Overwatch’s Winter Wonderland 2020 event has just gone live on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch bringing in some new skins, emotes and the Priority Pass system for role queue.
The Priority Pass system has been tested on the PTR for some time, but should finally give players a good opportunity to queue as DPS without the long wait times.
Basically, by queuing as one of the most requested role with the “flex” option, players can earn passes that decrease the time one spends looking for a high-demand role, which is usually DPS.
By winning matches, players will earn more passes than they would for a loss. However, the passes cannot be used when players are queuing as a group of five or more.
Since its introduction, role queue was seen as a bit of a necessary evil by the community. While it made matches more balanced with two tanks, two DPS and two supports, it made damage queue times extremely long.
Hopefully, the introduction of the Priority Pass finally fixes these problems and makes finding games much easier for everyone. Especially with Overwatch 2 still in development.
Additionally, there are some changes to the Replay Viewer that should make reviewing your own or someone else’s gameplay easier with even more control options.
Finally, footsteps should now be easier to hear, which should please players who found the game’s audio to be lacking in recent months.
Hopefully, the devs can keep up the bug fixes and the game can improve going into the new year.
Full patch notes:
WINTER WONDERLAND 2020
Overwatch Winter Wonderland is back. Unwrap new cosmetics, earn weekly rewards, and freeze your foes in the new 4v4 holiday brawl, Freezethaw Elimination!
Celebrate the season with Winter Loot Boxes. Unlock festive new seasonal items—including legendary skins like Conductor Reinhardt, Ice Empress Moira, and Penguin Mei—along with wintery items from previous years. Plus, play the returning Snowball Deathmatch, Yeti Hunter, and Snowball Offensive holiday brawls!
Learn more about Winter Wonderland on PlayOverwatch.com.
GENERAL UPDATES
New Feature: Priority Pass
In an effort to help address the population imbalance between Tank, Support, and Damage roles, and the longer queue times that Damage players often encounter due to this imbalance, we’re introducing the new Priority Pass feature. Players can earn Priority Passes by choosing Flex when they queue, with more passes earned for wins than for losses. Use a Priority Pass to decrease queue time for a role currently experiencing higher traffic.
Priority Passes may not be used when playing a group of 5 or more. Since we try to pair large parties against other large parties, and parties this large already contain a good balance of roles, we do not anticipate that using a Priority Pass would actually reduce queue times. As such, we don’t want players to waste their passes if this wouldn’t have a noticeable effect towards the feature’s goal.
Feature Update: Replay Viewer Custom Spectator Options
We have added a new options menu to the Replay Viewer, accessible via the Media Controls. Our goal is to give our players more control over how the Replay Viewer looks and behaves in order to navigate replays more easily, as well as make awesome content! These additional settings include the ability to independently toggle UI elements, modify player outline strength, disable objective capture sounds, and adjust the spectator camera behavior. We’ve also added 0.75x and 1.75x playback speeds to give you finer control.
New Options:
- Team 1 Banner
- Team 1 Heroes
- Team 2 Banner
- Team 2 Heroes
- Status Messages
- Playback Indicators
- Game Mode Specific HUD
- Kill Feed
- Player Names
- Player Health Bars
- Player Outline Strength
- First-Person Health
- First-Person Ultimate Meter
- First-Person Ability and Weapon Info
- First-Person Crosshair
- First-Person Hero HUD
- First-Person Activity Feed
- Objective Capture Sounds
- Time Skip Interval Length
- FOV Change Per Zoom
- FOV Interpolation Rate
- Maximum Free Camera FOV
General
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Mix of game sounds has been adjusted to give third person footsteps more prominence
WORKSHOP UPDATES
New Workshop Features
- [PC-Only] Inspector Log File
Developer Comments: When the setting Enable Workshop Inspector Log File [PC-ONLY] is enabled, any log entries written to the Inspector Log will be written out to a local file on disk. When the custom game ends (or if you disconnect), the current log file will close. A new log file will be opened each time you are in a new custom game that writes out a log line via Log To Inspector.
New Workshop Values
- String Slice
BUG FIXES
General
- Fixed a bug that caused the health display for heroes with a small amount of damage to appear at full health
- Fixed a bug that caused the “Default to Friends” option on the competitive leaderboards to not persist between game sessions
- Fixed a bug that caused the “Leave as Group” option while leaving games to not persist between game sessions
- Fixed a bug with Role Queue Beta season stats displaying the same ratings for all roles
- Fixed a bug that allowed some damage-over-time abilities to charge certain heroes’ ultimate abilities during the duration of their activated ultimate ability
- Fixed a bug that caused pain exertion sounds to not trigger properly
Maps
Eichenwalde
- Fixed a bug that caused broken Castle doors to disappear from the game client after a player respawn
Ilios
- Fixed a bug that allowed players to land on an unintended map location
Temple of Anubis
- Fixed a bug that caused the first capture point to have a higher capture point volume than intended
Heroes
Baptiste
- Fixed a bug that resulted in his left forearm animating incorrectly during his Scout emote
D.Va
- Fixed a bug that would allow D.Va to use Call Mech immediately after ejecting from her mech in rare conditions
Echo
- Fixed a bug that caused her hero portrait to reflect a cloned unit during end of round flows of PvE game modes
- Fixed a bug that would cause her to become stuck in the previous spawn point
Sigma
- Fixed a bug with his Medal victory pose that would cause him to clip into allies during specific victory lineups
Sombra
- Fixed a bug with Sombra’s hair animation not appearing correctly during her “Hacked” victory pose
Widowmaker
- Fixed a bug that caused her to spawn with an abnormal amount of health
Wrecking Ball
- Fixed a bug that caused the length of his grapple ability to be shorter than normal
- Fixed a bug that caused the camera to appear beneath the ground if Wrecking Ball shifts into ball mode while his model is still loading
