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But, for example, the report function, the way that works. Since Competitive has been live, we’ve been doing some under the hood tuning and tweaking on that feature to be more aggressive about handling toxic behavior. I wish there was more that was visible to players in a way that wouldn’t allow for other negative players to exploit it.
What I always try to encourage players is if somebody is acting out and being toxic in a game of yours, please use that report function because it very much has consequence on the people on the receiving end. One of the things Blizzard prizes itself in is staffing a 24-hour customer support group who we think are some of the best customer support reps in the world. It’s something that we really care about so we’re really looking at that stuff and we’re taking aggressive action.
We don’t notify you back, and I think that’s a bummer and maybe something that we can work on in the future. You don’t get a lot of feedback of like, OK let’s say Steven was being a jerk to us. You and I are grouped and Steven’s being a jerk to us and we report him. Right now, it just kind of feels like that goes into the void, but it doesn’t and that’s something that we’ve tweaked on and we’ve improved upon.
The other thing that we’re talking about and we’re kind of exploring options on right now, is finding ways to help solo queue players who have good experiences with players that they like, making it easier for them to either friend other players or just enter a group.
We’re brainstorming systems right now where you’re sitting at the end of the match and you’re like, “Hey, that Steven guy and that Nathan guy, they were actually pretty cool. Fuck, I wish I could just play with them more so I’m just going to click this button then if they do the same thing, then we can all just keep playing matches for the night.” It’s not some permanent friend thing. We’re not sharing real ID’s or anything like that. We’re just saying, “Hey, I like that group who I happened to be put with. How can I play more with those guys because they seem nice or confident or whatever.”
That’s kind of solving the problem on the other end of toxicity is when you have those positive experiences, what can we do to solidify those into either short term relationships or long term relationships?
Kotaku: Overwatch’s hitboxes have been brought in a little bit to be more aligned with the character models. Why were they wider initially, and why did you guys decide to change them now?
Jeff Kaplan: Our goal has always been to make shooting feel great in the game. A lot of times what a lot of players will do is they’ll kind of treat the game as a realism simulator. They’ll put the game through some paces that you would never naturally feel in an actual match of 6v6 Overwatch.
An example is whenever these hitbox videos come out of like, “Oh my God. The hit boxes are terrible in Overwatch. Check out this video.” You’ll usually see somebody like standing still either with a buddy in a custom game or standing still in the training room and then they’re millimeter by millimeter tracking their reticle down until they find a moment where you hit thin air instead of the character’s pixels.
They’ll be upset at that moment, but you’ve played a lot of Overwatch. You know that like ... Are there realistically moments in Overwatch where the combat slows down to a crawl and players are adjusting their reticles in such a way? We do it because Overwatch is a fast-paced game, and we want to make shooting feel great.
There’s kind of another weird way of looking at the hit box issue. Players will point it out always from a victim’s point of view like, “This is so unfair. It takes the skill out of the game.” Rarely or almost never have I seen a player point out, “Actually, when I play Hanzo, maybe a lot of my shots were landing when I thought I was like that bad ass best bowman in North America. Actually, maybe some of my shots were helped a little bit by this.”
What we did is we kind of went back to the drawing board and we just took a look at, “Is there a way to make shooting feel great while reducing some of those egregious cases?” We didn’t take too much note of those videos of people standing still in the training room. I feel like that’s not really a realistic case. The one that bothered us is somebody posted a video. I think they were Widowmaker standing on a building and a Hanzo arrow had clipped the Widowmaker when she was clearly out of line of sight, like around a corner.
That one really bothered us, and our lead gameplay engineer, Tim Ford, said, “OK, that’s a problem, and I know how to fix it. I’m going to go back to the drawing board on what we’re doing here.” I think a lot of it, our intention was never to make the game feel low skill. I think skill means a tremendous amount in Overwatch, but we’re trying to make a game that feels great to play. That doesn’t always mean that we’re going to perfectly simulate real world, pixel perfect physics and hit reactions all the time. Sometimes it means we take artistic liberties.Kotaku: You’ve said you’re working on four new levels right now. What sort of lessons have you learned from Overwatch’s launch maps, and how are you applying those lessons to new maps?
Kotaku: You’ve said you’re working on four new levels right now. What sort of lessons have you learned from Overwatch’s launch maps, and how are you applying those lessons to new maps?
Jeff Kaplan: Well, we’ve learned a ton and we sort of think of it on a lot of different levels. There’s kind of the art level and the science level to making maps. The science level is we’ve learned that we can do very little to a map and affect the outcome of the map in huge ways.
The example I use is in beta, we had a problem with Volskaya Industries where it had a skewed attacker win raise. Attackers were winning 60% of the time. We shoot for 50/50 win rate on our maps, but if it’s 48/52, we feel like that’s pretty much close enough, and the next week, it might end up 48/52 the other way. When we start seeing them skew into the 60/40 range, we feel like, “OK, we need to do some tweaks to bring this map in.” Also, the players perception was like, “Oh my God, Volskaya’s always won by the attackers,” so we actually want to make some tweaks to Volskaya.
We talked a lot about big level design changes we wanted to do, and we did an experiment internally and it was super successful so we put it live. It was actually a really small thing. We moved the attacker spawn points back by like maybe 10 meters in the library. That swung the win rate to the opposite direction to where defenders were winning, I think it was like, 53% of the time afterwards which was a huge swing to swing. They were at like a 40% win rate, defenders, all the way to like a 53% win rate for defenders.
That’s the science part of it of how precise we can make things in maps and what tuning knobs we can leave for ourselves. The art side of it is we want to try new and fun things that make the maps different. We don’t want to just spit out maps that are like, “Oh, this one’s in a different location and has a different color theme to it and a different time of day,” but it feels just like Gibraltar. It feels just like Dorado. We want to actually find new gameplay elements that really excite players and are fun.
An example was when we added the moving platforms to Dorado or Volskaya was an element that wasn’t there before. With some of our new maps, we’re trying stuff like that. What changes Overwatch? It’s still Overwatch, and it doesn’t suddenly break a bunch of the heroes, but what changes it up in a new, fresh way or what makes this one point on this one new map new and exciting in a way that I haven’t experienced before?
Kotaku: How about new modes? Are we gonna be seeing anything on that front in the near future?
Jeff Kaplan: They’ve always been a priority. We have those in the pipe. We have a really great tool set so we’re able to prototype new game modes not super easily, but fairly quickly.
The tricky part for us is we’ve always talked about the ultimate priority in Overwatch is the heroes. The game is about the heroes, and we never want a game mode to overshadow the heroes. As soon as somebody starts pitching a game mode where Tracer can’t blink anymore or she’s not allowed to use her recall, that’s where we step away from it and we’re like, “You know, we need the game mode that makes Tracer want to blink and use recall and that everybody thinks that’s cool and not a balance problem and broken.”
The other thing that we like because we’re a 6v6 game, is we like game modes where it focuses the team to work together. We don’t like game modes that come up where it suddenly becomes a lone wolf game and you’re off running by yourself and you don’t really care what you’re team is doing.
We have a lot of ideas. I think we have some absolutely crazy stuff that’s going to blow people’s minds coming out sooner than people realize. That’s, I think, going to catch people totally out of left field like, “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that from Overwatch.”
I think that will just be fun. That’s just for pure fun sake with a wink and a smile. It’s not, “Hey, this is the new direction of the game.” It’s more of like, “Look, we can have fun with this game in new and different ways,” so that’s my teaser.