Saturday, August 13, 2016

High bandwidth support for Overwatch coming right now


There's a new update on the way that's going to set Overwatch's default tick rate to 63Hz. Tick rate is the frequency at which the game updates and receives updates from the server. This has been a very troubling issue in the Overwatch community. The game's normal rate is 21Hz-that's 21 updates per second, which some people believe is too slow for a competitive shooter. In June, Blizzard added a high bandwidth option to custom games that enabled play at 60Hz instead, and it went over so well that they're now going to add it to all games in both Quick Play and Competitive modes.

The high bandwidth option in Overwatch increases the tick rate from 21Hz to 63Hz. Since there are players with potato internet there's tech that will automatically scale down your update rate if your connection can't keep up. Because high bandwidth servers will increase bandwidth consumption, they're working on an option to self-limit your update rate in a future patch. This is what Manager Liyrra explained on Battle.net.

This isn't going to change your life and even necessarily Overwatch. Most complaints about the tick rate are rooted in latency problems. What was referred to as lag when gamers were shooting each other over phone lines. For me it was more about pvping people in Diablo 2 with my elemental druid over phone lines. Ah, those were the days.

“I think players have latched onto server tick rate as being the reason that certain things happen. One of the things that players are upset about is that if they get shot, where they perceive they were behind a wall, that this is a problem with server tick rate,” he said. “Certainly there are contributions that could happen with both the server and the client update rates that could cause something like that to happen, but usually, in most cases, you're talking about latency.” (Jeff Kaplan, Lead Game Designer at Blizzard)

The increased rate will help the game feel more responsive. High bandwidth support is already being put out now but the process might take a while to be completed in all regions.

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