Fans are expressing concerns about the speed of Overwatch 2 patches after it was revealed that the first round of Overwatch 2 nerfs will not be implemented on the Blizzard FPS game’s live servers for almost three weeks after their announcement, despite the new patch being used in the upcoming Overwatch League grand finals. The multiplayer game’s lead hero designer Alec Dawson has addressed the delay on Twitter as part of his Q&A for the upcoming changes.
The balance changes were revealed on October 28 during a Twitter spaces discussion talking about the team’s decisions. However, they had already been previously rumoured and were reportedly rolled out to the game’s leading esports franchises on October 24 to allow them to prepare for the grand finals of Blizzard’s inaugural Overwatch 2 season of the Overwatch League. Despite this, and despite the fact that the new patch is being used for the OWL playoffs on October 30 – November 5, the team says they won’t hit live servers until November 15.
This delay is causing plenty of confusion among the community, who are querying why the patch will take so long to deploy publicly if it’s already considered to be ready for the Overwatch League playoffs. Overwatch 2’s lead hero designer Alec Dawson explains on Twitter that the team “did want this patch to come out earlier for the player base at large, but had some issues on our side.” However, he says that players “can expect future mid-season balance updates to happen about four weeks after a season starts.”
Meanwhile, fans on the Overwatch Reddit are joking about how Blizzard previously said that the transition of Overwatch 2 into a live service game should allow the team to get balance changes out sooner, and stating that expectations are higher as a result of this change, especially for balance patches that seemingly amount to small numerical tweaks. Of course, it’s important to emphasise that making games is hard – live service games especially so – but this confusion won’t do Blizzard any favours and may cause some players to wonder why they are playing on a patch that they know is about to change in a few weeks.
Speaking to the overall balance cadence of monthly patches as opposed to more frequent ones, Dawson says he believes that the longer cycle “allows metas to develop and gives us enough time to have changes we are confident in,” though he does add that these are only the scheduled changes and that “if anything were very out of line we’d step in ASAP.” Such on-the-fly reactions have already been seen after an Overwatch 2 Bastion exploit saw the Omnic DPS hero removed from the game temporarily for a total of around two weeks.
The Overwatch 2 Halloween event is ongoing and the new Wrath of the Bride event is well worth checking out. However, its cosmetic prices only continue to cause consternation, with a debacle over the price of an Overwatch 2 charm in real life compared to its in-game equivalent still dominating the game’s subreddit, having garnered a staggering 55.5k upvotes so far. Be sure to check out our Overwatch 2 tier list for the best characters to play pre- and post-nerfs, as well as how your Overwatch 2 sound settings could make all the difference to your success.