Jeff Kaplan Reveals Blizzard is Still Actively Working on Overwatch’s “Looking for Group” Based on Feedback
Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has commented on the player response to the new Looking for Group feature.
The Looking for Group feature went live with the game’s most recent patch, which also featured the new endorsements system and the Symmetra rework.
Looking for Group allows players to put together teams of people, either by starting their own group or searching for available groups, based on their own goals and preferences.
As a result, it also effectively functions as a substitute “role queue” – a feature players have been requesting for a long time – by enabling group leaders to build a group with a particular role distribution and even force players to stick to those roles.
It seems Blizzard is very much open to further adjustments to the system, however, with some changes even headed to the PTR already.
“We’re really happy that you’re enjoying the feature. Our feature team worked extremely hard on this patch and poured their hearts into it.
We’re actively taking feedback and also have a bunch of improvements coming for the system (some of these will even be on the PTR very soon). Let us know if you there are areas of confusion or if there are changes you’d like to see.”
In response to a player stating that it didn’t seem that there were many players using the feature, Kaplan also responded with some numbers.
“We’re currently filling 140~ groups a minute.
Keep in mind, the system does not show all groups all the time. It won’t show groups that are full and now queued. It also won’t show you groups outside of your skill range or latency threshold.”
Looking for Group is just one element of what has been a hugely productive month for the Overwatch team, with several heroes receiving reworks, major new features being rolled out, and a brand-new hero on the PTR right now.
