‘Smurfing isn’t really that big a problem’ – Developer community update notes week 2 April 2017

In the week that the much-awaited ‘Uprising’ expansion is released, the devs have been fairly quiet on issues from developer transparency to smurfing, and from skins to, well, super awesome skins, find out why lead developer Jeff ‘Bringer of Death’ Kaplan thinks smurfing isn’t an issue and a load more after the jump!

 

Smurfing

First up is the big one: Jeff Kaplan actually said with his own mouth, on purpose that he doesn’t think smurfing is that bad of an idea – but before you turn to pure refined NaCl (I know most of you didn’t get through that sentence without crystaling up a little at least) it IS worth seeing his justification for it: “I know there is a very bad perception of Smurfing. But the reality is, skilled players are moved rapidly out of lower skill situations.” – along with an anecdote about a smurfing pro player who’s account was ranked up with his main ‘within 15 games’ – that doesn’t mean that every single one of those 15 games isn’t while playing as Pharah on the enemy team, though ☹.

While that is enough to produce the salt to keep the roads of Canada safe for another harsh winter, it is prefaced with some interesting insight about the other huge plague on Overwatch Matchmaking that’s slowly driving everyone insane: boosting.

Boosting

Boosting he offered another opinion on, he stresses that boosting is very bad, and that’s why the 1000/500SR ‘gap’ limit exists in comp, and that the OW team are ‘very actively’ working on pursuing and punishing boosters. I guess we know what it’s like when the Overwatch team play comp together then

New Overwatch Skins

Of course there are things more important than gameplay updates, skins! The ‘Uprising’ expansion dropped this week (for free!) with a staggering Widowmaker legendary skin and then a bunch of skins that are okay I guess (Kidding! – Orisa gets an awesome new legendary, too!) with most of them being ‘Overwatch Agent’ skins that follow the style/palette of Soldier: 76’s ‘Strike Commander Morrison’ skin, you know it’s gonna go down when the whole squad turns up in matching SKINS from now on!

As for the future, Jeff confirmed the following:

A new Sombra legendary skin (a few months out, but still this year)

THREE new Hanzo legendary skins (three!)

Two new Zarya legendary skins, (one of them being ‘awesome’ and the other being ‘super awesome’, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were slight palette swaps like her other skins and ‘awesome’ and ‘super awesome’ were just their names)

An Ana nerf, probably.

That’s pretty much all from Jeff this week, though in response to people saying he was being particularly quiet as of late he mentioned that he’s been in London this last week (King’s Row IRL?) and that he’s not been able to post, but fans shouldn’t worry, he’s not giving us the cold shoulder, he’s back now ad he’ll try to post more!

Thanks a load for reading, please let me know what you think! ☺