Overwatch 2 Developers Hear Fans and Promise Changes for Season 3

Blizzard recently communicated upcoming changes in Season 3 that are meant to resolve frustrations expressed by Overwatch 2 players.

Many players have expressed disappointment with the lack of new gameplay features and improvements. Essentially, the feeling in the Overwatch 2 community is that the game is not living up to their expectations. As a result, Overwatch 2 players are calling on the developers to provide more information and updates about the game to alleviate their frustration.

The developers have taken notice of some of the games’ current shortcomings. Therefore, the Blizzard developers are trying to address these concerns by providing insights into upcoming initiatives. This post by Aaron Keller, Lead Level Designer at Blizzard is another effort to reassure players that their concerns are being worked on. Here is the full post:

Message by Blizzard to the Overwatch 2 Community

This piece is aimed at looking at some of the topics that have come up in the community over the course of Season 2. This won‘t be comprehensive enough to look at everything that players are talking about.

However, our intent is to do this every few weeks, so we will be able to start diving into smaller topics as we go. Also, the goal here is to keep you up to date on what we’re thinking and planning, but not necessarily to be the source for all the reasoning and detail behind those decisions.

Overwatch 2 Ranked Mode in Season 3

The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. There was confusion around players’ real rank and how that translated to their skill level and difficulty forming groups with friends. In addition, there was a negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar).

We will be implementing some Overwatch 2 changes in Season 3 and quite a few more in Season 4. All changes are aimed at creating more clarity in the system. More details on short-term changes and long-term vision will be coming soon.

Earning Items

We’ve gotten feedback from players that the game doesn’t feel rewarding enough to play. Basically, players can’t earn the items they want in a short enough period of time.

Therefore, we’ll be making a change in Overwatch 2 Season 3 that should address some of these complaints. This is a first step. We will have more details to share about this next week.

Hero Ultimates

There are a fair number of changes to ult cost in Overwatch 2 Season 3. We’ll be lowering the ult refund when swapping heroes to 25% as part of this tuning pass.

Overwatch 2 Balancing Gameplay in Season 3

Balance frequency is a big topic. Bug fixes to hot fixing should enable us to address balance faster. This would have enabled us to tune Hog earlier in Season 2. We’re still planning an initial and midseason patch each season. However, now we have the full ability to fill in between those as necessary.

One-shots and frustrating hero mechanics are being discussed a lot in the community and on the team. This is an ongoing discussion, but the topic has a lot of nuances including

• The frequency of those mechanics,
• Trade-offs for using it
• The overall power level of a hero
• How often the hero is played

Know that we’re listening here, the feedback has been great and very welcome. We’ll come back to this when we have more to share.

Thanks so much for reading, and please keep the feedback coming. We’re listening.