Waching daily Jan 26 2018

Welcome everyone to another Developer Update. I am Jeff from the Overwatch team.

Today we're going to try to cover some popular topics in the community.

Stuff that you guys talk about and express that you want to hear more from us the

development team about so I'd like to touch on some of those things.

The first thing that I wanted to talk about was our progress on toxicity.

As you all know, it is a major initiative of the Overwatch team and everyone here at

Blizzard to minimize the amount of toxicity that takes place in online

games not just our games but games in general.

So we've been putting a lot of effort against this

and I think making some good progress.

As you all know, we recently added the ability for our console players to report people

which has been amazing and has shown us really great results.

We also added warnings for people who were about to get suspended, silenced or banned that

their behavior was unacceptable and that if they kept getting reported by other

players or noticed by us here at Blizzard that they would get in trouble

and that's helped a lot.

And then we've also given feedback to those of you who are reporting players who are exhibiting poor behavior

in the sense that you would get a message in the game itself that would tell you:

"hey, you reported somebody and we've taken action against them".

I am very pleased to report that in competitive play since those features went live

incidents of abusive chat are now down 17 percent.

So we measure the stuff and we track it, and we're very pleased with those results

On the other hand, player reporting

the amount of times that you guys actually report bad behavior

is now up 20 percent.

We're restoring faith in the system, it's starting to work much better and

it's actually having a big impact on the community.

We know those numbers are not as great as they could be.

We know that the problem is not solved

and things aren't perfect, but it's getting a lot better

and a lot of the initiatives that we're doing here at Blizzard

are starting to make a difference.

We've instituted some really interesting programs on that front as well.

I'll just give you one example. A lot of these we don't like to talk about

because we don't want players gaming the system or knowing what we can

catch you for or action you for, but I'll give you an example of one thing that

we've been doing that has proven very positive.

We now proactively seek out social media sites like YouTube for example and look for incidents of very

toxic behavior and track down the accounts that are participating in those

and action them, often times before anybody's even reported them or they've

shown up in any other place.

That's just one example of us being proactive

that I think is going to make a big difference over time.

Another popular community topic that always comes up is hero balancing

and people ask us constantly what's our philosophy on hero balancing

or why isn't my particular hero that I love buffed

and why isn't this particular hero that I hate nerfed

and I want to talk about how we come about with our balance philosophy.

I always describe our balance philosophy, or our balanced process, as a triangle

and one point of that triangle is the community feedback.

We are listening to community feedback on balance all the time.

It's very important for members of the community to realize that the community is absolutely massive

we have over 35 million players and much of the time there's not one central community voice

meaning you're really part of many probably thousands of smaller

communities who are voicing different opinions and each community sort of has

its own take on what's right or wrong so oftentimes it's easy for us to feel like

everybody feels the way that I do when that's not necessarily the case but we

are actively listening to community feedback.

The other thing that we review constantly are statistics.

and we do a ton of analysis on how the game is actually playing.

These are undisputable facts about

hero playtime's, win rates, how fast ultimates are charging

map balance is a great example, but we're always looking at statistics.

And then the third point of that triangle that we balance based on is our own intuition as game developers.

We on the Overwatch team play a ton of Overwatch.

We play competitive, we play quick play, we play the arcade.

We're participating in the game as players.

As the people who made the game we have very strong

opinions about how it should be tuned and balanced.

We very rarely only listen to one point of that triangle and we're always sympathetic and aware

of all three points of the triangle.

We have to know that even though statistics

and the community feel one way about something if we as game developers

disagree with it, we need to reevaluate our opinion and really look deeply at

why the other two points of the triangle feel the way that they do.

There's no one driving thing that's causing balance to happen at any one time.

I know people want to know some particulars about hero balance changes that are up and coming.

Obviously, as a lot of you know, we're experimenting with changes to Mercy

on the Public Test Region right now.

Our efforts there are to tone down the impact of Resurrect

and make Mercy more manageable when she's in her Valkyrie state during her Ultimate.

That's what we're experimenting with right now.

We love Mercy. She's one of the best throughput healers in the game.

She has absolutely fantastic mobility.

Obviously, with the change of adding Valkyrie to replace her ultimate of Resurrection

we tried to move Resurrection to a secondary ability

and the ability right now in current Overwatch isn't playing out as a secondary ability

it's playing out like another Ultimate ability

in combination with Valkyrie which is extremely powerful

Mercy needs to be toned down.

I know there are a lot of Mercy mains.

Mercy is by far the most played hero in the game

and the community is absolutely vocal.

We know how much you love this hero.

If we tone her down too much we will bring her back.

We will pay very close attention to the changes that we do with Mercy.

We want her to be very viable.

We're not looking to remove the hero from competitive play or anything like that.

We just need to tone down that impact of Resurrect.

We do believe it's a balanceable ability.

I read a lot of feedback, people saying just get rid of that ability give her something else.

We would like to attempt to bring the balance in reign and we think that we can do that.

Now with Junkrat.

Junkrat's not far off from being at a balance point that we want him to be at.

We're going to start by toning down the damage fall-off

or actually adding damage fall-off to the Concussive Mine.

Currently there's no damage fall-off to Concussive Mine.

We're going to make it so Junkrat players have to be more accurate with that Concussive Mine.

And it will feel less random and lucky on Junkrat's behalf when he gets those

kills with the Concussive Mine.

Again, we'll keep a close eye on him if he's not in the right balance point.

Meaning, he's either too powerful or not powerful enough. We'll revisit him.

There's a list of other heroes that I am frequently asked about

that I think it's important to address.

Hanzo comes up a lot .

I think there's a lot of frustration that players have because of the Scatter Arrow ability.

We're currently looking at options both in terms of

can we retune Scatter Arrow to feel more fair for people involved?

I think what frustrates people the most is, I always like to use the Orisa example.

If you're playing Orisa and Hanzo shoots a Scatter Arrow

into your feet and you get one shot by it, it doesn't feel real good.

We're going to look into issues like that, see if we can balance Scatter Arrow.

We also have a number of ideas that are potentially replacing Scatter Arrow.

Internally, we're doing a lot of prototyping and a lot of playtesting

so we haven't really settled on which direction we're going to take it.

I just want you to know that we are looking into Hanzo

specifically at abilities like Scatter Arrow for potential changes.

Recently, there have been a lot of threads bringing up Mei.

People want to hear about Mei and know what we're doing to change her because

they're concerned they look at her pick rates on some of the fansites

that analyze Competitive Play or they look at the Overwatch League

and they sort of judge how much Mei is played.

I don't think Mei is in a horrible place

but we believe that Mei might need a slight adjustment

to make her a little bit more relevant.

I put Mei into this category of heroes that we need to be really careful with.

She can feel very oppressive to play against if she's too powerful.

We want to bring her in balance.

We do believe that she is a more situational character.

Meaning that Mei, even when balanced properly,

might not be the right pick all the time, every single match.

Overwatch was a game that was designed for you to pick different heroes.

We allow for hero changes to happen all the time.

We designed the game so that there was was nothing blocking you

from having access to all 21 heroes when the game released

and now we're up to 26 heroes.

We strongly encourage players to have

at least a small hero pool of heroes that you can switch around and play.

I know the culture of maining and the culture of one-tricking

has become very popular in our community and you just need to know that if you're

only going to play one or two heroes, you're going to have a hard time sometimes

because your hero might not be relevant in all gameplay situations all the time

and this isn't our goal.

Our goal is to have heroes all have a place in the game

but not necessarily be played wholly and solely all the time by themselves.

I believe that super highly skilled players can pull off something like that occasionally

but just be careful, you might be damaging the experience for yourself

and you might be risking experience for your teammates as well.

Another hero that we get asked a lot about is Symmetra.

Symmetra is one that we're still discussing heavily.

We don't believe that she needs major buffs.

We do believe that she is a very situational character and that's how she's designed.

Meaning, there are going to be occasions where Symmetra is not the right pick.

We recognize that right now she doesn't have enough usefulness across the board

and we'd like to give her a little bit more, but that doesn't mean that we

believe that she's ever going to be at a place where her pick rate

is way beyond where it is right now.

We think we can improve it but she is kind of a situational character.

She's built to be a defensive character who owns a certain space

and that's the design that we're really excited about right now

because she has that that certain kit and that's how she plays

it's going to be difficult to make her 100% useful in all situations

Again, that's why we strongly encourage that

we want her to be super fun

we want her to be picked more than she is right now

but also consider that in some situations

you might want to pick a hero besides Symmetra.

Those are some of the things that I wanted to cover.

I know that there's a lot more topics that you guys want to hear about.

I know you'd love to hear about all 26 heroes and

where we think we're at with them in the balance.

All in all, we're feeling pretty good about balance.

We feel like there's a lot of variety in strategy.

There's a lot of heroes being played.

We're constantly looking at what you guys are doing,

the Overwatch fanbase at large.

We're following your behavior very closely

and we're watching what heroes you play and how you're performing and

we're also keeping a very close eye on the pro scene as well because that

informs where the game is going and how the game can be played at the highest level of skill.

It's all very helpful to us and we really appreciate all of your participation.

Anyway, we hope you're having fun. Please remember to be good to each other.

We'll see you guys in the next Developer Update.