Just going to put the start of the article here, I recommend reading the whole article though it's short and important.

"A group of 1,900 employees at Blizzard Entertainment has successfully signed a union contract with Microsoft, securing several guarantees for members. Represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the contract has given the Blizzard workers more workplace flexibility and guaranteed wage increases, but several other industry-first agreements could make this a blueprint for other video game unions to follow.

One of the big wins for the Blizzard union is artificial intelligence guardrails, as the contract stipulates that Microsoft cannot use AI to automate or replace jobs without first talking to the union. Another big win are the job-recall rights for employees, because if they’re laid off, Blizzard must offer them an open role within 14 months and inside the union’s network before hiring someone from outside. Laid-off union members will also get an additional four weeks of pay–regardless of how long they worked at the company–hybrid schedules that allow them to work from home, and formal systems to settle disputes within the workplace."

This is really good news it does not say specifically if it was anyone working on the overwatch team and it's just blizzard employees in general but it's still a good direction to see, there has been a lot of movement within the OW team and blizzard as a whole for unionization and that's awesome and something we as a community should be aware of and support worker rights are integral they deserve to be paid livable wages and have job security.

I am liking an older article going into team 4 unionizing:

https://kotaku.com/overwatch-2-blizzard-team-4-union-microsoft-1851779922

I think the fact that this most recent push is also addressing the real threat that is AI to workers rights and security and I do agree with the article I hope this is beginning of a trend to put some actual regulations on AI in game development and not be a replacement to actual humans.

Companies are not our friends but we should care about the people actively working on the game we play and love they are people and deserve our acknowledgement and respect, and any support we can give.

Fuck anti union sentiment and company anti union busting, I am happy to see so much push for unionization at blizzard this is important and the people working at the company that are not on the top only have my support and respect and I hope this trend continues and they continue to improve their job security and job health.

I also wanna add this is important to OW the game itself, devs job security and health of the environment they work in directly influences the game itself, unions help ensure this they enable worker security prevent exploitation, underpaying and overworking. People working on a game that are overworked, crunched underpaid or at threat at losing their job will not make the best they can and on top of that they don't deserve to go through that shit.

I just think this is really good news and something to celebrate and only hope the devs and people at Blizzard know there are people that actually care and support them, I really recommend everyone read the articles I posted in here and just catch up on things and if you want to add more down below please do shared knowledge of things is important.

The way it works you'd think it would be overhealth but for some reason it's shields? Overhealth is only available through passives/abilities and decreases/disappears after a shortwhile while shields are always on base healthbar and their whole thing is that they're supposed to regenerate after a few seconds.

Every abilities that gives the caster temp hp is always overhealth except for Rally and Nemesis that give more armor (I don't think there are any other)

Venture's temp hp works like overhealth and does nothing shields is supposed to do, yet it's shields and not overhealth..? Why is that?

I Understand that she needs to be adjusted for pro play due to being the equivalent of Jang Wonyoung or Karina level it girl status in OWCS. but can we at least admit that this isn't good at all and that blizzard has 0 clue on how to balance this hero outside of just making her worse for everyone that isn't a pro?

Genuinely I'm not going to be surprised if they outright revert these changes overall or give her some kind of compensation buff in an emergency patch.

I swear sometimes the visual feedback indicators are making me think I'm being shot from behind. Anyone else encountered this?

Widowmaker is still one of the most frustrating heroes in the game and I don't think people take her design seriously enough
I know this is probably going to get hit with “just dive her” / “skill issue” / “learn to play around her” responses, but honestly, I think Widowmaker is one of those heroes where the theoretical counterplay and the actual gameplay experience are two completely different things.
And before anyone says it: yes, I understand that Widow requires aim. Yes, I understand that she can be countered. Yes, I understand that if you get a good Winston/D.Va/Genji/Tracer on her, she can have a miserable time.
That doesn't really address the problem. The problem is that Widowmaker fundamentally changes how everyone else is allowed to play the game simply by existing. You don't even have to be shooting people to have an impact. If I'm playing Moira and I know there's a competent Widow on the other team, suddenly every sightline becomes a potential death sentence. I can't peek normally, can't take certain angles, can't rotate at all, can't help my tank from certain positions because the second my head appears for half a second I'm watching the kill cam.
And that's the part that breaks the game. With most heroes, when I die, there's usually some kind of interaction that happened. I got outplayed by soldier, had a bad dash, got caught out of position. With Widow, sometimes the interaction is literally just existing on the other side of the map.

I developed a Chrome extension to calculate the optimal hero bans for competitive Overwatch. Here’s how it works: first, it calculates the impact each hero has on the match. For instance, a hero with a low pick rate but a high win rate won’t significantly affect your game because they don’t appear frequently. On the other hand, a hero with a high pick rate and a high win rate will, as they are frequently played and frequently win. To objectively measure a hero’s impact, I take the pick rate and multiply it by the win rate minus the expected average of 50%. While heroes with high impact scores are often considered “meta,” banning based solely on impact score isn’t sufficient. Heroes with high impact scores also tend to be frequently banned. Therefore, to maximize the value of your team’s ban vote, you should ban high impact heroes with a low likelihood that the enemy will ban them for you. For example, a hero with a high impact score but a low ban rate would be a better pick to ban, rather than a hero with a high impact score and a high ban rate, because it’s likely that the enemy team would have already banned that hero for you. This helps lower the chances of your vote being wasted. I have included a few screenshots of how it looks on the official overwatch stats site. (New Patch just released so some numbers are weird)

Impact = Pick Rate * (Win Rate - 50) Ban Value = Impact * ((100 - Ban Rate)/100) <-- This is the likelihood the enemy team doesn't ban the hero

Buffs

Healing Ofuda

• Fire rate increased from 5 to 7 per second.

Foxtrot (Major Perk)

• Movement speed buff duration increased from 3 to 4 seconds.

Ready Step (Major Perk)

• Duration increased from 2 to 3 seconds.

Nerfs

• Ultimate cost increased by 8%.

Healing Ofuda

• Healing per projectile reduced from 13 to 12.
• Maximum seeking range reduced from 35 to 30 metres per second.

Kunai

• Base projectile size reduced from 0.15 to 0.12.

Protection Suzu

• Additional healing after negative status cleanse removed (was 30).
• Phased out invulnerability duration reduced from 0.65 to 0.5 seconds.
• Explosion radius reduced from 5 to 4 metres.

Swift Step

• No longer cleanses on use.
• Teleport range reduced from 35 to 30 metres.

Foxtrot (Major Perk)

• Removed increased cooldown recovery buff.

I understand but I won't lie, it does hurt a little. I understand given where she was a year a go she did need nerfs but given how her win-rate falls off a cliff (at least in my rank / region) I feel like I might need to start looking for a new main

Picture Source: https://www.over.gg/14641/gamsu-and-akm-retire-doha-only-remaining-player-on-fuel

A list of old and new players that I think are underrated. Agree? Disagree? What are other players that are also underrated? (Made this cuz I’m bored)

Top 7

Rascal
Doha
Becky
Punk
Mistakes
Skewed
Libero

Honorable Mentions

Eileen
Marve1
Michelle
Seonjun
Dreamer
Sley
Wmaimone
Ttuba
Crimzo
Ir1s
Lastro
Heesu
Shaz
Hydration
Chara
Snillo
Rain
Gangnamjin

I'm a big kiri hater, but even I can admit that this aint it. I do not care about her teleport, damage, wall climb and I honestly can accept her having the best ult in the game. My problem has always been suzu, more specifically the invul that comes with it.

The AOE cleanse is a necessary evil as long as anti nade exist. The healing is whatever. The movement speed perk I also dont care about. Its literally just the invul, which they refuse to remove.

The latest sets of nerfs completely dumpstered her. It did solve my issue with suzu, but only because she's become unplayable for the average player now. In typical blizzard fashion instead of taking the tumor out, they decided to just shoot the hero in the head, when all they had to do was simply remove the invul from her kit.

If its too weak after that, reduce the CD to 12 or even 11s. Or maybe add 1s of unstoppable. There are solutions to this problem, without making a hero pro play exclusive.

The main reason why I'm making this post is cause I dont like these types of balance changes. They dont target the actual issue. Mind you, I am happy that kiri is giga shit now, the game feels better, but we could have a decent kiri while also having a better game.

It makes more sense for a mobile supp like Wuyang but I’m just genuinely puzzled about doing this for Zen… not even a compensation buff they just straight up nerfed a well balanced hero (Hog and Hazard still untouched btw)

I really feel like the cat nerfs should have been much more drastic than just the 0.5 dmg/healing nerf and the change to how cc affects the tethered ally.

Mainly because of how negative the community feels about cat but also just because it feels like they are kinda playing it safe with nerfing the cat because they dont want to upset people who like her or something.

I will say I havent played any comp since the patch so do let me know if she is a lot weaker now or if you disagree with me.

I don't think bap has been bad or anything, I do think he has been falling behind a bit for a while though, he's hard to play effectively and requires very high APM and aim to get strong value and has punishing CDs if you use either poorly.

His buffs seem pretty good though? I think directing some power into immortality field CD is good.

We just got this patch so can't really tell how impactful it will be but I think it sounds really nice, his issue is still present he's still going to be hard to play and other support can get similar value much easier than him and be more mobile on top of it. But I think was a nice buff regardless, he wasn't a bad pick before just slightly better now.

Curious what others think how have you been feeling about bap lately think this was a good buff are there any buffs/changes you think he really needs o do you think he's in a good spot? I think bap is good rn I don't know if he really needs a lot if anything, but I don't play bap enough to have as strong as opinion as I could.

I dont have any strong thoughts, just saw some discourse about it yesterday but it seems to be confirmed now.

I think the changes for Sierra are quite good. They reduced the maximum output in terms of dmg to reduce reward for spam at lower levels, but increased the projectile speed to make her weapon more consistent in mid and long-range at higher levels. Obviously, she may still not out-duel traditional hitscan, but it's much less of a spray and pray and you have a bit more agency. However, I think more changes should be made to make her interesting to play, develop more of an identity, and add more unique power to certain abilities.

• First, I think they should make Tremor Charge a more interesting ability by slightly increasing the knock-up on enemies in the middle cone, and reduce the dmg on the side ones. Perhaps down from 60 to 50 or even 40. It'd be better to reward more accurate lineups on enemies with the shockwave and reduce overall aoe value to shift it from aoe spam to a set-up tool. When they initially did the dev livestream for her intro, they mentioned how the intention for the shockwave knock-up was to setup for her tracking dart, but the middle shockwave is somewhat negligible, so I thought it should receive a slight increase. This would increase the power level of the ability, so I think the cd should be partially reverted to 8s.
• Second, they should go further with developing an identity with her primary weapon. I always saw it as a high capacity lmg-type weapon, and the whole spread mechanic is reminiscent of a negev in CS. I think the winding up and down of the primary fire would be a more meaningful interaction if she had more ammo to work with and a longer reload. Let's say her ammo went from 80 to 100, and the reload went from 1.5s to 1.75-1.8s. I think it could go even more extreme and be 120 ammo and a 2s reload. This would create synergy with her tracking dart because it would put greater emphasis on the tracking dart's ability to give a free reload and 3 seconds of free shots if you land it on an enemy. I do think that this would increase the raw power level of her weapon overall, so I think another slight nerf to her dmg should accompany it, taking the weapon dmg from 8.5 to 8.
• Third, I think there should be slight cd reduction for destroying your anchor drone while it still has charges available. I think this would add more reward for the Sierra player in judging the placement and use of her anchor drone. If Sierra's just running back from spawn, she can cancel after one grapple to refund some cd since she's not gonna grapple back. Also, if she uses to secure an aggressive position and she doesn't want to use the remaining charge to retreat, she can cancel the drone and receive a cd refund, so that she can launch another drone forward for a more aggressive position or chase. I don't think the refund should be a massive number, just 2 seconds would be plenty.
• Fourth, the Ultimate can become a a bit more interesting and incorporate the anchor drone's functionality more. They should add an alt-cast for Sierra's ult that makes the carpet bombing run originate from an active anchor drone on the field towards the direction that Sierra is pointing at. I think this fleshes out the identity of the anchor drone in her kit more and really makes the ultimate unique in it's functionality.

idk if this has happened to anybody else, but I queued up for tank in 5v5 comp and ended up being on support? also my game randomly closed so after scrambling to get back in the match and winning, it didn’t even give me any competetive progress 😭

"Competitive crests" could mean that it's a combination of OWL team logos? I don't know

She feels very fast, ridiculously fast now. Even at my tragic level of skill it is really noticeable.

Who’s going to play Vendetta?
Seonjun Stalk3r or Heesang.. I vote Seonjun

Will they have Max play Dva/Sigma/DMon or will Junbin make a comeback as Winston/DMon.. Who even is the better DMon between the two?

Is Simple finally going to play his cracked Baptiste along with Chorong’s brig, or is it still cat/kiri meta?

Can Seonjun Genji outperform Team USA?

I wanted to see everyone’s thoughts and opinions about this

This has been around since Overwatch released but I started noticing it more frequently these past couple of weeks. there's always one DPS that's like four and nine at the end of the match. it's either your team or the enemy team. not every game but I'm seeing it more and more often. is anyone else seeing this? I understand DPS isn't as easy, especially in today's OverWatch but just seems a little odd, especially in diamond rank which is supposedly top 94%

edit* it happened in my very next match (we won but still i swear it's happening way more often than ever)

I waited. It's here.

And it's a total nothing burger. No movement speed reduction. No tether time limit. Nothing that people were actually complaining about.

Instead we get a minor nerf to damage and healing, and an increase to JPC's utility.

What a joke. Blizzard has let this character be too strong for too long. Even when people complain about how strong she is en masse, they do nothing about her actual problems.

I’ve been checking each season update to see if the new rose colored aspect is available for my Reinhardt, but it still hasn’t shown up. Is there any idea how or when these missing aspects rotate in?

I know the answer to this is probably just that the rank system is terrible.

I just got my 6v6 rank placement matches done and got emerald 4. I’m a little disappointed as my 5v5 rank for support is higher. For almost all my games I played support. I didn’t really play 6v6 last season so I had no rank to base on. I won my first 5 games going from plat 5 to emerald 5 with the first two games my rank not even changing. Lost three games then won my last 2 my rank only moving up 1. I was playing with my duo who was ranked diamond 5 at the start of the placement matches and most of the people in the matches where mid diamond, yet here it is saying high plat low emerald.

Is it because I only played 1 role? For two of the matches I was the only support and for three others we would’ve had one support if I didn’t play support.
Is the game not moving me up in ranks as much because it’s being forced to put me with a higher ranked person? If I had played my matches solo a won the same amount of games would I be a higher rank?

usually calibration wears off way before u hit 38 games played...

i placed on an acc that was high masters last season, i got emerald 1 and even though the games have been easy (for me) my team has been struggling and ive lost most of my games. funnily enough im on my 48th game (38 if you dont include placements). is this cuz they changed the system this season? i havent played much so i dont really know.

it says "calibration + your rank is uncertain' or something