Bastion and Torbjorn are going to take a small respite out from Overwatch 2, as Blizzard sorts out the latest round of server issues and solutions they have attempted to implement.
The game went through an extended emergency maintenance period yesterday. Unfortunately, it didn’t come out of that maintenance intact. Many players are once again finding themselves unable to play, either because they need to connect, or were put back into the dreaded queue.
Other players noticed that half of the roster is unavailable to them, which leads us to discussing the ongoing issues with Bastion and Torbjorn.
In Bastion’s case, the character became a little too OP as players observed that his ultimate ability, Artillery, was way too overpowered to the point of being unfair. The way Artillery is supposed to work is, Bastion plants himself into the ground, and then gets to shoot three rounds for the duration of the Ultimate. The way the bug has been working, players have found they can keep on throwing out rounds after the third one, running down the timer.
To a non player, that may sound like it’s workable to be a fair gameplay element, but Blizzard did not design it that way. Here’s a tweet demonstrating how unfair this Ultimate plays out in execution
Blizzard did not elaborate the reason for Torbjorn’s removal, but the character should still be selectable for Quick Play.
Other ongoing issues include the merge account feature failing to work properly. In particular, players opening the game on a console don’t get the option to merge accounts. In some other cases, their account data, such as cosmetics, are not carrying over properly after the merge.
To briefly recap, Overwatch 2 suffered a server attack immediately after it launched. Players were having trouble waiting on a queue, that itself had issues that made some players see a ‘0 players on queue’ message but still didn’t allow them to play. Knowing what gamer culture is today, these issues would eventually be turned into memes, but Blizzard was attentive to what was going on in the game and how fans were reacting as well.
Blizzard formally apologized for the issues at launch, and also promised they would remove the SMS phone number requirement, if not for all players, for most of them, particularly legacy players coming over from the first Overwatch.
They also released patch notes this week, revealing that Blizzard had retired a lot of features from Overwatch for Overwatch 2, including lootboxes, general chat, players levels, and most notably, the Looking for Group feature. Moving forward, players will have to connect with each other outside of the game itself, most likely in social places like Discord.
Whiles these things aren’t coming back for Overwatch 2, Torbjorn and Bastion are. Just give it a little time, folks.
Source: VideoGamesChronicle
