Last Friday streamer Emongg interviewed Aaron Keller about stadium. There was a decent bit of interesting new info in there that I haven’t seen reported elsewhere, so I figured I’d provide a summary of any new information that came out of it:
Info:
- They’re probably doing another balance patch this week
- Highest winrates by role across all ranks: Lucio, Reinhardt, Reaper.
- Highest winrate in masters+ lobbies: JQ, Mei, Lucio.
- Interestingly d.va is the lowest winrate on high rank PC (46%) but the highest on console
- Highest pickrate across the board is soldier 76
- The top picked powers in the game are the soldier 76 tactical visor spam and the Juno 2nd missile charge both at around 70%
- Their goal was for stadium to make up around 10-20% of the player hours, at launch it was over 50% and has since dropped to around 40%. For comparison when a new event mode drops it usually peaks around 20% and can drop to as low as 2% by the end of the event.
- In pre-stadium OW, ranked and unranked role queue were the most popular modes and it’d fluctuate which is more popular, and after that third place was unranked open queue at around 8-10%
- Aqua (codenamed season 18 hero) may or may not be added to stadium in his launch season. They are still deciding whether it’d be more exciting to prioritize newer heroes or to switch up the classics. (This contradicts something said by another dev in an AMA that happened a few days earlier so it seems communications got mixed up somewhere)
- A goal of the upcoming trials (quests) feature is to stop the armory side of the mode from becoming stale by forcing you to have to reconsider your build each match based on the trial and the upgrade you get from it
- Trivia bit: Reinhardt’s original internal name was “Juggernaut” and Pharah was even called “Mercy” for a brief bit
- The current rough plan for drafting is a fairly simple system of teams taking turns picking one hero at a time. They also plan on giving whichever team picks tank first a ban so that the other tank doesn’t just pick their hardest counter. This feature is planned for season 19 but there is a chance they change priorities and swap its release with trials in season 18
- 6v6 stadium is not currently planned. Performance issues are a big factor in that. It’s not entirely off the table just not likely. Also interestingly the mode was originally planned to be 4v4
- Performance is something they are looking into with a patch hopefully coming on Monday (today) that will experiment with removing the 30 fps cap on legacy consoles. One tidbit that was surprising here is that mythic weapons were a challenge for the team in terms of performance
- 62% of players are using 3rd person mode
- A midmatch first/third person toggle is not currently planned as they see some potential issues with it including balance, but they’re considering trying it internally
- The stadium matchmaker cares more about internal skill rating than actual rank, hence why you’re getting in matches with people 3 or 4 ranks apart. This is necessary since in the first 4 ranks playtime is a larger factor than skill
- They’re planning to make the transition to first person on aim-down-sights heroes smoother hopefully next season
- They plan on improving the replay system for stadium at some point
- Support is the most popular role in stadium right now and Aaron suspects it may be because their kits currently have more varied and radical builds than the others
- They do have plans to switch up items and powers for variety and balance reasons. Next season will see a fair number of items added and removed. Powers they plan to wait a bit longer to switch out as the rest of the mode is still evolving rapidly, but if any particular power is an issue they may change it sooner
- Some features are surprisingly difficult to port over to other modes like endorsements and leaderboards, but endorsements are definitely coming to stadium. Aaron also expressed interest in drives for stadium
- They are currently playtesting a 5 round format to determine whether a shorter format would be a better fit for the unranked mode they are adding. Stadium used to be much longer than 7 rounds but they shortened it to keep a reasonable match length and so they could also have longer round formats (initially they had quick stuff like deathmatch in there)
- Stomps (3-0/4-0 matches) are more common than they want right now. Other than general tuning to things like catchup mechanic, one idea they are considering is removing the currency element of the mercy rule so that the matches end sooner in stomps.
- Balance changes to the main game will apply to stadium as well. Aaron mentioned that this means hero reworks will come with a lot of changes to their stadium powers, but that it “doesn’t look like we’re going to have to do this for a bit”
- When further pushed on reworks, he declines to name any heroes but says there are “a few on the list”
- Aaron stresses that their focus isn’t just on stadium and that they’re still adding a lot to the core game in the coming months
- Some power teases next season. Sigma gets an additional mini version of his barrier that passively orbits around him with which he can strategically time his movement to block damage, and it synergizes with any other barrier upgrades. And zenyatta has a power called “flying kick”
- They want to continue doing bigger things like perks and stadium going forward. He ends by saying “next year is gonna be bonkers”
