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Competitive change for Overwatch's Assault hits the PTR

The change is pretty big.

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Overwatch's principal designer Scott Mercer has detailed some PTR changes via Battle.net, and has revealed that changes are being made to competitive so that draws don't happen as often on certain maps.

"On PTR we're testing a change to victory conditions for maps that have capture objectives," he explained. "This includes Assault maps such as Hanamura or Volskaya, and the first objective of Assault/Escort (aka Hybrid) maps such as Eichenwalde and King's Row. Currently on live, these maps result in a tie score more often then we would like. This is especially true for more defensible Assault maps such as Hanamura, which saw the most ties of any of our maps. We decided on trying a very aggressive method of tiebreaking on the PTR to create as few ties as possible."

He then outlined what was being changed: "A team no longer has to completely capture one more objective than their opponent to gain a win. If both teams have the same score and run out of time, we now compare the maximum capture% of each team on the last objective they were both trying to complete. The team with the highest capture% on that objective wins. This is not based on the progression points at every 33%, but is on a completely granular scale of 0-100%. The three "pie pieces" still function as before, so if attackers take 50% of a map but wipe out then the minimum capture% decays down to 33%. We show the maximum capture% with an orange triangle placed around the capture circle."

He then gives some examples of how this can happen, before explaining what this all means to players. Defenders, for example, will need to contest the objective by having a player in it much more often, as the smaller differences in capture percentage are now relevant, meaning getting held to 0% is "now a really big deal."

"Competitive play is available with both Hanamura and Eichenwalde, so when you play on PTR you'll definitely get a map where the new tiebreaker system could be the difference between winning and losing! We're looking forward to feedback on how it all works, from the feel of the new system to how the UI can be improved," Mercer finished by saying.

With this new system, however, some are concerned that this becomes unfair, unbalanced, or just too quick. Reddit user Derkki, for instance, posted a gif showing a round lasting a matter of seconds as all the team needed to do was push the objective past 1%. There are some players, however, who are welcoming the change. Where do you stand on the changes being made?

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