reworking these iconic heroes - rebalancing them to fit the tank role. This would bring some hero mains into the tank role that hadn’t previously enjoyed it - as well as increasing the small tank role hero pool.
Lastly - will we see a “Classic 6v6 Quick Play” option in the arcade like we currently see of “No Limits”?
Geoff Goodman: I think the common one that comes up here is Mei, which is something we’ve talked about in the past, but we haven’t run the “mei tank” experiment internally yet. I feel like she would have to change quite a bit to fit the tank role, so its a bit more of a rework to have her fit well into that role. That doesn’t mean its off the table, just that its not a trivial change to throw in and try out.
If we did try it, im sure we’d try the ice slide that everyone loves to think about It certainly feels more acceptable on a Tank, which would allow her to engage in front of her team etc.
Doomfist I think requires a bit more thought than even Mei. He is extremely unique, even amongst the Overwatch roster, but he essentially requires CC to control him, and he throws out a bit too much CC himself, even if her were a tank. We haven’t started digging into him yet, as we’re still figuring out how some of these CC changes are going to play out, but hes on my list to look at as soon as we can. Ideally i’d love to keep his high mobility ability-based gameplay in tact, but be less frustrating to play against.
I would like a random skin option and random favorite option. Similar to the random favorite mount button in world of warcraft and the random favorite summon battle pet.
I think both options would be nice. A star system could indicate your favorite skins.