Overwatch News: Game Director Discusses Ranked Play And Matchmaking Details

Blizzard just released a video in which the game director of Overwatch , Jeff Kaplan, talks about ranked play. He asks the community to weigh in on the subject and understand the game designer’s perspective. Finding the right balance is hard, he claims: they don’t want to alienate people with a super competitive ladder or make the match making too simple. Kaplan gives the example of a tee-ball player playing in the same league as a professional baseball player.

In the video, Kaplan discusses how the Overwatch team plans to approach playing with a pre-made group. Some players may feel anxious getting paired up with total strangers in a ranked game. The Overwatch team is discussing adding something similar to League of Legends Dynamic Queue, where multiple players can queue up together for a ranked game.

Kaplan says: “we’d rather have players angry at the game, and be angry at Blizzard, and be angry at Overwatch … rather be angry at one another as players.” They want to develop a system that will be less “toxic” than other popular computer games. Blizzard has already tried doing something like this in Hearthstone . It’s harder for players to yell at each other because you can’t talk to your opponent, you can only send emotes.

One of the biggest things the Overwatch team is working on is the connection to the server for players. According to Kaplan, over the last week players in North America, South America and Australia saw improved ping, but longer wait times. They plan to improve the ping in Europe, Russia and Asia.

Kaplan apologized to all the players who couldn’t get into the beta, and said that the Overwatch team would have done the Beta differently to allow more players in. They can’t support too many players right now, so Kaplan feels they should have opened up to the players in the Alpha.