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.
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