Blizzard has launched the new Winter Wonderland event in Overwatch today, but it’s not the only change.
As confirmed in the new patch notes, a number of other tweaks have been made, including the introduction of the Overwatch Priority Pass.
This new item is going live today and is being used to help with some of the long queue times being encountered by Overwatch fans.
Damage players are being left hanging for the longest and the new Priority Pass should make it easier to skip the queues.
A message from Blizzard explains: “In an effort to help address the population imbalance between Tank, Support, and Damage roles, and the longer queue times that Damage players often encounter due to this imbalance, we’re introducing the new Priority Pass feature.
“Players can earn Priority Passes by choosing Flex when they queue, with more passes earned for wins than for losses. Use a Priority Pass to decrease queue time for a role currently experiencing higher traffic.
“Priority Passes may not be used when playing a group of 5 or more. Since we try to pair large parties against other large parties, and parties this large already contain a good balance of roles, we do not anticipate that using a Priority Pass would actually reduce queue times.
“As such, we don’t want players to waste their passes if this wouldn’t have a noticeable effect towards the feature’s goal.”
Today’s Overwatch update is quite hefty when it comes to new feature but it doesn’t include any notable Hero rebalancing efforts from the development team.
More of these will be happening in 2021, with today’s patch being followed by a few others in December.
Added alongside the Priority Pass and the Winter Wonderland event today is a new options menu to the Replay Viewer, accessible via the Media Controls.
This should make it a better tool for generating content, with Blizzard adding: “Our goal is to give our players more control over how the Replay Viewer looks and behaves in order to navigate replays more easily, as well as make awesome content.
“These additional settings include the ability to independently toggle UI elements, modify player outline strength, disable objective capture sounds, and adjust the spectator camera behavior. We’ve also added 0.75x and 1.75x playback speeds to give you finer control.”
More from today’s Overwatch patch notes can be found below:
General
WORKSHOP UPDATES
New Workshop Features
When the setting Enable Workshop Inspector Log File [PC-ONLY] is enabled, any log entries written to the Inspector Log will be written out to a local file on disk. When the custom game ends (or if you disconnect), the current log file will close. A new log file will be opened each time you are in a new custom game that writes out a log line via Log To Inspector.
New Workshop Values
BUG FIXES
General
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Fixed a bug that caused the health display for heroes with a small amount of damage to appear at full health
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Fixed a bug that caused the “Default to Friends” option on the competitive leaderboards to not persist between game sessions
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Fixed a bug that caused the “Leave as Group” option while leaving games to not persist between game sessions
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Fixed a bug with Role Queue Beta season stats displaying the same ratings for all roles
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Fixed a bug that allowed some damage-over-time abilities to charge certain heroes’ ultimate abilities during the duration of their activated ultimate ability
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Fixed a bug that caused pain exertion sounds to not trigger properly
Maps
Eichenwalde
Ilios
Temple of Anubis
Heroes
Baptiste
D.Va
Echo
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Fixed a bug that caused her hero portrait to reflect a cloned unit during end of round flows of PvE game modes
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Fixed a bug that would cause her to become stuck in the previous spawn point
Sigma
Sombra
Widowmaker
Wrecking Ball
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Fixed a bug that caused the length of his grapple ability to be shorter than normal
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Fixed a bug that caused the camera to appear beneath the ground if Wrecking Ball shifts into ball mode while his model is still loading
