Overwatch 2 PvP Beta Analysis: How Data and Community Feedback Inform Game Balance

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Heroes of Overwatch, let's talk data! Data is a valuable resource when it comes to game design. Data, player feedback, user research, internal discussion, and simply playing the game ourselves, all influence our design decisions. Data can give us a bird’s-eye-view, a close look at the smallest details, and it can illuminate larger trends in our game. Today we’re going to talk about what we can learn from the first Overwatch 2 Beta and how we use data to inform design decisions in-game.

The design team wanted to keep an eye on several things as the first beta began. We saw the community play Sojourn and explore the Sombra, Bastion, Doomfist, and Orisa reworks for the first time. We wanted to know how these heroes were performing in the beta and respond with quick changes if they were found to be lacking in effectiveness or too overpowered to play against.

When evaluating hero performance, we look at all competitive ranks and skill levels together and separately to get the clearest picture of how various portions of the playerbase are reacting to the current state of the game. Players that occupy the highest ranks push the game to its limits and often discover the strongest abilities and strategies much faster than the rest of the playerbase. Lower ranked players may, however, struggle more to deal with certain heroes and playstyles, so we find it important to keep all players in mind when making decisions about game balance. Rank-specific analyses are a vital part of our data diet, but this blog features data pulled from all skill levels in the beta.

The question of “performance” is multifaceted, and we have several different metrics that shine light through the prism of performance from different angles. The first metric is