While the big news for Overwatch was the introduction of seasonal events and Olympic-inspired skins, there was, in fact, a patch update as well. Nothing here matches the new brawl mode of Lucioball or the new loot boxes, but there have been some tweaks to the game on PC and on consoles.
First up is the introduction of a cooldown timer on those who leave a competitive match before its conclusion. Now, players will have to wait at least ten minutes after leaving a competitive match early before they can join another one. This is designed to work with the other penalties for leaving to help create a system that punishes those who try to exploit the system, while not being too harsh on those who have legitimate internet issues.
As part of Blizzard's effort to speed up the game by killing off excessive wait time, they have decided to look at hero selection time. What they have done is on Assault Maps (Hanamura, Temple of Anubis, and Volskaya Industries) they are reducing the amount of time provided in subsequent rounds for team assembly. The idea here is likely that you have an idea of what you want to play already from the last round, meaning you can pick your heroes in a shorter amount of time without it impacting strategy.
Some of the most notable changes may be in some user interface tweaks they made. First of all, they have removed the "No Builder" and "No Sniper Hero" warnings, meaning the game won't be trying to push someone into those roles. Second of all, and perhaps bigger, is that they have changed "No Support Hero" to "No Healer" and it no longer counts Symmetra. This means that you won't have someone take Symmetra when what your team really needs is a proper healer. As a small tweak, they have also kindly removed Hero Selection tips during brawls, which often require you to pick certain heroes or have special rules in them.
Console versions of Overwatch got the update that the PC did last week which buffed Ana and weakened McCree with this update as well.
There are some small tweaks and bug fixes as well. A few examples include: PC players can now set an FPS cap in custom modes, the tutorial is no longer unplayable after switching heroes, a bug that stopped the 30-seconds remaining music from playing on Payload maps was fixed, and Ana's "Most in Game" career statistics now display properly after a bug was swatted. Perhaps the most important bug fix was that that they fixed the bug that stopped grouped players from being able to rejoin a match when disconnected.
You can read the full Overwatch Patch Notes on the Blizzard site.
What do you think of this update by Blizzard? Do you think that these qualities of life changes will improve the game experience? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
