http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20752015856 https://imgur.com/a/MuFN9
Sombra is live in competitive
Nano Boost move speed nerf
Any thoughts as to how this is going to affect upcoming APEX matches??'
NOTE: Edited to add blizz forum link for changelog
Unbelievably stupid not to schedule around $100k+ tournaments. There is a hugely important - and very close - match happening tomorrow between RunAway and KongDoo Panthera and it will just be a guessing game between the two. They won't have been practising extensively in PTR, they haven't had anywhere near enough time and were told the changes would not go live in that form.
Then there's the playoffs, and there's no guarantee whatsoever that the teams who were good in the previous patch will be as good in this one. Look at NiP, the difference between the two patches was gigantic - in one they are a tier 2/3 team in Europe and then suddenly in the next they're one of the best teams in the world. There's very little legitimacy to the teams who made it to APEX playoffs now, they'll have to scramble to adapt as a lot of their preparation, practice, and comps are thrown to square one.
The PTR has not been tested enough and they have done only one iteration of it; the PTR was even advertised as major changes that shouldn't be expected to all go live. It blows my mind that they've just shoved it live and fucked an enormous tournament. It makes me so frustrated to see these basic mistakes. All they had to do was hold off for just over two weeks, making some small tweaks to the PTR based on feedback in the meantime, and there'd be a far better reception and they wouldn't have fucked the biggest global tournament so far in Overwatch.
That was a large surprise to me, and my biggest gripe. Not that the changes pushed were bad, but I was expecting a lot more testing to be done before anything was committed. The PTR was only up for what, a week or two? While I understand not wanting to restrict yourself to only releasing updates when major tournaments are not going on, I hope Blizzard will at least be able to give more notice next time. A "Hey, we know we said these changes weren't likely to make it to live, but we've changed our minds and a new patch will be heading out in the next few days" would go a long way.
Also, I'm surprised Sombra made it to live without any changes - especially her health kit hack period. Interested to see how that plays into the meta.
99% of the playerbase is also not playing Blizzard-sanctioned cups for $178,000. And it's not like they were even clamouring for Sombra to go live yet, the majority of feedback I saw was about tweaking Pharah/Soldier76, nobody was asking for Sombra to be in ranked immediately. There's no tangible negative to delaying Sombra going live for a fortnight.
As for scheduling around longer tournaments, if they had been aiming to release in the beginning half of this 2 month tournament then I would agree, but they only have to wait another 2 weeks for it to be completely over and the PTR has massive changes that've only been live for one week. Even one more day to avoid the regular season and then have a different meta for playoffs - which would be barely better but it would indicate some sort of respect/coordination with the tournament. I don't think it's reasonable to shove meta-changing patches, which this certainly is, in the middle of such major tournaments. Either they don't care about 3rd party events or they'll continue doing this for OWL etc. which is a terrible policy both ways.
Another thing I didn't mention is that they could fix this situation by saying a week beforehand "we are planning for the PTR to go live next Tuesday". Teams could spend time scrimming in PTR, or strategising for it at least, and they would know exactly which games would be on which patches to plan for their opponents.
Discord