Jeff Kaplan Talks Lucio Re-tuning, Winston Buffs, Loot Box Gifting

Overwatch's Jeff Kaplan answered questions for three hours straight on a Reddit AMA request. During this 3 hours, the Blizzard vice president talked about his favorite hero, games he likes to play on his free time, and some other casual talk, but he also talked about some more serious stuff related to possible upcoming changes. Lucio is one of the characters that he brought up, saying that he feels players always choose Lucio as a must pick support hero to any composition, while he also doesn't feel very impactful to play. 

It's true that Lucio is definitely the most chosen, or at least most essential support hero for most competitive and professional team compositions. While he is an extremely popular pick, playing as Lucio doesn't feel very meaningful thanks to his AOE heal. To less experienced players, it can feel like you aren't helping your team out very much, or just not having a meaningful impact on the game in general. Kaplan explains that they are working on making Lucio feel more meaningful to play while also making him less of an essential/obvious pick in competitive play. 

"We're trying some ideas to make him more engaging to play while making him a little less obvious/must pick. We'll see if those changes make it to the PTR. One tricky thing is that player perception of 'must pick' doesn't match actual behavior. I sometimes look at the hero pick stats and they clearly don't match the 'hero meta report' stats. Then players tell me to throw out my stats and look at only diamond and higher in competitive play only."

Jeff Kaplan has again, and again shared his opinion on the matter of "meta-reporting" Players constantly give feedback to blizzard based on the competitive scene, thinking that professional players should be a guideline by which updates are based on. Kapan continuously tries to explain that the professional scene is such a small minority of the community, and their experience/meta does not set precedence over the majority of the player base.

Kaplan also talked about potential changes to Winston since he is the least picked hero overall in the entire game. Winston is definitely a hard character to buff because I personally have dominated with him in the right scenario, and my most eliminations with Winston is in a control match. With the right player and the right team he can be amazing, but he is not consistent enough. Regardless, we will definitely see some changes for Winston and Lucio showing up in the PTR relatively soon.

Kaplan mentioned that they are also working on a loot box gifting system so that players can send friends presents freely. Hopefully you've got some generous friends that play Overwatch because I don't...the generous part I mean of course. On top of all this news, in response to a direct question about the possibility of a documentary being made based on how the game's characters are made, Kaplan replied: "We have something for you!". This is incredibly exciting because Overwatch's heroes are definitely the most interesting, rich and detailed characters out of any hero-shooter or even first person shooter in general for that matter. 

If you would like to read over the full Reddit AMA, click here!

Also, check out Overwatch's newest hero activating next week!