Jeff Kaplan Responds to Effect's Letter About One-Trick Players
By Nicholas Barth ·
The star Dallas Fuel DPS player Hyeon "Effect" Hwang received a very articulate response from the fan-favorite game director of Overwatch about one-trick players and their place in the game.
Hyeon "Effect" Hwang is one of the brightest stars in the Overwatch League and is often counted on by the Dallas Fuel to deliver momentum shifting plays. When Effect is not playing in official league matches you can often find him on his Twitch stream playing Overwatch as well. During Effect's stream yesterday, one viewer managed to grab a clip of the popular player pretending to write imaginary letter to Jeff Kaplan. The letter consisted of Effect explaining to Kaplan that he is constantly running into one-trick players and competition for the Damage-Per-Second (DPS) role in his high-level ranked matches.
One-trick players have been a hot topic in the Overwatch community for a long time, as the majority of the community find these kinds of players very irritating, due to their unwillingness to switch off their main character and work with the rest of the team to have a strong team composition. Competition for the DPS role is also a major problem for pro-DPS players who go into ranked play trying to practice, as the DPS role is often taken before they can assume it.
One-trick Torbjorn players are often particularly ill-received by their teammates.
Effect's video found its way onto the Competitive Overwatch subreddit and garnered a large amount of traffic, as many members of the community feel the exact same way as Effect. The team at Blizzard took notice of the popular thread and decided to send in Jeff Kaplan to respond to Effect's concerns.
"Dear Effect,
I love watching you play! You are so incredibly talented. I'm very aware of the frustration you are facing and the issues that you talk about are part of our daily discussions.
"Fixing the 'one-trick issue' is extremely complicated for a lot of different reasons. There is a spirit, freedom and creativity to the game that we are eager to protect. But I also believe that (especially at your level of play) other players can cause a detrimental experience.
I don't have immediate solutions to your problem that don't drastically change the face of Overwatch. But I do want you to know that we care and that we are very engaged in brainstorming solutions.
Changes will not happen fast on this subject. But with that said, we have placed urgency on ourselves to make a change. For example, one thing we are examining now is all of the reasons players do not want to group with each other when they play (and there currently are a lot -- some real and some perceived). I wish there was a world where OW players felt like they could play with who they want. This would be an immediate solve to the problem but we are a long way from achieving such a state.
In any event, please know that I hear your frustration. We'll do our best to make OW better not only for pros like you, but for everyone who faces similar challenges.
All the best,
jeffrey + ow team"
Jeff Kaplan is the public face of the Overwatch team and has become a celebrity among the passionate fanbase.
Source: Business Insider
Kaplan made sure to let Effect know that he and the Overwatch team are very aware of the frustrations that players are facing, especially pro players, but that there is no easy fix to these problems and that any drastic changes could dramatically affect everything we love about Overwatch.
Even though Overwatch is far from being a perfect game, no one can argue that the team working on it is one of the best in the industry when it comes to communicating with their community and letting them know that they are actively looking to improve the game.
While no major fixes are in sight for the issues that Effect focused on in his letter to Jeff Kaplan he can at least rest easy knowing that Jeff is taking the concerns of players like him very seriously.