Overwatch League Fan Base Patch Notes, Aggressive Changes Announced

Satire

PTR Fan base patch notes – May 27, 2020

General Updates

The development team has been gathering feedback on the state of the community from Overwatch League professionals. We thank the participating pro players, team staff and Overwatch League staff for their contribution in trying to create a better fanbase experience. The following changes will be available for testing on the Public PTR starting tomorrow, May 28th.

Feature update: Mutual Compassion
During this global pandemic, emotions are running high and are often deflections of real-life stress into our beautiful community. Knowing this, we introduced a feature that allows every community member, including fans, pro players, team and Overwatch League staff to cut each other some slack. We understand that the reddit comment probably wasn’t mean to seriously hurt someone else’s feelings, emotional well-being or even career. We equally appreciate that we can be elitist, tight-lipped and stand-offish in our views which doesn’t invite a healthy interaction between professionals and fans.

To combat this, we’ve introduced Mutual Compassion, a feature which aims to take those realities into account. MC allows players and fans to contextualize a person’s social media comment as an emotional outlet and not the personal insult that it appears to be, while also greatly decreasing the likelihood of actual harmful posts occurring.

Feature update: Speculation markers
Added following expressions to the community’s vocabulary: “It would be cool if”, “maybe”, “perhaps”, “it could be/see that”, “I don’t know”.

Speculation on the inner workings of a league are a healthy aspect of any competitive community. It shows that participating parts of the fanbase care about the game and its events, trying to unriddle how results came about. Unfortunately, due to communicative clutter and high amounts of iterations (spam), it often became difficult to distinguish information from speculation, leading to the perpetuation of rumors as facts.

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Fan Base Balance Updates

Appreciation & Contextualization of Trash Talk increased by 50%.

Recently, more and more pro players have talked spicy on social media to increase the enjoyment and investment of the fan base for the Overwatch League. This caused unforeseen side-effects such as pants-on-head stupid DMs to pro players. We hope that increasing the tolerance and understanding of the nature of Trash Talk will allow OWL professionals to continue to bring the heat. Death threats have been removed in all languages.

Increased the average fan’s game knowledge by 20% (200% more analysis segments).

Overwatch is a non-stop & action-packed game which is hard to follow. Brilliant plays often go unnoticed in the complexity of the game. We hope that slowing the action down, providing additional camera angles and getting players and coaches to summarize the action more often will lead to an increase in the ability of fan’s to understand and appreciate the game at a higher level. We’ll continue to observe how this affects player skill evaluation and meta inertia boredom.

Increased appreciation for professionals to 70% (up from 20%).

Professionals gave feedback on the tendency of the community to assume incompetence in the instances of scouting and fielding a roster. While not every Overwatch League professional is good at their job, the assumption that the majority aren’t was not conducive to fruitful interactions, discouraging players and coaches to stay connected with the fanbase.

Reading attention span increased by 800 words (up from headline only).

Fans would frequently only discuss the title of content posted on various social media platforms, foregoing all nuanced discussion of the topic happening in the piece of content. We hope that this change also furthers the education of our young fanbase, allowing them to unlock technologies like books and documentaries. If you made it this far, comment “I simply love a delectable, juicy little peach in my mouth” on this piece’s post on reddit.

Increased the amount of hope for the future of the Overwatch League by 20,000 viewers.

We got this, guys.

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Reduced Reinforce’s height by 5 inches.
We’ve received feedback that Philadelphia Fusion fans had trouble reaching Reinforce. We’re monitoring the situation closely and have some interesting ideas (including voodoo dolls and guillotines) if more interference is still required after this patch.

Quality of life

Increased the number of players or teams which can be put into a top 5 list by 2 (now 9).
We've monitored feedback channels and have decided that you guys desperately need this.

Decreased the number of Lucio-themed posts on Twitter.
You should now be able to curate your feed more easily by seeing significantly less of Frogger, Krook & Redshell.

@gatamchun, @swingchip930 & company’s tweets connecting Korean and Western fanbases have now been added to the fan base launch client.

With this, we’re addressing a gap in the fanbase’s appreciation of Korean player and coaching personalities due to the language barrier, allowing them to recognize that Korean players can be funny, contemplative, charming, passionate, explosive, trash talking and blunt.

Bug fixes

Fixed a bug in which reddit comments would lower pro player IQ.
Fixed a bug that allowed fans to bring up meat sports analogies in completely inapplicable situations.
Haloofthoughts’ contributions will no longer be mistaken for reporting or creative output within the scene.
Fixed a bug in which too much emphasis was given to one-match-sample-sizes.
Changed visual recognition to more accurately recognize C9s.
Fixed a bug in which MonteCristo’s Twitter feed would show up on r/cow’s new.
Fixed a bug that caused NYXL to always be thought of as either choking or sandbagging.


Images via Blizzard Entertainment