Hey players, Aaron here checking in after the first few days of Season 16! We’ve seen so many of you jumping into Stadium, making as many crazy builds as possible, and we love to see it.
I’m currently working on a longer Director’s Take about the past, present, and future of Stadium–complete with a roadmap for the mode–but I wanted to do a quick round-up of things from this week. There have been a lot of conversations around Stadium, and I want to make sure everyone is aware of the updates, changes, and how things are going.
First of all, we’ve listened to your feedback on Stadium and have some in-game data on it already. Here’s what we’ve seen and heard:
- Lack of Cross-Play support
- High leaver rate
- Performance on older systems
- Certain Heroes and builds are frustrating
I’ll break these down a bit below.
Cross-Play
We agree that this is an issue, as our goal for Stadium is to enable everyone to get to play with their friends through Cross-Play.
There are two ways we can do this, either create an unranked version of Stadium and enable it there or turn Cross-Play on in the current ranked version. Part of this decision will come down to how popular the game mode is. If a ton of people are playing it, then we’d feel confident there would be enough players in the unranked and ranked versions to support healthy queue times and matchmaking.
All that being said, either version requires a patch and we’re still investigating the timeline. We had hoped for Season 16 midseason, but it’s looking like a Season 17 launch might be more realistic.
Leavers
There are leavers in Stadium, that’s true, but it's not at a rate higher than in Ranked. At least, that is what we’re seeing from in-game data so far.
Our leaver rate right now for Stadium is currently sitting at 7% of games have a leaver, which is just under the leaver rate for Competitive. But we are aware that the perception is different from what our data says, and we are investigating why this is. Also, on Thursday, we fixed a bug that caused leaver penalties to not be enabled for some players. With this resolved, we’re looking forward to seeing whether this lowers leaver rates any further.
Performance
Because of the sheer amount of extra abilities and powers that players can equip in Stadium, it is a technically demanding game mode. We’ve heard that it’s hitting some systems harder, especially older ones. Because of this, the decision to lock older hardware to 30fps in the mode was made. This would stop erratic framerate swings, but it could feel worse more consistently for some players. We’re putting tech in to dynamically disable this and are hoping to test it out in the next few weeks. Also, some players run the PS4 version of Overwatch 2 on their PS5 systems. Running the game, this way would cause this FPS lock on a very capable system. We’re looking into a fix for this as well.
We’re also looking into general performance improvements. To be honest, we’re continuously doing this for the whole game. Overwatch 2 is constantly adding new features, so we’re always looking at performance improvements to keep all the latest tech running as smooth as possible.
Heroes and Builds
There’s been a lot of talk about the power levels of different Heroes and different builds. Theory crafting is one of the most fun aspects of Stadium! We do think that it’s going to take a little while for players to figure different builds out, but we also don't want to leave frustrating elements in for too long. So, in the meantime we’re looking at nerfing just a few of the Items that could cause frustration, as well as buffing more that players just aren’t picking much. These changes should affect everyone in the lineup, but there are targeted adjustments for Cassidy, D.Va, and Zarya. We've released a quick patch for the weekend. We're watching this part of Stadium very closely and will most likely follow up with more balance changes soon.
Hero Bans, Freja, Perks
We are currently crunching data on Hero Bans and Perks, as well as seeing how players are responding to Freja. We’ll be talking about these in the next few weeks.
We’ll have a lot more on Stadium for everyone soon, including a Reddit AMA with some of our Stadium dev team on Monday.
Thanks for all your great feedback- we appreciate it, as it helps us continue to update and make a great game.
See you all in the Stadium this weekend!