San Francisco Shock main tank player and vocal online personality Super has just revealed hat Overwatch League players recently had an opportunity speak directly to the Overwatch development team during a 30 minute online Q&A session. He mentioned this in response to some Overwatch League fans’ speculation that Blizzard employees have not been communicating much with the pro players.
One of the topics brought up during the second season of the Overwatch League was the watchability of the GOATS composition (or 3-3, as it was called exclusively by the Overwatch League staff during official broadcasts). Nearly gone were the “pop offs” that dominated highlight reels from the league’s inaugural season; instead, avalanches of ultimate abilities that would result in a single elimination (if that) became teams’ new path to victory.
GOATS was the norm for well over half of Season 2. While opinions on GOATS were divided, a perhaps more underlying issue behind the pervasiveness of GOATS was how long it look for Blizzard to meaningfully shift the game away from a state in which competitive play was dominated by a single team composition, with very little variance.
Blizzard recently owned up to this to address restrictive metas. This has resulted in a few new systems being brought to the game that are designed to ensure that the majority of its roster of heroes can be played competitively.
Since the announcement of these key new features, some posts online have expressed concern that hero pools in particular will be hard on professional players. While this may be true — newly-re-announced OWL desk host Reinforce, for example, recently explained how the new system now favors innovators over perfectionists — Super has now confirmed that, at the very least, players now have a direct line to the game’s developers.
Whether that means that pros will have influence on future development decisions or simply an easier time adapting to them, it’s hard to say. However, it’s an encouraging sign that the pros are not being ignored.
Source: Dot Esports
