A new hero joins the Overwatch team, and he's here to share some mid-season updates!
EDIT
If I had only one piece of advice on how to make Supports more popular, and feel like they can defend themselves do this:
Support Movement Passive
- Base Movement Speed increased by 18%.
- Base Movement Speed increased from 5.5m/s, to 6.5m/s.
Not only would this help Supports evade better, duel better, but it would also help them heal more spread out teammates. It’s also really simple to implement with a small numbers tweak, instead of a bunch of reworks. And it allows you to adjust Ultimates like Doom, Bastion, Mei to be buffed so they are less underwhelming. Also just, “Mobility Feels Good” in a kinesthetic sense. It also might prevent the need to nerf DiveTanks/Flankers as hard, down to the level where Supports can deal with them better.
(Props to RobotWizard on figuring this out)
Oh cool. Saw the headline about Jared Neuss in Google News a while back.
Queue Times
Contrary to what your DPS Moira may tell you, Overwatch is a role-based game. As such, queue times are a very real, very consistent focus area for the team.
With the move to 5v5, we’re seeing longer queue times than we’d like for both tank and damage players, and while there’s no silver bullet for this issue, the team has a LOT of ideas that we want to experiment with in the upcoming seasons.
Many of these ideas are focused on the support role and how we can make it more fun and more rewarding to play. We’re discussing targeted support hero reworks, game system updates, and even some role-wide changes to improve support quality of life.
Good luck on that. Since I’m guessing Support player counts aren’t anywhere near the ideal 2/5th or 40% of the playerbase right now.
And Ramattra is going to make that a lot worse.
A big “bandaid” suggestion on that. Starting in Season 2, make it so Kiriko is either free to F2P players, or very early in the battle pass. That should flood the game with a bunch of players on the Support Role for a few weeks, to get past some of the more traumatic aspects of Season 2 queue times.
And heck, a policy of “Previous New heroes are instant accessible in the next season that has a new hero is featured” might soften a lot of the concerns about Hero Unlocks. Since that will get to be a bit daunting after a a few seasons have passed for newer players.
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Reading your posts, watching your clips, and playing alongside you always leaves me humbled. We have an incredible community, and I hope that by opening up about what we’re thinking more, we can keep growing together.
Fix the broken OWL reward first, bro. (and couple other things)
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I hope this says why on gods earth you nerfed Junkrat and not sojourn
but no explanation will be good enough
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Me reading that post:
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Good start on potential changes to the challenges and BP System.
If you bring in a higher coin reward for actually playing to subsidise the shop I’ll be happy. By higher I mean increasing it by at least 5-10x what it is now.
I get F2P means we have to spend money on currency fine. But I’d rather it be a top up option for if we’re 100-200 short of a cool skin (and still have enough to pay for the BP next season).
Right now I refuse to have to fork out $20 for tokens to buy a nice skin period. Whales are going to be whales whatever happens…But the normal player base would be happier making smaller purchases IF something they want is visually appealing.
#marketing101
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Is it just me, or does the entire progression section really say “holiday events will have a skin now” and nothing else?
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A trend in the right direction if all that comes true. Especially the comp stuff 7/20 is dogwater and needs fixed or reverted to SR
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This was a solid article. Let us hope you follow through with this.
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It also says they’re revamping the BP from Season 3 onwards. Hopefully it’ll mean more coin rewards!
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Hopefully he knows how to fix players not receiving OWL rewards!
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Glad to see the devs have heard the feedback that the gameplay has a progression/reward issue. Knowing they’re looking at it and toying with things in the future feels better than radio silence.
It’ll be interesting to see how they toy with the Support roster to try to get it feeling more enjoyable and rewarding.
Looks like I’ll still be waiting for s3 though unless s2’s opener patch looks good.
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Yeah that’s great and all but nerf Sojourn.
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Here’s hoping “revamping the battle pass” means you don’t have to grind all the way to tier 55 to unlock heroes…
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You forgot the most important par KEEP WATCHING STREAMS FOR CONTENT
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Contrary to what your DPS Moira may tell you, Overwatch is a role-based game. As such, queue times are a very real, very consistent focus area for the team.
Oh my god so funny 
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Like I was genuinely confused by that. He did a whole multi-paragraph preamble, which had me built up for them to announce some major change, and then what they actually revealed was essentially nothing. I hope that what they announced here was just a small bonus and not actually their way of doing what they said.
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I mute them on my phone while at work. EZ skins
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I bet you that it will be an unlockable epic skin.
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I mean, the general problem is still that we get more content by Watching someone else play rather than playing ourselves
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