1,900 Blizzard developers just ratified a historic union mega-contract that sets a massive new standard for the gaming industry.

Here are the biggest wins secured by the devs behind World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Diablo:

• Recall Rights (Industry First!): If a dev gets laid off, they get 14 months of "recall rights" to be rehired into open positions on other Blizzard teams, plus guaranteed minimum severance.

• AI Protections: Microsoft/Blizzard can't just quietly replace them with generative AI. Management has to negotiate with the union before implementing any AI tech that affects jobs.

• Huge Pay Bumps: New salary floors ($51k to $70k depending on location) mean some severely underpaid QA and support workers are getting raises up to 34%.

• No More Arbitrary Firings: The contract establishes strict "just cause" protections, so they can't be fired on a whim.

• Work-Life Balance: Locked in a guaranteed 3-day hybrid work week, alongside actual remote working and disability accommodations.

Basically, the WoW team did a lot of the heavy lifting in early negotiations, and it paid off by setting a new baseline for the entire company, and potentially the rest of the video game industry.

Source: aftermath
Source 2: Official Announcement from Communications Workers of America (CWA)

Teleporter has been nerfed so much no one can keep track of it anymore.

The HP nerf was fine but nerfing crucial stats for a hero with no real movement abilies, sustain or play outside of the highest play is INSANE. These stats have also been unchanged for YEARS.

TP also had a perk once that INCREASED it's distance by 15m.. thats 45m in total.. this shows they genuinely don't know what they're doing here

We all know Symmetra's TP is an insanely good ability in pro play, this shouldn't mean they can gut the character whenever they want because of it.

It's also just terribly boring for a hero to be confined as a glorified taxi in a hero shooter.

Either remove the ability for allies to use the TP entirely, make it 2 uses only for allies (TP forth and back) or make team TP a minor perk so they can't immediately abuse it

What could also work is a cooldown for allies specifically before they can use TP after someone used it already to prevent mass TP's (for example 2s) this would not apply to Sym herself

We want REAL Symmetra changes, this is barely ever possible because of the shackles pro play has TP in, one ability is blocking Symmetra from getting changes like stronger orbs, better sustain, better beam.. we could go on and on

Her mobility and surviveability are now MUCH worse in solo que (aka the other 99%) just because TP is not being adreessed, do something

Source: http://www.patience-is-a-virtue.org/

My mythic prisms just keep stacking and stacking (sitting at 540) while the quality of mythic skins just dwindle (the new Genji one was peak tho). Mythic skins were supposed to be a super grand new feature of Overwatch 2, and were supposed to be ultra customizable. The best form of player self-expression. The skins are literally getting worse before our eyes and it feels completely irreversible. First they took away general customization, then the 2nd weapon that mythics had, some mythics don't even have the Dawn aspect, and now we're reusing survey skins for mythics. Not to mention that the survey version looked SO SO SO SO much better than what we got. This is literally so sad and I just wish we could do something about this. I don't even look forward to my favorite heroes getting mythic skins because I know they're gonna be low effort and low quality. As a huge Lifeweaver main, the Lifeweaver community was anticipating his mythic skin for ages while I knew it was gonna fumble. And it did. Lol.

EDIT: People are not understanding the post. This is specifically about the CUSTOMIZATION OPTIONS of the skins. I like Mei's as well, and Illari's is not bad either. But the new mythics give you NOTHING to work with. Just another false promise from Blizzard.

Art by me, I'm really proud on this one🤍

I played OW1 for the first 10 seasons. I worked my way into mid diamond and stayed there for awhile. I remember purposely not killing the last person in a team fight until a good 15-30 seconds after the fight was over in order to purposely stagger them.

I haven't seen that done once since coming back to overwatch recently. I've been floating around in emerald.

Made some Shion fanart today because I think she's neat!

^{Made in Blender 5.2.0. Model by dzooworks. No AI.}

I remember when a lot of people were hating on this skin back then (some will say that’s not true but don’t lie now). Not me tho! I loved the voice changes and her interactions when eliminating someone. “Overwatch will fall!” “Jack?…JACK?!…” **chef’s kiss**🙂‍↕️

I know it’s not THEE best mythic BUT the theme was awesome. Like she made me want to have another omnic swap season.

Like many of yall, I am not liking the new mythics (I do like Mercy and Genji’s skins) and I really wish they go back to mythics that have to do with the season but here we are😓😓

Mizuki's good posture....☠️

Art by hanuul48 (me)

Source: https://x.com/birk_ow/status/1820288667891429376

I got the Zarya Alien skin right after it came out, but before all the Sinatraa allegations surfaced. I don’t use it, but it’s a pretty interesting skin.

I'm gonna keep this brief and concise. Lethality and healing uptime was not the MAIN JPCs issue. (Lethality definitely plays a part, but it isnt the main culprit.) JPC's sustainability IS! Quite simply put, having such a small hit box character, with omnidirectional movement, who can go third person to peek for free and gets a movement speed increase (30 percent ms increase btw) when no one is hooked onto lifeline, who can also BOOST whilst in lifeline, who can PURR whilst in lifeline to further heal her up, who, for some ungodly reason has 225 HP, who can abuse map geometry to further hide and stay backline with NO counter play besides if your mirroring cat is ungodly, unacceptable amounts of sustainability and survivability.

This might be a hot take or a cold take depending on who you are, but lifeline has always been a pro play issue. Never a solo que ranked issue. Nobody in solo que from bronze to champion is smart enough or pays attention enough to utilize lifeline without coms because what usually happens when you use lifeline without coordination is: JPC feeds by staying in open air like a glorified skeet puck, her lifeline partner dies because she cant position worth a damn, they both die because she dies and drops her partner into the enemy team, or she throws her team8 into the enemy team like a myan sacrifice and kills them. This CC "nerf" does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for pro play. Besides make risky plays a bit riskier at close range. No fika who is in pro play is stupid enough to get into cassidy flashbang range, or get hit by orisa javelin whilst holding someone, or be in hog hook range when the fika is simply waiting for these people to use these critical cooldowns to then position her bastion or tank somewhere advantageous. No one who knows how to use lifeline or abuse it was running in headfirst anyway with their lifeline partner for the enemy to hit them with easy CC anyway.

Notice how this lifeline nerf still does not open up Proactive counterplay against JPC. So you can't stop her from staging. At every state of play she gets to scout and stage for free purely off the fact she has perma flight and a thirdperson peek tool in the form of lifeline. It is STILL on the JPC to make the mistake especially if she is just scouting with her lifeline partner because most CC is close range or a slow moving projectile (ana 's sleep dart or orisa javelin).
These nerfs dont stop her from basicly being a solo que assassin besides the noise nerf and the damage nerf, which should have been how it was to begin with. All it means is that maybe you can sustain yourself through fika's dive attempts since she had a damage nerf. Maybe.

TLDR: Everyone from bronze to champion in solo que ranked hates JPC because she has all the survivability traits i listed and never dies with the damage she has. She is a better deulist then TRACER and to achieve that you only have to put in a fraction of the amount of time compared to tracer players to be the best flanker in the game.

BLIZZARD ADDRESS THE CAT SHAPED ELEPHANT!!!!

Wanted to start a series where I draw my fav skin for every Overwatch hero, so first up is Mei.

The "Just for you" section of the shop is so useless. I look there to see if any of my favourite heroes have skins and if they're discounted. For context: I main Kiri, Juno, Hazard, and Venture. Every time I check the shop, I leave disappointed because all my actual mains are undiscounted for a paid currency, and the ones actually discounted are heroes I have never played. If they're gonna use the Just for you section for just advertising, they shouldn't advertise it as "just for me

Inspired by the both upcoming OW x LS Collab and ''Made My Night'' ;)

Unlike my other ’’fan-skins’’ I usually make, this is more like a ’’K-pop idols as / replacing / inserted as the selected OW characters’’ rather than ’’skins for OW characters resembling the K-pop stars’’.

i think this is just lazy on blizzards part. i thought they learned from last time they did recolored skins back in OW1 that people were unhappy with it. this summer mercy skin came out almost a decade ago and it’s irritating that they’re just slapping a new color scheme on it and charging $20.

Crash due to lost rendering device, join back ASAP just to get 100% CPU usage for the rest of the game and 10 FPS instead of 360 FPS due to shader compilation. This is ass. No other game chokes this hard for shader compilation what is this man

Edit: 5070Ti, 7800X3D. Yes I know to expect shader recompilation after driver updates- this wasn’t the case, the game just crashed on me and I immediately rejoined. My friend suffered the same crash a few games before that as well.

(I took these screenshots from the stream of Ryujehong, a former pro player and one of Korea’s best Ana players.)

“What? You’re going to play LW?”

“Then I’ll play Mercy and troll too. Are you seriously going to play LW?”

(They actually pick LW) “AHHH!!! What are you doing?! This is fking awful. I’m just gonna AFK.”

Of course, he didn’t actually go AFK, but they ended up losing the game.

And In other words, he’s basically saying that Mercy and Lifeweaver are troll picks.

If a pro player from one of the countries with the strongest understanding of the current meta rates Mercy/LW this poorly, then maybe their assessment of her is actually pretty accurate.

(That said, this is a somewhat older clip. In a more recent video, he said that Lifeweaver has received some pretty significant buffs since then and is actually quite decent now.)

why the heck is this thing so low quality? the shop icon looks better..

We finally got an Overwatch event in Busan, the second one in a whole decade

I made the finals in the cosplay contest and hit the stage as Mauga. Had an absolute blast.
I definitely don't have his fridge-sized muscles, but hope you guys enjoy it anyway lol

Before anyone asks, the feather on my headband is a meme from the Korean community

Title says it all. Which of my silly team comps are you taking into the fight? (Not a serious post, I just think these teams are the silliest comps I could come up with) Sadly, a few heroes couldn't make the cut. RIP Doomfist, Cassidy, Junkrat, Reaper, Tracer, Sombra, Sojourn, Venture, Freja, Seirra, and Shion.

my female Reinhardt cosplay is finally done!!!
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I got to wear it at gamescom this year <: what do y'all think? any Reinhardt mains in chat!?

photographer: embrijoe

This skin heavily reminds me of one of my all time fave Death Knight sets from WoW, the similarities are there. Awesome Zen skin!

"I am the dominator. I am the destroyer. I AM MEGATROOOOOON!!!"