As Overwatch players may know, the recent 1.10 patch introduced a change to the victory calculation on Assault and Assault/Escort maps in competitive mode. While an improvement in many ways, Blizzard feel the need to make a further tweak.
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Principal designer Scott Mercer lays out the reasoning for both changes in detail on the Overwatch forums. Before patch 1.10, you needed to fully capture one more objective than the enemy team to score a victory on these map types. This led to a lot of ties (a 6% rate across all competitive matches, in fact) as capturing a whole objective is tough.
The new patch made it so a team only neeeded to gain more progress than their opponent. This makes ties exceedingly rare, but has created a few awkward side effects.
It’s pretty easy to gain just 1% capture progress, which can mean attacking teams can win in what feels like instantaneous, confusing circumstances. Imagine defending the choke on Hanamura only to be suddenly told you’ve lost because a Reaper or Genji flanked their way to the point.
Blizzard’s fix is to raise the threshold for victory to 33% capture progress, rather than just 1%. Now, if neither team has captured one more objective than the other, either can win if they hit the threshold of 33% capture progress. If both teams hit the threshold, but neithermanages to capture one more objective than their opponents (e.g. Team A has 90% progress and Team B has 40%), the team with the most progress wins.
Slightly more ties will occur than under the present rules, but they should still be way fewer than before, and Blizzard feel “the additional clarity of the victory moment and ability for the defence to react” are worth it.
Outside of that change, the patch also addresses a host of bugs. It’s live now and you can see the PC-relevantpatch notes below:
Competitive Play
- On Assault and Assault/Escort Maps, teams now need to capture at least 33% of the objective before the tie-breaking system is activated
Bug Fixes
General
- Fixed a crash that could occur during the end-of-round screen
Arcade
- Fixed a bug that prevented the payload from showing damage until after the escort phase in the Overwatch Uprising brawl
- Fixed a bug that allowed players to get under the payload using certain heroes’ movement abilities in the Overwatch Uprising brawl
- Fixed a bug that caused the payload’s health bar to interfere with the scoreboard, forcing players to hold down the spacebar to view the scoreboard in the Overwatch Uprising brawl
- Fixed a bug that caused Genji’s “You’ve rescued me again, Dr. Ziegler” voice line to play after being resurrected in the Overwatch Uprising brawl, regardless of which hero performed the resurrection
- Fixed an issue causing the chat window to block the ‘refresh’ button when the Overwatch Uprising leaderboards were open
Custom Games and Game Browser
- Fixed a bug that prevented the ‘Start Game Mode’ button from appearing when creating a Capture the Flag or Elimination game
Heroes
- Fixed a bug that gave Genji’s Dragonblade ability a slightly increased swing speed while at a higher latency. Dragonblade’s default swing speed has been slightly increased to compensate
- Fixed a bug that prevented Genji’s Dragonblade ability from registering hits correctly
- Fixed a bug to prevent hit effects from being inflicted on D.Va’s human form while piloting the mech
Maps
- Fixed a bug causing glass that has been shattered by an explosion to be colored black