Jeff Kaplan shares win rates for several Overwatch Quick Play maps

Last week, Jeff from the Overwatch Team took a break from starring in developer updates and posting incredibly detailed forum responses to divulge a bit of information on win rates in Overwatch. The post was prompted by a player frustrated over continually being matched into Capture Point maps, which — for this player at least — tend to cause people to drop because the second point is so difficult to capture.

As it turns out, the win rates for attacking and defending teams are… pretty dang even across the board. And I don’t just mean attacking win rates for one map are the same as attacking win rates for another, I mean attacking and defending win rates are both very close to 50% on nearly every single map. See for yourself:

Granted, these win rates are exclusively for Quick Match and only cover roughly the past two months of play, but they’re very telling all the same. For one — and this ties into Kaplan’s words regarding balance and the game’s meta — player perception can lead to very strong feelings, even if the statistical data says otherwise. In this case, the original poster was frustrated over attacking teams having a rougher time on Capture Point maps when the reality is that there is rarely a bias toward either side.

The second interesting bit to note is that, of the maps listed, the biggest disparities in win rates exist on the two newest maps. However, one of those maps favors the attacking team while the other favors the defending team — I’ll let you decide if that means things are balanced overall or not.

Either way, this is just another post among many from the Overwatch team that offers a pretty open look at the inner-workings of the game. If we see changes to either Eichenwalde or Horizon, we’ll know why — and if not, it’s still refreshing to see open communication from the game’s developers like this.