yup…probably said this myself in 50 different bastion threads lol…great minds think alike clearly…
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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 
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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
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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!
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I think you’ve shared this one before
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I thought I was the only one who got a sense of deju vu from that…
im 99 percent sure they did.
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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.
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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.
Q: Will there be a Beta?
John LaFleur: Almost certainly, yes. If I knew when, I couldn’t tell you. If I told you, I’d have to kill you. But u/blizz_akeller is our resident secret-leaker, so you might give him a try!
Q: Any major changes to the game engine, visual rendering, texturing as thus far?
John LaFleur: Yes, we’ve had a lot of changes to the game engine. Many optimizations, better lighting, and many new features have been added. PvE has also allowed us to look much more at how our environments tell our story, so we’ve added many features that help with that. In addition, since the hardware landscape has changed a lot since Overwatch was launched, we’re taking the opportunity (both on the artist side and the technical side) to beef up our high end features and assets.
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Q: Will we see any more animation by Michael Biancalana? OW1 has been lacking since they left.
Arnold Tsang: Michael is an incredible animator and game developer! He left a permanent mark on the game with the highlight intro system, as well as iconic characters like Zenyatta and countless other great things. He’s no longer with Blizzard now but i’m sure he’s off somewhere making awesome stuff.
Q: Hello, Overwatch developers! I wanted to celebrate all of the lore you have given us in the past 5 years by asking a question related to Reaper.
To keep this short, if you are willing to answer any past lore question, is there any clarification on the family that Reaper apparently had, as mentioned by Ana in the Bastet short story? And, is this the same family that Reaper was stalking in the “Reflections” comic, which was apparently not chosen at random? Reaper as a character is very special to me and some insight on this lore detail would mean the world to me! 
Arnold Tsang: The family that Reaper is stalking in the “Reflections” comic is indeed his family and not just random people on the street.
I think there’s still a lot to explore about Reaper’s story, and we’re currently working on some lore for him that i’m pretty excited about.
Q: Hello,
I don’t have a question - I just wanted to thank you for the 1.5k+ hours of fun you gave me playing Overwatch with my late partner and soul mate, Liam - he passed away on the 20th of April, 2021 just 10 days before his birthday, from an extremely rare illness called Haemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis - Total Mayhem was the last game mode we played together before he went to bed on the 29th of March, being admitted to hospital on the 30th and never getting to leave.
Overwatch was a really big part of our free time together, especially during the last year, as we weren’t yet living together - we were saving for a mortgage when he passed. It was definitely the game we played together the most, so thank you for that. 
Arnold Tsang: I’m so sorry for your loss. Though i’m glad you were able to use the game as a way to connect and bond.
Hearing stories like yours and being reminded of the reach of Overwatch, and it’s positive effect on people is always humbling and heartwarming. It reminds me of why we continue to put our best into the game.
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thats cause its overreaction geoff 
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Q: As a renowned map designer (because we all love Kings Row) what are some key points you look at when designing a map for Overwatch and some pitfalls a new map designer might need to avoid?
Aaron Keller: Hi TurnipSquid! Long answer incoming.
Two of the biggest mistakes that people can make when designing OW maps is to make them too complicated and to make them too large.
Overwatch gameplay is really fast. People need to make decisions based off a lot of complex interactions very quickly. The busier the environment(and the rest of the game is) the harder this is to do. One of the last changes we made to King’s Row was closing one of the window’s over point A. There used to be 2 side by side. One extra opening was just enough to where a lot of players couldn’t consciously focus on dangerous areas well resulting in them feeling overwhelmed.
The community talks a lot about power creep, healing creep, etc but not many people mention size creep. I think over the years Ow maps have grown larger. Think the opening area of Junkertown. When we have too many spaces like this our core gun play begins to break down. We’re really investigating map size with OW2.
As far as what to look for. This is a little more hand wavy and gut based. An OW map just feels right when you look at it. Most of the time people wonder how we make spaces for individual heroes to feel good and we do put time and thought into this but our maps are designed with a lot of intentionality and affordances built into them. What that means is when a player turns a corner they can very quickly recognize where they are supposed to go, what the map will probably be laid out like in areas that she can’t see yet and what type of threats and gameplay they can immediately expect to engage in(a teamfight, a flank, etc).
If you’re looking for advice in how to progress as a Level Designer, my number 1 is to pick a game or games, study them and then just endlessly build maps for them. Its a skill and is something that you’ll get better at with time and practice!
Follow up to the Gothenburg & India map type question
Q: 99% sure Gothenburg was shown briefly at Blizzcon 2019. Of course, it was an Assault map at the time… Looking forward to this new game mode.
Aaron Keller: Oh shoot! You might be right. Ummmmmm… <waiting for brain to come up with something intelligent to say....>
Q: Loved this question from the last AMA but what were some abilities that were originally planned for heroes but had to be cut out?
Scott Mercer: We’ve tried and discarded quite a few abilities during development of our heroes, it’s a very natural part of the process. Sometimes the ideas are better fits for other heroes, sometimes they just don’t work and we chalk that up as a lesson.
Here’s one I worked on for Torbjörn:
Torbjörn had something we referred to as the “Claw Trap” that he deployed similar to Widowmaker’s Venom Mine, but instead of dealing damage the trap grabbed a hold of you and prevented the enemy from moving outside a fixed radius of the trap. You could move freely around next to the trap, but couldn’t move far away until you destroyed the base of the trap. It had some fun moments as it could do things like stop a charging Reinhardt or prevent Pharah from launching high into the sky, but it really caused a lot of confusion. After a bunch of iteration, we decided to go in a different direction.
Wait, i think it was in the Bastion comic
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Q: How close have you been to make a really controversial change (like deleting brig XD) that barely didn’t make it through?
Geoff Goodman: Other than a bunch of stuff we’ve thrown on the test server and pulled at the last minute (like Zen’s discord being able to target through barriers), maybe the most significant was Sombra’s hero design. For most of her development, she was a Support hero instead of a Damage hero. In this role, her main goal was to hack every enemy, while sneaking around and trying to stay alive. At that time, Hacking an enemy was a long duration debuff that reduced their healing/damage output, rather than the short duration high-impact debuff it became later.
The idea was that she was balanced so that if she successfully got enough hacks on the enemy team, your team would effectively be able to win a 5-6 (since she wasn’t very good in combat for her team), simply because the debuffs were strong enough to allow for that. This is all fine and good on paper, and it was pretty fun to play her this way, but people just hated getting debuffed in this way. In fact, every time we’ve tried to put this kind of debuff in the game (Wrecking Ball also had it in early development, instead of his shield), we get overwhelming feedback that it is the most terrible thing we could put in the game.
There is something psychologically painful about a -damage/healing output debuff, compared to just about any other debuff, it makes it hard for it to find its way into the game in any form.
Needs to be 3 seconds in the AOE after the slow drone deploys and has to be in LOS with the drone. Most heroes can already escape it easily with their movement abilities. If she has no freeze on her kit other than her ult, she has no freeze overall
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Q: What was your favorite skin to design?
Arnold Tsang: I loved working on Toxic Roadhog. It was a collaboration with one of our senior character modelers, Niles Doubleday. It was fun to see his vision for the skin and translate it to a concept. Making the floating skull head work was difficult, but worth it! As character art director, I don’t have as much time as I used to to work on skins, but that’s one from recent memory that I enjoyed a lot.
Q: Hi Blizzard! Will Overwatch 2 launch on all platforms day one? Specifically will it hit Nintendo Switch the same day as PC, Xbox and PlayStation, and will it run on both the previous gen and newer gen consoles?
Bill Warnecke: Hey there! As a live ops engineer I loved shipping Overwatch on all platforms and in all regions at the same time, it was a huge challenge and was very exciting. It’s definitely our goal to do the same for Overwatch 2, but of course I can’t promise that we wont’ hit any blockers that prevent us from doing that.
Cheers!
Q: Any new workshop content in the works. Customizable maps, spawnable shields, spawnable turrets
Bill Warnecke: Hey there! We ARE working on something super cool in this space, not exactly what you called out, but I’m pretty excited about it. We’re not ready to announce it yet, but I thought I’d drop a reply here and let you know that yes… more workshop related things are still coming 
Cheers
Q: Who has the highest SR on the blizzard team right now, and how high is that SR?
Bill Warnecke: I’m not sure what SR this person is at now but the highest I’m aware of was around ~4300. We really have a wide range of skill levels on the team, while we do many team wide playtests, we also have focused playtests for specific skill ranges when necessary.
Cheers!