Blizzard has made an official response to feedback on a series of Widowmaker bugs.
Overwatch player Brokenstyli made an extensive and detailed post on the official Overwatch forums explaining and demonstrating a variety of bugs currently occurring with Widowmaker.
With multiple examples showing off exactly how each bug could manifest, the post offered an incredibly thorough look at the issues affecting one of the game’s most iconic heroes. Overwatch community manager Tom Powers has now responded to the post.
It seems several of the issues should be addressed by the latest update currently on the PTR, which focused primarily on fixing key bugs with a number of heroes. Others
Brokenstyli’s questions that received a response, and Tom Powers’ response itself, can be seen below. Brokenstyli’s examples and additional context for each issue raised can be seen in his original post.
Questions:
Sniping issues
1. Double bullet trail hitreg/netcode misprediction bug
2. Overaggressive occlusion culling, enemy and map “pop-in”
3. Bloom and enemy effects with bloom/red colors significantly reduce Widow’s scope visibility
4. Hitbox Issues
Grappling Hook Issues
8. Grappling Hook auto-aim is a nightmare
9. Grappling Hook just gives up
10. Grappling Hook does not pull up-and-over ledges, it just drops Widow instead
11. Grappling Hook will unituitively slingshot Widow in the wrong direction
13. Grappling Hook animations will very rarely redirect mid-cast
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14. Grappling Hook auto-aims to sliding ledges – what’s the point of autoaiming to the sliding battlements of Eichenwalde, if you can’t stand on them?
15. Point blank Grapple Hooks are supposed to reset the cooldown, they sometimes don’t
Infra-Sight Issues
16. Infra-Sight does not properly give wallhacks in FFA
Other Bugs/Issues
17. Parented Floating Reload Canister Bug
18. Audio Bugs
19. POTG/replay camera does not match raw inputs performed live, making unnatural snapping to heads in the replay (leading to hack-cusations and sometimes misfiled reports)
Standing on Destructible Railings
20. Despite Widow’s grappling hook often pulling a player directly to them, railings are hugely inconsistent as standable platforms for Widow to jump on.
Miscellaneous
21. It’s hard to identify which ledges are able to be stood on, because there’s no concrete visual pattern consistency that tells you which ledges ARE able to be stood on
22. Collision doesn’t match art assets
23. Map design discourages sightlines with vision of spawn doors, prevent places from being stood on (that may or may not have a strong sightline), and doesn’t convey clearly what objects are allowed to be stood on. Except sometimes it does the exact opposite, and then we get a “Fixed a bug that allowed Widowmaker to reach unintended locations with Grappling Hook” in the patch notes.
Response:
Hi brokenstyli and heroes!
Thank you so much for making this post outlining detailed examples and descriptions of the bugs you’ve identified. We appreciate your passion and support!
In a continued effort to be more transparent about which interactions are or aren’t bugs, alongside which ones are currently higher priorities to fix, one of our developers provided some valuable insight.
Today we’d like to share that with you:
Sniping issues
1. The 1.26 update that recently went live fixes an edge case that could cause the recoil mispredictions to still occur. Please let us know if this still seems to be happening!2. We’re still investigating solutions to this issue that will help mitigate pop-in at lower framerates without further lowering framerates.3. Not a bug, nonetheless we appreciate your insight and feedback!4. Hanzo’s hand shouldn’t be blocking headshots any more and the rest of the hitbox issues should also be resolved.
Grappling Hook issues
8. Unfortunately, auto-aim of grapple isn’t perfect at the moment. However, this is one of the larger tasks that we intend to tackle.9. Most of the clips are simply the grapple failing to connect to a surface before it auto-retracts, which is somewhat exacerbated by either auto-aim failure or due to the player reducing their auto aim sensitivity.10. We’ve reworked this mobility on the current PTR, where pulling up should be more consistent when possible. Additionally, momentum should be better preserved when not.11. This should also be resolved on the latest PTR build.13. This is likely a client misprediction due to a dropped or late packet.14. As noted in point 8, we intend to remedy the auto-aim, which is impacting the animation in instances like these.15. Indeed, this is a bug. The cooldown should be getting reset and it’s on our list to fix.
Infra-Sight Issues
16. These issues should be generally fixed.
Other Bug/Issues
17. This should be fixed in latest PTR build.18. Hit confirm sounds are not 100% reliable, especially during packet loss or enforced rate limiting.19. The split screen videos are interesting! They appear to be synchronized by the red skull kill marker though, which won’t be the same on the client and server. On the client you don’t see it until you’ve confirmed the kill, but on the server the kill happens immediately and you will see the skull right as the headshot happens. Bullet tracers and movement should be synchronized and if the videos are synchronized by that, the view should generally match pretty closely!
Standing on Destructible Railings
20. Standing on railings should be much improved in latest PTR build.
Miscellaneous
21. Not a bug, but we appreciate your feedback!22. Training range is generally lower resolution to reduce performance costs.23. The Ayutthaya issues should be resolved and the feedback is good!
As always, we appreciate the constructive feedback and examples provided. This assists us in identifying and ultimately resolving many of these issues.
Thank you to all the contributors. We salute you.