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“ Since Ana is also another support like Zenyatta that can also deal quite a bit of damage at range, it does open up the possibility for three supports being played.

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“ We definitely want to make sure that players are not overly encouraged to act in a way that would be detrimental to the team.

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“ Looking forward at future seasons, we will look at your previous Competitive matchmaking rating.

“ Attackers have a very high chance of completing the map objectives, so we were running into more ties than we thought.

Read on for the full transcript.Certainly for our normal players, Ana is a very unique hero in that she’s a support but she’s also a very long-range sniper support. Certainly something we’ve heard from a lot of our players is, ‘I like playing support, but I’d like something that has a bit higher skill cap than Lucio might.’ So, I think, for the players that enjoy the play style of the long-range sniper character – but at the same time really want to impact the team in a much stronger way – Ana really speaks to those kinds of players. So that’s the thing where… that hits a lot of players at the selection level where there’s a seemingly unlimited skill cap in terms of, like, their ability to aim. Ana’s pretty powerful. She essentially changes the meta a bit because - along with Ana - we also buffed Zenyatta quite a bit, especially his Transcendence ultimate, so it’s a whole lot more usable in team.Previously, I think, the support meta was definitely something dominated by Lúcio and Mercy because of their ultimates. With this [upcoming] patch, we’ve brought Ana, but also Zenyatta with a much better ultimate. We’ll see how that turns out. Right now, the meta is generally two supports for most maps, though we do see teams running just one support. Since Ana is also another support like Zenyatta that can also deal quite a bit of damage at range, it does open up the possibility for three supports being played. So we’ll see. There’s definitely, like… it’s always interesting when we add another very powerful tool to the arsenal, with a new hero, what strategies will evolve. So we’ll have to see, but we’re excited.I think she’s definitely a character who can try to fight off a Widowmaker. I mean, Widowmaker is always going to be a better sniper than Ana. One of the interesting things about Ana is her Biotic Rifle depends on who she hits, whether it’s friendly or foe, it also means that if I’m trying to shoot someone that’s past an ally, I can’t really do that because my shot will first hit the ally and try to heal them. It’s something where, potentially, because she is a sniper with a full hitscan weapon, she’ll be able to be a threat that a more dedicated sniper like Widowmaker or Hanzo will have to worry about: they can’t just rely strictly on their extreme distance to protect them knowing that Ana can potentially reach out and damage them, as well.She’s currently on PTR [public test realm, on PC] now, and she’ll go live when the 1.10 patch goes live, which hopefully will be soon.So without getting too much into some of that, we tried, in beta, a lot of different formulas to figure out the best way to handle that situation. I don’t want to get too much into the math, but we do definitely recognise that when the skill difference is a little bit too big, definitely someone who can carry means a whole lot more than… it’s not a straight average, it definitely tries to be a little more smarter than that. So it is something we’re definitely taking into consideration, the concept of the high-skill carry that groups up with players who are maybe new. If I’ve been playing Overwatch for a while and I’m really good at Overwatch, and some friends of mine are, like, ‘Hey, I heard you had a lot of fun playing this game, I want to try it.,’ we definitely don’t want to set up a situation where the new players and someone who’s been playing for a while group together, and it causes huge problems with the matchmaker. We’ve tried to mitigate that as much as possible, but it’s definitely a challenge.In general terms, when you play a competitive match, the matchmaker tries to put players of similar skill together. In an ideal world, it will put together a match where it thinks two teams have, roughly, a 50 percent chance to win, especially at the super high-end where you’re talking about some of the best players in the world, sometimes that’s not quite the case. When you win a game, if the system determines that you had a better chance to win, then your skill rating won’t improve as much when you win. Similarly, if you’re playing against a team and you’re the underdog – if you do win but you weren’t expected to – you’ll gain more skill rating on a win.The biggest factor towards determining scoring is simply: did you win or lose and were you expected to win or lose? On top of that, there’s also an additional factor, which is basically: how well did you play during that match? That’s something that we look at. Every hero is looked at differently in terms of how well they performed. Obviously, a Genji has completely different metrics than, say, a Mercy would. You’re not trying to directly compare the damage done between a Mercy and a Genji because it’s not really a fair comparison. We have a set of metrics that are different for heroes, and we try to compare the heroes against each other. What does a good Mercy game look like? And really try to compare you to that more of, like, how well does that class fit?So if you have a really great game, you did amazing, the system is going to say, ‘Hey, you had a really great game, so you’re probably more skilled.’ If you had a really bad game, maybe you shouldn’t get as much skill rating for the win because you didn’t impact the game as much. That’s sort of the personal performance part of that, but it’s not as important as whether or not you won or lost. In the end, we definitely want to make sure that players are not overly encouraged to act in a way that would be detrimental to the team. And I’m sure there’s going to be some polish and we’re definitely getting feedback in a lot of situations where players are wondering, because the system as a whole, it’s not as transparent as we’d like it to be in a lot of cases.We definitely don’t want to make changes to heroes in Quick Play versus Competitive Play. The kind of things we change for Competitive Play are more on the map side, the game mode side, where for Competitive Play when you play a control map like Ilios, it’s best three out of five instead of two out of three. For Competitive Play, when you play Hanamura, it’s not simply one playing attack, one playing defense, and it’s just one round and you’re done. We have a hybrid game mode that we created for our assault maps. That’s the kind of thing that we’re looking more to change for Competitive is making sure that at the end of… that there’s enough gameplay that happens and we definitely have an adequate opportunity to really determine based on this match who was the better team.We don’t actually look at Quick Play MMR for competitive matchmaking. It’s something where, during the placement matches, the system does a pretty good job of actually determining what your skill is pretty rapidly, and some of that is based on that we are looking at personal performance. That does help us determine when you’re matched up against players who are much less skillful than you, and you do have a really great game, that means you probably need to get your skill rating up higher. The placement matches definitely help, and looking forward at future seasons, we will look at your previous Competitive matchmaking rating to try to have a better idea of making those initial placement matches not so squirrely in terms of matchmaking. For the initial season, we didn’t use Quick Play.How we handle that is, when matchmaking tries to find a match, part of it is trying to find a fair match of players of similar skill, but it also spends some time trying to match up groups of similar size. So, if a full group of six queues up together, it’s going to look for another group of six. It’s not going to look for anything else for quite some time. The system gives itself enough time to really go looking for another group of six, and then if it can’t find a group of six, it starts loosening up that particular restriction. We’ve seen that the system has done a pretty good job of actually matching up groups of similar sizes; so if you’re in a group of four, it’ll try find a group of four on the other side, maybe worst-case, it’ll find a group of three. So we’re pretty happy with how that’s worked out.In terms of the future, will we see a very explicit solo queue? We’re not looking into that right now. It’s something that we’ve discussed, but we’re much more happy with the way things are currently working out in terms of having a queuing system that totally allows and doesn’t discourage players to play together with friends, play together with teammates. At the end of the day, Overwatch is a team-based shooter, and we really want to encourage playing together as a team.To give you a little bit of history about that, there are situations where our games currently went into ties, but maybe because we’re American and we hate ties, so we really tried to figure out, ‘Hey, is there a way to do a tie-breaker?’ So, one of the things that we’re doing before we get to tie-breakers is we’re actually trying to… one of the reasons we added the new game mode to the assault maps, the timing system, is we're trying to reduce the number of ties. Something that we’ve seen, especially among our extremely good players, is that the attackers have a very high chance of completing the map objectives, so we were running into more ties than we thought.And then with our current coin-flip sudden death, we were hoping that… we knew it wasn’t completely 100 percent fair in terms of, like, 50/50, but we thought we could make it fair enough, something more along the lines of 55/45, worst-case. Again, what we saw is that attackers do really well, and there’s still a lot of dissatisfaction even with the 55/45. We didn’t come up with something perfect. So that’s what we’re going to do for season two, we’re going to remove Sudden Death and, at this point, the core question we need to answer is, if you do tie, while you’re not rewarded as much as a win, we do need to reward you more than a loss, and we’re trying to figure out exactly how to reward you so you don’t feel like you just wasted a bunch of time.