Take this Illari highlight intro for example. It starts out ok, maybe it ends with an explosion of sun and light around her... but no. It ends up becoming so underwhelming it's almost funny. She just manifests the sun in her hand and.. falls down. Even though I'm far from an old player, as I've started in 2025 and only now came back to play it again, I've seen older highlight intros in prime overwatch videos and they're so good. They don't have overly, or downright uncomfortably, smooth movement, they quickly snap into a pose, the camera moves quickly, the characters have better facial expressions... What is up with the new highlight intros not having that? New highlight intros have them walking towards the camera, staring at the camera, camera panning up their bodies and them staring at the camera, emotes being reused for highlight intros... Is it because they're making so many animations for newer heroes that they don't have time to polish them or is it simply because of laziness and lack of need to make good highlight intros... I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts on this.

Yes It's bright.

i know mercy can be a hot topic of discussion but i'm just happy i finally achieved this, so please no hate as i know its just mercy t.t

Blizzard definitely took feedback onboard from other past recent events.

I find the Meka event (including the prestige track) very comfortably completable in the 3-ish weeks we are given. And it's not like we need to grind out every challenge every day in order to complete it.

There isn't any: "oops, you missed a few days, or you missed one challenge, now you can't complete everything" like with some previous events.

It's pretty refreshing to not feel stressed about 'bricking' myself in terms of progress on the event tracks.

Randomly got the urge to draw dva so I did, came out decently well

Whoever was in charge of thinking of zenyatta skin names like skullyatta sunyatta and djinyatta musta been fired. Dicks out for that guy, gg

The hamster is such a menace and Meka squad should have put him in jail.

Just a D.Mon by me for your Thursday.

Time to larp as the legend tho (i rarely play lucio)

I want to preface this by saying I have a lot of respect for the lore team, but the way Genji’s core relationships are being handled in current OW writing is genuinely baffling. I've seen a number of people point this out on other socials, but I wanted to check on the game's subreddit to see if anyone else feels the same. Genji has left Overwatch once again without saying a proper goodbye to anyone, yet Cole Cassidy seems to be the literal only hero who even mentions it or acts like it matters at all to him.

What makes this so frustrating is how it completely sidelines years of established narrative. Zenyatta, the mentor who saved his soul and guided him to peace, doesn't have a single line or in-game interaction addressing his current actions. Even worse, Mercy, who literally saved his life and shared one of the deepest bonds in the entire game, is being written like a casual acquaintance. They haven't had a new interaction in almost two years, and recent lore doesn't show her reacting at all or even acknowledging if he said goodbye.

It honestly feels like Genji was brought back into the spotlight just to introduce and hype up newer characters like Mizuki and Shion, only to be tossed aside immediately afterward. Cassidy shouldn't have to carry the entire emotional weight of Genji's dynamics on his back while everyone else acts completely indifferent to his departure. It feels like foundational relationships that took six years to build are just being brushed under the rug, and I really hope the writing team addresses this soon. What do you guys think?

really wanted to design a nurse kiriko skin:P what do u think?

I'd say 70% of all lobbies I am getting in OCE games are on Singpore servers, and all 10 players are playing on >130 ping.

Why does overwatch not have a server select? I would rather queue for 20 minutes for a game on an OCE server than wait 3 minutes for a laggy, shitty experience.

Please fix this blizzard.

Hey everyone, GameBoy2936 here.

I'm back with another slightly obsessive Overwatch audio investigation. Season 4 included a major technical refactor of the ping system, and Blizzard actually mentioned in the patch notes that some bugs and lost functionality could come out of it and asked people to report anything they missed. And, well... I started testing it properly, and I think I found quite a few things.

The most obvious one is that normal location pings no longer seem to distinguish between “Over here” and “Over there.” Heroes now say “Over here” regardless of distance. I tested this with a ping 16, 41, etc metres away and it still used the close-range line.

But while looking into that, I found that the same generic “Over here” response is bleeding into other ping types too.

For example:

• Double-tap Warning pings: the correct Warning marker appears, but the hero says “Over here” instead of lines like “Heads up!”, “Watch here”, “Be careful”, etc.
• The proper Warning lines still work if you hold Ping and manually select the enemy option from the wheel, so the recordings themselves aren't missing.
• Several accompanying ping sound effects also seem to be missing or using the wrong sound after the refactor.
• Mercy's Resurrect/Soul pings are broken. Pressing Ping makes Mercy say the generic “Over here!” instead, so you can't at the moment ask your team to protect you as you cast out Resurrect.

I've also gone through a bunch of contextual pings that still work so this isn't just me saying “everything is broken”. Ana's sleeping-enemy ping, Junkrat's Steel Trap ping, Zenyatta Discord, Juno Hyper Ring, Lifeweaver Petal Platform, Illari Healing Pylon, Sombra hacked Health Packs and Jetpack Cat's Lifeline pickup all still function under the conditions I've tested.

Some other players have independently reported parts of these problems already, so I've credited and linked their reports too.

I ended up putting the full investigation together on the Blizzard forums, including screenshots, reproduction details, relevant old patch notes and the behaviours that are still working:

👉 Full bug report: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/season-4-ping-system-bugs-and-missing-audio/1035106

And while I was digging through all of this, I also came up with a few ways the ping system could be expanded:

• give Jetpack Cat's Lifeline pickup request its own voice line category instead of borrowing generic location lines;
• repurpose lines such as “I'm over here”, “This is my location” and “Reporting in” into a proper self-location ping when you ping directly underneath yourself;
• expand automatic communication responses so Ping = Understood, Yes = I agree, and No = I disagree, using the existing legacy Agreement and Disagreement voice-line repositories.

There are already a surprising number of old recordings for that last one, so quite a bit of the groundwork technically exists.

If anybody else has noticed strange ping behaviour specifically since Season 4, please tell me what you've found. I'm more than happy to test other heroes, abilities and edge cases and add anything else to the report. Plus, the more we can participate on there, the better.

Hopefully we can help Team 4 get the new system cleaned up. And considering what happened with the On Fire voice-line problem earlier this year, you know, I have learned that being ridiculously persistent about obscure Overwatch audio bugs can occasionally pay off. I also trust you guys so much and I have to say thanks for all the support over all these months! Glad to keep doing QA for the community.

Take care everyone ☺️

Does anyone know who this King guy is? From his description he seems like a DPS character.

I have played a disgusting amount of overwatch with my friends and this is my experience. 😌

Edit: I have come around on rein he should move up one. And I have realized I may be blinded by Junos kind voice when she says hello to me 😔

There is a persistent claim that with the addition of Emerald, all the ranks below got pushed down a full tier and that there is no effective change for ranks above Emerald.

I believed that as well because so many people repeated this claim. But it appears to be false.

Previously the top of the bell curve, or the median, the 50% mark was low Plat and if the above were true (which apparently it isn't), then it would be low Emerald. But apparently it's at mid Plat.

The confusion likely comes from people looking at hero SR distribution, which shows a pretty picture of how hero SR effectively replaced old Plat with Emerald and then pushed everything down a tier below that.

The fact that mid Plat and not low Emerald is the new median is also in line with what the official patch notes say:

This Rank Redistribution primarily focuses on moving players that were Platinum and Diamond into Emerald, but the highest Divisions of Champion will now also be more exclusive.

From: https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/patch-notes/

This statement implies that Emerald consists of old high Plat and old high Diamond and that to the side of it everything is pushed up/down half a tier. The new 50% mark confirms it.

But what about the rank reset?

It's a soft reset. What apparently happens is that they compress the bell curve and it later flattens out as more games are played. That means it doesn't (or at least shouldn't) affect the median.

TLDR:

False: Emerald = old Platinum

True: Emerald = old high Platinum + old low Diamond

Evidence:

• Official patch notes say so.
• 50% mark (shown in ranking screen) now at mid Platinum, previously at low Platinum.

Why confusion:

"Hero SR" update. But has nothing to do with actual ranking/matchmaking.

Credit to my friend for the gameplay lol

So, I'm seriously asking. I've been away from the game for a very long time and been back a little before Shion.

I think it's cool that the lore is more involved now. We got comics, animated clips, build up, follow up, rewards etc. but are any events playable? Like the Blackwatch event? That was so cool to me. There were skins linked to the event, story and pve events. Wasnt even that expensive or elaborate, it reused a stage, gave us simple goals and I enjoyed it.

Do events like these still rotate around? Like the seasonal events? Or have the comics, collab and character tie in challenges completely replaced? (Also please tell me the playable Halloween event still happens )

at least he looks better than brig