While we don’t have anything too ‘meaty’ directly from ‘Fresh-breff-Jeff’ Kaplan, other members of the Overwatch dev team have been transparent about what their thinking of for future updates!

Capture Progress Changes

Our first one is a biggie coming from Scott Mercer, in short: that game-changing Assault mode rule change? Forget it. – in slightly less-short: you need 33% of the objective [the first ‘checkpoint’ node] to win. He goes through a lot of scenarios, but the long and short of it is that while you still only need to get 0.1% more than your opponent, you still need to get 33% to win, so:

Team A gets 0% captured

Team B gets 23% captured

This is a TIE, neither team got the 33% necessary to ‘register’ as a score

HOWEVER:

Team A gets 45%

As soon as team B gets to 45.1%, the game is over and team B wins – this was to stop it being extra tricky when a team wasn’t able to get on point, and all it took was a tracer or pharah flying immediately over to end the second round instantly (still, watch the point!)

Mr. Mercer outlines a couple other scenarios but I found his post a touch confusing, I hope mine makes sense!

Problems with SR Gains/Losses Debunked

Secondly, Scott Mercy hit’s us with the fat 1-2 by crushing another of my dreams via a forum post: supports don’t necessarily get less SR for a win or more for a loss.

He touches upon a few things in this forum post, saying that the community doesn’t fully ‘understand’ how the on-fire bar works and it’s relation (or lack thereof) to SR, the TL;DR of that is that while the SR system IS changed, only certain users are reporting ‘problems’ with their skill rating and the majority seem to be fine, but he insists that the player base should keep the dev team informed of anything that looks like it might be a problem, just in case there IS something going on (My 800SR skid is just because I suck then I guess ☹)

Genji’s Dragonblade

Finally, Geoff Goodman addresses the cries of Genji mains all over silver complaining about the (accidental) nerf to his ultimate. In short, you used to get more ‘sword swings’ if you had higher latency, and because of this, it SHOULD be 6 swings, but most people were used to get one ‘extra’ swing – the accidental nerf is that all players now only get 6, Geoff said that the plan is to make it so all players get 7 in future to be in line with what most players are used to (not that it matters if Ana is good with her sleep darts until that gets nerf away from her [on accident, no less])

A relatively quiet week for the OW team, proving that the Uprising expansion launched with very little bugs – good on them!

Check back next week for another whistle-stop tour of the forums and what out beloved devs have been up to!

Thanks so much for reading! ☺

Charlie K