Overwatch 2Jun 12, 2017 2:00 pm CT

Jeff Kaplan on plans for Mystery Heroes

By Matthew Rossi

{PB} If you play Overwatch, you may be familiar with the Arcade mode ‘Mystery Heroes,’ where players randomly change heroes after each death. As a result, you could end up on a team with 5 Genjis playing against a balanced comp that does awful, awful things to you. Or you could end up dying and coming back as Hanzo on a team formerly consisting of 5 Genjis, which is just awkward, at best.

It turns out that Jeff from the Overwatch Team (also known as Game Director Jeff Kaplan) has heard your concerns and boldly answered:

Originally Posted by Jeff from the Overwatch Team (Blue Tracker)

We have a number of Mystery Heroes fixes on our to-do list. We’re very eager to get to them but it just hasn’t bubbled to the top of our priority list yet. We definitely want to get rid of suiciding to force a hero switch. We will also remove the “Assemble Heroes” wait time as there is no reason for it in this mode. We have some other improvements in mind as well.

I am curious how the community as a whole feels about some of the ideas you bring up. I know that it frustrates me when the other team ends up with 5 D.Va’s. I also get frustrated when the enemy team has a balanced team comp and my team comp is less balanced. But perhaps that is part of the charm of the mode?

How do you guys feel about a purely random system (such as it works now) versus a mostly random system where we try to limit stacking and nudge the team comps towards something more reasonable? I can see arguments for both ways being compelling to different people.

This was in response to the original poster’s outline of some of the problems of Mystery Heroes as an Arcade mode, like the fact that you can have a wildly unbalanced comp, the annoyance of a character selection section when you’re not actually going to be playing that character, and, although the OP doesn’t specifically mention it, the pure randomness of what can happen.

But Jeff mentions that for some players, that sheer randomness is potentially part of the draw of the mode, so while they are going to make improvements — seriously, why bother with character selection here? — he wants to hear from players about their opinions of the mode as a whole.

This means if you’re an avid Overwatch player, now is your time to go to the forums and give them exactly that.

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