So TM 2-0 exo, then exo 2-0 ence. And ence are very close to ssg and their matches are always dog fights, so im kinda confused.

Most of my season 10 games have been atrocious. I constantly have a full team of solos vs 3 and 4 stacks. This is annoying but I can at least beat them some of the time.

But I have had an insane amount of cheaters in my games, these are players with over 100 games played this season blatantly locking. Just lost again a 5 stack with two cheating dps in top 500 and it’s just getting boring. Anyone else seen a lot more cheaters this season?

i see a lot of japanese streamers on twitch but they seem to either play on kr servers or be like mid diamond.

is japan an active server or do most high ranked players just queue kr instead

https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/8lnrht/mark_cuban_about_owl_i_think_overwatch_is_going/ https://twitter.com/Slasher/status/999423354305163264

https://youtu.be/P0U1fQZ4bMY?t=11

Going back and see some interesting predictions from Mark Cuban that both came true. He first said overwatch was going downhill and therefore it meant OWL was not going to be sustainable in 2018. Then after he references overwatch saying meta changes the game into an entirely different game every few months.

Think this is pretty apparent these days, if you're a casual viewer viewing every few months the game turns into something new every time and unless you play alot it's tough to keep track of all the changes/abilities/reworks.

Just attached 2 clips of OW2 and you can barely recognise them between another. Doesn't help with OWCS that there are barely any teams identity and half the rosters implode at the end of each tournament. How do you get a following when the game itself/teams change so often?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frrMF287eSQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4bkWa_YL3Q

I just wanted to know what the collective opinion is about this is,

I feel like if they made a sort of system where you could make your own “professional” team in game, that there would be a lot of opportunities in that.

For instance say the top 50 clans or teams have a chance to participate in OWCS? Or maybe have this be essentially the replacement to OW Contenders.

The idea that I had behind it was that you have clans of 5 main players, but then you can have 3 subs, so that way if someone is out, they have a replacement for each role.

How would they balance it out? Well since we have wide matchmaking already in the game, I imagine clans would use that system.

Alternatively, the clan’s ranking could improve as the players on those clan’s rank up themselves. Kind of like how you can see what the combined rank is of someone on leader boards. For example if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I myself am Plat 3 - 5 on all roles so my combined rank is Plat 4.

Or we could have a clash of clans type deal where clans could engage in a “war” with another clan, and basically both clans agree to a date for when they play an OWCS style match, so 5 maps and winner is who wins majority. (Essentially whoever makes it to 3 wins first).

I feel like theres a lot of potential in this, and I also feel like people might start using VC and Team Chat more often because they actually want to communicate and work together to win.

I also think clan’s would have their own special banners and icons that players of that clan can buy with the comp points they already earn through competitive.

Theres also potential for more rewards too, like I miss the end of season comp points for your end placements. We should have that for clans!

TL:DR, clans are essentially OWCS teams for the average person, and its basically little league with potential to go big.

And also cool rewards and more incentive for team communication.

Since I've seen a lot of confusion in the community on the tank changes and I'm trying to help out the ones in needs!

So let's brake it down by starting from the most simple changes, the Boop resistance. Knockback resistance will be increased from 30 to 50% meaning every displacement ability will be less effective on tanks. This is overall a buff, especially for ground tanks such Ram, Rein or JQ. It's a slight nerf to Winston Ultimate, Doom cooldowns and a quite sensible nerf to Ball.

The armor changes + the headshot resistance must be acknowledge together. What will basically happens is that all armored tanks will take MORE damage overall from most sources.
Especially against spam heroes such Hanzo, Junk, Phara, Echo and from all supports. Ana and Zen the ones that will see their damage increased the most, with the exception of Lifeweaver that will see their damage reduced.

Luckly, thanks to the headshot damage passive not all is bad news since the SPIKE damage you will receive will be lower and there will be more time to react to it. The devs are trying to close the gap between the lower amount of damage and the higher amount of damage tanks will receive on average.

Although, armored tanks will receive more damage from heroes capable of dealing a lot of damage in single hits, they will receive less damages from pellets (shotguns and miniguns). This means that heroes such Dva, JQ, Mauga, Tracer, Reaper, Bastion, Sombra and similar will do less damage to armor. This will also reduce the damage received by "Sprays" such as Mei primary fire and (In theory) Moira primary fire.

Finally, all armored tanks will receive the same damage that they are currently receiving from beams. So Zarya, Sym and other beam heroes will do the same damage that they are currently doing.

All these changes aims to change tanks with armor so the could receive damages more consistently and less "spiky", giving them more time to prepare and react accordingly. This also will lower the TTK tanks for dps that are capable of high instance of damage, but tanks usually have more abilities to mitigate this kind of damage.

On a side note, what changes for other roles?

• All NON PELLETS heroes will gain more ult charge by shooting tanks.
• Headshotting a tank will be always better than bodyshot but not so substancially as right now.
• Pellets heroes will have more difficulties to fight vs Torb and Brig since they have armor (Nerf to tracer and sombra basically)

Hope this will help having a better understanding of the changes on a simpler basis.

If something I said is wrong (nobody is perfect) please let me know so I can modify accordingly.

Cheers!

Tank not fun, I think you heard that billions times already. With the recent tanks changes annoucement, I had a little bit of hope that the role will be more fun and popular, but imho, nothing is gonna change.

The main issue with tanking is the absurd amount of pressure that the game design itself put on, previously the 2 tanks players but now it's even worse, the only tank player of the team. Youre the choosen one (to suffer) !

In the current state of the game, the tank had to do EVERYTHING in players minds. And if you lose, it's obviously the fault of the tank, because who else ?

In non-tank players ideal world, the tank has to : create space, do damages and kills (be careful if they don't see insane K/D and dmgs when press tab), peel the backline because they can't peel each other, control highground, stay front and shield damages, all at the same time. In OW1, the task was not easy but actually doable with 2 tanks, but now with 5v5, good luck.

And of course, you have to switch hero, to counter everything your teamates struggle to fight because you are the only one who can press H, and the only one who has to able to be flex and play the entire role hero pool because your job isn't hard enough. If you want to play the hero you like, tank busters, sombra, and tanks like Orisa will be there to make your game miserable.

You have to keep in your mind that if you make a single mistake and die, your team will lose the fight, and if it's still not enough, the enemy team will 90% of the time full counter you because it's the easiest way to win against you if you play too well.

There isn't a single ranked session where I don't see a team blaming their tank for the lose and asking him to switch after one single lose fight.

Buffing tanks to make them unkillable boss won't change the way people will treat the role. There is nothing we can do... but you can so pls stop blaming your tank for everything and be nice with him thx.

So Venture got released and they got really zero discussion around they. Got nerfed pretty quickly and i only see they on specific point where venture does good. Where does venture stand right now? Very fun hero and i love the movement but the impact is kinda ok. So how do we feel overall about venture especially since its the first hero which got instantly into ranked?

LGD base fits Shy's description

The former Hangzhou Spark five-man squad has reassembled in Hangzhou during last week, but they will probably not be competing under the name of BLG or NetEase for Esports World Cup as some has speculated.

Shy during his stream leaked the district their current base is located in, and that he could see a "blue and orange building" from his window. Keen Chinese fans have since deduced that it is indeed the LGD base. Shy also mentioned dining out in a restaurant under a certain Chinese brand. A restaurant under the same brand was identified 60 meters away from the LGD base.

Therefore, it is very likely that the five players will compete in EWC under the name of LGD. It is unclear whether they will stick with LGD after the event for when Chinese OWCS eventually kicks off, or whether they are merely using LGD's facilities under another org after Spark shut down theirs last October.

(Source: https://bbs.nga.cn/read.php?tid=40095647 )

Through wide queue we were able to produce the rank 1 tank player and the rank 15 support player; the tank started unranked (probably with a GM2 MMR and placed GM5) and the support started M1; the tank is now champ 5 and the support is GM3. We only wide-queued and have been doing this since the start of the season; the tank has won 60/64 games played in 12 hours played and the support has won 55/57 in 8 hours played. While both of these players were t500 players going back to OW1, neither of them peaked higher than 4.4/4.5 in OW1 and shouldn't be anywhere near rank 1.

Obviously we achieved this by exploiting wide queue’s matchmaking. Wide queue takes the average of the group and matches it against other wide queue players. We aren’t sure about the mechanic in detail, but from our testing it does not account for the range of the wide queue, merely the average and the fact that it is wide. This means that a GM + Bronze will queue into the same games as Diamond + Gold (along that line). We both 3 stacked and 5 stacked through this; it is worth noting that when we were 5 stacking we only got a 5 stack once and only ever played into 3+2s.

The SR (%) gain also made this exploit work. A win generally gave anywhere from 1-8% progress, but the issue here being that the low elo players were always on the low end of the SR gain and the GM/Masters were getting the high end; the low elo players would get around 2% average and the GM/Masters were getting 6% on average, meaning the GM/Ms were rewarded for winning functionally free games. Losing a game lost us roughly the same amount, but we did not lose enough to get a good sample size in. Assuming a player would get 22% per win in a non-wide game (and in high GM this number is much lower), you would need a 64+% winrate to beat this efficiency.

Now while we do admit we did this because it was funny as hell, we also partially did this because this mechanism is incredibly exploitable and we strongly urge Blizzard to either remove or modify how wide Q_U_E_U_E works. This mechanic is horribly implemented, exploitable and ruins the integrity of the ranked ladder. While we could've just made a post about it on the blizzard forum, we all know blizzard only listens to nuclear options so we had to make rank 1 to prove our point: Remove this feature ASAP.

btw we are making an OD team xoxo dm for tryouts rank 15 and above only.

https://preview.redd.it/uwmxbdhhm8zc1.png?width=740&format=png&auto=webp&s=ded4be42b6c3e4d14a69ff787ddd9cfda3966aec

https://preview.redd.it/6mu2micim8zc1.png?width=734&format=png&auto=webp&s=7ab6fc5356706a8183909de3336b15d56142b36c

Donghak and Irony from YETI are following FNATIC right now
So, Yeti to FNATIC confirmed?

Valorant, Counter-Strike, Rainbow 6, Rocket League, and PUBG all give orgs their own in-game items which they get a percentage of the profit of. This is the easiest way to get more orgs into Overwatch that I haven't heard my people bring up. Other esports with similar viewship numbers to OW have far more orgs because of incentives like this.

This wouldn't even require very much effort for Blizzard, just tell the orgs to design their own skin for a hero and give them some design rules to follow. Then put the skins in their own tab in the shop and split the earnings with the orgs. Blizzard gets more money from skins they got other people to design for free, the orgs get more money and get their names and logos in the game, and the players get more money after more orgs invest into the scene.

Everybody on this sub has such a doomer attitute towards the future of Overwatch esports, but if Blizzard just puts in a little more effort on things like this the future will be much brighter.

blizz_winter was answering questions in Spilo's stream. Here is a rough transcript

Soren841: Are they gonna fix their matchmaking so I can stop getting 3x more expected losses than wins

blizz_winter: @Soren841 Since "they" is me in this case, we're not aware of any issues with that side of the system right now. We've heard some players say they get more negative modifiers than positive, but whenever we investigate those accounts we've found them to be 50/50 bad/good.

Soren841: @blizz_winter Have you guys considered a system like other games where accepted reports for throwing/cheating/wintrading refunds the losses for everyone else

@Soren841 Some other games do that, but they've had a lot of issues with those systems and I haven't seen one that works well. R6 Siege does it for example, but their players are often frustrated when they rank down when they were offline because they lost MMR due to having had a cheater on their team.

OWSpartan: @blizz_winter the current system in top 100 does not accurately display skill

blizz_winter: @OWSpartan Agree that top 500 is in a bad place with regards to the ladder specifically. It's something we want to make better some day.

OWSpartan: @blizz_winter will there be a design change with Champion rank

blizz_winter: @OWSpartan For grouping you mean? If you're talking about grouping, we're investigating how to make the matchmaker smarter for high MMR right now and we aren't ready to talk about what we think is the best solution yet, apologies.

OWSpartan: Just feels very very difficult to get champion let alone to progress into the champion tiers

blizz_winter: @OWSpartan Ah, I understand now. Yeah it's probably too hard to get right now because of our grouping restrictions. That's a problem we're actively trying to solve.

OWSpartan: @blizz_winter I'd say its even harder as a solo player though especially as a tank

blizz_winter: @OWSpartan Agree, groups have an advantage at this time.

Boti1v9: @blizz_winter sry, one last question: in GM and Champion, only duo group will be possible as narrow group? Or can five people play as narrow group in those ranks?

blizz_winter: @koob_ow That's effectively what it was for the first week of Season 10, and we got a lot of feedback that this was unacceptable.

blizz_winter: @Boti1v9 Right now all stacks (2, 3, 5) can be narrow. We don't think that's a great solution, but we didn't have a lot of good fast options.

tusk__ow: @blizz_winter is it not possible to make duos play with both narrow and wide?

blizz_winter: @tusk_76 It was not possible in 1 week. What we did last Tuesday was.

Eridug: blizz_winter what about the quickplay mmr translating to comp?

Eridug: i used to instantly get into a top500 lobby

Eridug: Just from high quickplay mmr

blizz_winter: @Eridug We do that, yes.

blizz_winter: @Eridug But we don't put players at the higest ranks anymore. We have a ceiling now.

Soren841: @blizz_winter I know you spoke about it a bit but is there a consensus that something with the ranks was really screwy last season with like GM1 consistent players being stuck in Masters?

blizz_winter: @Soren841 Last season was a soft MMR reset (bigger than we'd ever done), so yes, ranks weren't as well definied.

wisperina: @blizz_winter so is champion 1 supposed to be unattainable?

blizz_winter: @wisperina No, but the season 9 grouping restrictions might have caused it to be.

OWSpartan: @blizz_winter it's taking a lot longer for those to calibrate back to normal bc of how hard it is to move up and down rank, especially in high elo

OWSpartan: its the amount of % u gain/lose per game in that high of a rank as well as the queue times

OWSpartan: If u 3 stack at gm 1 it takes 30 mins to get a game and u only win maybe 15%

blizz_winter: @OWSpartan Yeah, I see that, but we also redefined the rank boundaries too, so the definition of Grandmaster changed. It's a smaller percentage of the population by design.

OWSpartan: @blizz_winter What were the expectations of champion players

blizz_winter: @OWSpartan If you're asking for the exact percentage of the population, I'm not sharing that here, apologies. It was extremely low!

Eridug: blizz_winter is it looking like the current rank distribution is up to your expectations after the changes?

blizz_winter: @Eridug Mostly yeah! The only part we don't love is how the highest ranks don't have quite as many players as we wanted. We think that has to do with grouping, and we're working on solutions for that.

OWSpartan: @blizz_winter You shouldn't be required to stack with people to climb

blizz_winter: @OWSpartan I agree that is a problem.

OWSpartan: @blizz_winter That's why im saying for groups it makes sense that theyre winning 15% per game but as a solo I shouldn't only be getting 15% per game and have to win 7 in a row for a streak just to get a few percentage more

blizz_winter: @OWSpartan Grouping doesn't currently modify Rank Percentage gained or lost. The phenomenon you're probably seeing with lower percentage gained is the back pressure that the highest ranked players have after every match.

OWSpartan: @blizz_winter Whatever back pressure is needs to b e lowered imo

blizz_winter: @OWSpartan Maybe. My focus is to improve how we matchmake groups though at this time.

froagkey: I'm pretty sure blizzard uses Microsoft's TrueSkill algorithm for matchmaking. @blizz_winter can correct me if I'm wrong

blizz_winter: @froagkey It's not exactly that, but it's similar, yes. Like most things on our game, it's home made

wmaimone: out lep: out admiral: in

Blizzard should implement a ban system where everyone in game chooses 1 hero from each role, and the most selected hero from each role will be banned for the rest of the game.

We already have closed accounts and streamer mode, so one trickers should be fine.

Firstly, it will help keep heroes like Orisa/Hog/Mauga/heroname away from ranked games because they are broken/annoying.

Secondly, it would be a great signal to Blizzard that something is wrong with certain heroes are too strong, because I don't believe win rate is a good indicator of hero strength.

Right now the scene is just running on two things: pure Passion and the hope that teams get some money from the EWC.

I am not worried about Orgs getting involved in the scene but if the players don't win a tournament or a stage they are screwed and the salaries are like 500 or 1000 dollars per month which is really bad.

I know we can't compare it to OWL but how can you sustain an eSports scene with good players with these salaries? And at the same time why would the orgs actually pay the players good salaries when they don't even get something from OWCS outside of prize pool.

Sadly we can't do anything this season but they have to make changes next year, like maybe partner with the biggest teams in each region and give them a permanent slot every stage, like maybe 8 teams in Every region and the rest qualify from the open qualifiers? And if this season attracts more sponsors and fans maybe we can get more money for the players and the teams? Idk honestly. What are your thoughts guys and expectations?