Overwatch Community: Meet the Community Site: Part I - Overwatch Community

A week ago, we announced Overwatch to the world. Now let's admit it, the news post was pretty dense, full of text, imagery, a video and a bunch of subtle references. One would think that in all that, I would have had enough room to mention everything of importance. Wrong, as there's still plenty to tell you.

For example, you might be wondering who I am, where I come from and what role I play on the Overwatch development team. I would love to tell you, but I can't. It is forbidden. Instead, I want to share a very important piece of information I had barely mentioned in the announcement: the two main purposes of this community site.

I will assume that most of you reading this blog have already stumbled into our message board. You may have also noticed some of the other accessible sections, like our Links directory and the Bug Tracker. The areas you don't yet have access to include the homepage, Resources, Galleries and Downloads.

So how does this all come together and what is the real purpose of this site?


1. Play a role in Overwatch's development:

Each and every member of our community is an important part of our development team. Every discussion on our forums, every suggestion and idea, every bug report and all the criticism you will throw our way are extremely valuable at helping us improve Overwatch. For that reason, we have dedicated a lot of resources and put in a ton of effort to make it as easy as possible for you to play your part.

Forums
Our community message board is a great place to discuss every aspect of Overwatch, from implemented features to your own ideas and suggestions. As you've probably already noticed, our developers keep a close eye on it, taking part in the discussions as much as possible.

Bug Tracker
We all hate bugs (and if you don't, well.. you're weird). They ruin the experience, kill the fun and just frustrate the heck out of us. There's only one thing we hate more than bugs: bugs that don't get squashed. Our hatred for bugs is so intense that we've built our entire development infrastructure around QA (short for Quality Assurance). In the past year, our team has reported over 300 bugs to our internal tracker, ensuring a release with as few bugs as possible:
Even with all the effort we've put in, some of those little vermin might have slipped through the cracks, and we'll need your help to find them. We'll have a bug reporting guide ready for you by next week's release.

Votebox
I predict this will be one of our most popular community site features and I'll be dedicating an entire blog post to it soon. In the meantime, feel free to speculate!


2. Contribute and help Overwatch grow:

If working on Sven Co-op has taught me anything, it's that gamers love to create custom content. A small wall texture here, a stormtrooper model there... or entire map series based on weird looking characters or a completely black & white environment.

Knowing the immense potential of the FPS/RTS-type gameplay that Overwatch will feature, we want to encourage the growth of our own community of content creators. As such, we are designing Overwatch to be as customizable as possible, from allowing simple modifications like tweaking parameters in a map's .cfg file to implementing brand new game modes written in Python or Lua, all while keeping it very easy for players to activate and deactivate any of these addons.

Creating this content won't be a whole lot of fun if you have no one to help you and no one to share it with, so the community site itself has also been designed to help you create, showcase and distribute your work.

Collaboration
Playing as a group of rebels in Overwatch doesn't need to be your only co-op experience. Every gaming community is full of experts, programmers, level designers and artists. Our resources section and wiki allow you to contribute your own tutorials and guides and cooperate in the creation of new content.

Portals
As a content creator, you will have access to your own portal (not to be confused with Aperture Science's hole-in-a-wall), a web page which serves as a hub for your creations. From that page, the community will find information about the assets you've created (news, blogs and articles), related media (videos, screenshots), two big download links (to download via the site or through Desura) as well as your own subforums, bug tracker and other little goodies.

Front-Page
We love custom content and believe it's a sin to keep it hidden in a subforum in some dungeon three worlds away. We will be proud to showcase some of your best works on our front-page, giving it the attention it deserves. You can also expect tons of contests and competitions that are sure to pique your interest.


That's it for this first blog. You can expect more of these to be posted frequently enough. Since I've mentioned quite a few neat little things in this post, is there anything you'd like to hear more about?