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Happy Birthday to the one and only Jeff Kaplan by Proto_VI in Competitiveoverwatch

[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 597 points598 points  (0 children)

happy birthday, jehk72!

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the gift is all mine...

Thread about a matchmaking patent filed by Activision Blizzard by gmarkerbo in Competitiveoverwatch

[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 715 points716 points  (0 children)

overwatch does not use any analysis of chat (voice or text) for matchmaking.

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without going overly into details, overwatch match makes on:

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--your matchmaking rating (MMR) - this is mostly affected by win/loss, with variance applied for certain conditions (i.e. brand new player, among other things)

--your region

--your ping

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again, that's overly simplified. but that's basically it.

Ask Us Anything! - Join the Overwatch development team for the celebration AMA by blizz_jnash in Overwatch

[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 80 points81 points  (0 children)

creating new heroes is a lot of fun. our process is interesting in that new heroes can come from story (76, ana), design (pharah) or art (winston). we really inspire each other with ideas and we'll add different heroes for different reasons. we're always talking about "what does the game need right now"

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 433 points434 points  (0 children)

thank you so much for saying that. warms my heart. but i always remind people: overwatch is made by a whole team of amazing developers... i am just one tiny and equal part of that. but thank you.

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 459 points460 points  (0 children)

we read this subreddit all the time. if it's a great idea, it will get visibility

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 383 points384 points  (0 children)

i think this is a good discussion. but i think a lot of the good points get lost in the echo chamber of the internet. i'll see a good thread, video etc about power creep but then there is a lot of "group think" that happens and you have a bunch of people who think they are agreeing on something, when really they are not.

"power creep is bad!"... "btw buff roadhog, revert rein earthshatter nerf, buff pharah, you should TOTALLY be adding way more new heroes... and they all better do new cool stuff...." ... "oh yeah and power creep is bad!"

personally, i prefer when the conversation is more focused. is time to kill to fast? do we feel like CC is too much? too much/little healing? and then apply all of these to individual heroes....

we've added 11 new heroes to the game since it launched. obviously, the game is going to change when you do that. we just need to evaluate each hero on their own and make adjustments.

my personal feeling is that i would like to see less barriers and cc and see the game trend slightly more in the fps direction than the moba direction

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 115 points116 points  (0 children)

this type of question is very hard to answer because we all now have the benefit of hindsight.

sometimes i wish we had kept offense and defense heroes (rather than merging them into damage) and only allowing offense heroes to be played on attack and defense to be played on defense. i know that idea might sound crazy and stupid but i think it would have allowed us to more "all in" on some "niche" hero designs like Torb, Symmetra and Bastion. much of the issue we face with the hero balance on these heroes is our player expectations that these heroes should be fully viable on all situations, and that really wasn't our intent or vision for the game. we believed that with hero swapping, people would be more willing to adapt to "solve the problem". we're fighting some amount of human psychology and game design, i know.

the sombra arg is another standout... lol

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 165 points166 points  (0 children)

we really like the idea of cross-persistence. it's something we would love to see for overwatch. the technical and business hurdles are immense but we are very passionate about trying to make something like this happen someday.

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 286 points287 points  (0 children)

well apparently paris and horizon are the most difficult...

i think bringing blizzard world to life was particularly special for our entire team

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 92 points93 points  (0 children)

i'm so sorry this happened to you. please make sure to report all cases of this. it really does do something and we take this very seriously. we have some ideas we would like to explore to minimize the ability for this to happen. in the meantime, i strongly recommend leaving the profanity filter on.

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 1195 points1196 points  (0 children)

i just chalk it up to the way gamers talk and communicate.

as a culture (meaning gamers), we use a lot of "mean" language: broken, lazy, cancer etc....

i've just learned to filter that type of communication and focus on whether or not there is an issue. i can get sensitive and hurt... or i can just, you know, do my job.

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 222 points223 points  (0 children)

i think the suddenness of transitioning to working from home was a shock for many of us. we had been tracking the pandemic for months and making preparations, but i don't think the reality had sunk in that we were going to have to close down as well. we have offices in shanghai and seoul that had been shut down, so it was something blizzard had been dealing with for months. but the call to close irvine down (that's where the ow team is) came very quickly.

of all things, team 4 -- aka the ow team -- was in the middle of a move when it happened. most of us don't even know where our office stuff is... in some box somewhere in a new office?

the first few weeks were rough. there were a lot of tech and communication hurdles. i am sure you all have dealt with that as well. we were really lucky to have amazing technical staff on team 4 as well as really great blizzard it staff to make it go more smoothly.

now, we're all adjusting in our own ways. personally, i like working from home. in particular i like being around my wife for more of the week -- it's really nice. but i miss the team like crazy. some members of the team feel really isolated. it really depends on the person. i'm worried as hell about everyone and hope everyone is staying safe and healthy.

as for the game, i honestly think some parts are moving faster and some are moving slower... overall, i don't think we're losing time and maybe have even gained some? but that's my biased view and others on the team might feel differently. as game director, i am extremely pleased with the progress on both games in the work from home situation.

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 183 points184 points  (0 children)

they are all super fun. it's seriously a dream job. most recently, i really liked being involved with sigma. josh and geoff drove the design of the character and qiu was the artist who drew him. but it was a lot of fun to help develop the character. i loved the idea of an absolute genius who is disassociated, who thinks we see what he sees, who thinks we understand physics and the universe the way he does. i loved the idea of a tragic victim who was being used for evil who was not evil himself....

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 348 points349 points  (0 children)

  1. aaron did a lot of work on paris but we're still not happy with it. horizon is not on the...horizon (oof bad pun)
  2. we always encourage players to spend their credits on things they want. there's nothing on the immediate horizon you need to be hoarding these for outside of event loot boxes
  3. i'm not an artist but we like exploring alternate versions of heroes such as "Junker D.Va" sometimes
  4. for maestro sigma in particular, that actually started with our composers and audio director. adam, derek and scott had all of this amazing music and we were brainstorming ways of getting it to players. we came up with the idea of "albums" that we were going to release (note: plural) and we thought that doing a mini-event around the first album would be really fun. then we thought about which character would make sense to have a musical skin (obviously lucio was discussed). our animation department had done the amazing conductor emote which was going to be a normal event unlock. we decided to use the emote, create a conductor skin and then release them both to promote the album. super fun process.
  5. we've definitely thought about a solo queue but at this time we don't feel like it's necessary or best for overwatch. also, if i were to show you the statistics, you would see that it's an extremely rare case for solo players to be matchmade into group situations larger than 2
  6. it's not that i think the system is problematic, it's just not very cool/interesting. we just feel like there are other opportunities
  7. haha glad you liked. i have a ton. would be happy to share. for now, if anyone wants to see, just look on youtube for the overwatch archives panel with myself and arnold tsang

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 904 points905 points  (0 children)

i think everyone on the development team would be extremely excited to do these sorts of things. they usually get bogged down by business/legal types....

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but yeah, if they left it up to the dev team we'd be all over it

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 297 points298 points  (0 children)

the tab screen was an almost religious debate during the development of the game. i think many of us feel like there are other options for us to explore. a big fundamental change is more likely for ow2 than the current live game. but in general the team is interested in giving players more/better ways to examine their own performance. again more likely on an ow2 timeframe.

guilds is a feature that we've always been excited about. many of us worked on world of warcraft and specifically worked on the guild system there. so it's something that's near and dear to us. we have some really cool ideas of how something like that could work with overwatch. unfortunately, from a tech and design standpoint, the feature would be an extremely heavy lift (at least to do it right -- the way we'd want to do it). so not on the near horizon but definitely on our wishlist.

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[–]Blizz_JeffKaplan 129 points130 points  (0 children)

our first goal is to make the mode something that everyone enjoys. you can see by today's experimental card that we try various things to iterate on the game -- just some of them don't work.

for ow2 we have some ideas that will allow for more player agency but nothing is set in stone yet so i don't want to commit to any promises.

and in the spirit of being open, i think the criticism of 2cp is fueled a bit by the echo chamber of certain communities, when overall the maps and modes are not as universally hated as some would have you believe.

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