Quality-of-life additions

Low saturation mode

I've heard from my friends who play Overwatch regularly about suffering from too bright (too saturated) colors. While this may be not true for me, I know some people who were completely turned off playing Overwatch because of the strobing imagery. I believe that's a problem that lowers the number of players by a significant percentage (According to my web research I expect it to be around 2%).

The solution, however, is quite simple in terms of how much time it will take. I suggest implementing a setting that will apply a color filter to desaturate the image. Some people said that they want to be able to turn Overwatch black-and-white but I suppose they will be satisfied enough with just desaturating the picture a bit and even if not, it is rather easy to implement a slider that will set the strength of the filter to the desirable value (as the developers did for brightness).

Comfort advice

As some of the people (mostly newcomers) can experience discomfort while playing Overwatch it is important to show them that the game has the solutions to the problems they have.

Firstly, let's talk about the people who check the settings after they experience that kind of problem. It isn't rare when they simply cannot find the right option or even understand what setting should they tweak. Thus the game should give them advice. That can be done in various ways, but I propose the following one:

1. Add a tab named "Comfort" or something like that (should be self-descriptive);

2. Gather all the settings responsible for playing comfort there and group them by their influence on player experience.

This will help users to quickly navigate to settings needed and advise them what to tweak depending on their problem. As an example, I stopped playing Overwatch when I started to get motion sickness during every match. I simply didn't know that it's a solvable problem and I could get rid of this effect just by adjusting Field of View and mouse sensibility.

I'll cover the problem of people not checking the settings in the next proposal.

Newcomer's post-game survey

To prevent the player from leaving by helping him with his problems and, on the other side, to get an understanding of what turns the newbie players off playing the most, it would be good to implement a post-game survey.

The window with the question "Have you encountered any problems?" will appear to the newcomers after each of their first 5-10 matches:

1. Everything was OK
Thank the player for his response.

2. I wasn't able to play hero well
This should provide the list of the heroes that are recommended for beginners and the links to guides for heroes that the surveyed player played during this match.

3. The enemies were too strong. These answers should be counted to allow developers to monitor the density of smurfs and their impact on the gaming experience.

4. I had troubles with being valuable
Offer to replay the tutorial and provide links to the general guides.

5. I felt physical discomfort during this match
Provide some of the most common problems ("The colors are too bright", "I felt sick", ...) and advise to adjust the corresponding settings after one of the answers is chosen. If the player selects "I have another problem", ask him to describe it and forward the answer to the support service.

6. I lagged
Test the ping and if it's normal, propose adjusting some video settings that aren't set to their minimum values. If there's a problem with the connection, provide a link to a troubleshooting page.

7. My teammate was aggressive towards his allies
Show how to report toxic players and submit a report.

8. I have other problems
Ask what the problem is and forward it to the support service.

The last two surveys should contain the recommendation to contact support service whenever the player will experience some problems.

Minimal rendering for slow computers

Before I bought a new laptop, I had been trying to play on a weak one. After I've set all the video settings to minimal, the gameplay became smooth and enjoyable. But there was a huge problem - my HDD was very slow. That gradually increased the time required to load a map, every second game I was getting kicked because of being AFK before being able to do anything about it. It resulted in me being punished and allies playing without a teammate for a while.

To fix that, I propose to implement an "emergency loading/rendering mode" and load a primitive map which has a smaller filesize and is easier to render but is less pretty and accurate. The game should test the HDD read/write speed while the player is in the menu and if it's too small to allow the map to be loaded and rendered before the game starts, tell the loader to use emergency mode. Displaying a warning to a player about the problems with his HDD and their negative consequences should also be considered.

I think this is an important problem because it prevented me from playing Overwatch despite the gameplay was smooth (so the minimal requirements were met there).