Contrary to popular belief, there are actually some people out there who have received their closed beta invites to Blizzard Entertainment’s highly anticipated team-based shooter, Overwatch, and this week game director Jeff Kaplan took the time to personally respond to one beta player’s long list of suggestions.

Earlier this week, Overwatch forum user Alystair submitted a lengthy post to the Beta Feedback board entitled “Feedback & Memorable experiences (500 games).”

“I know this is a long post and will be impossible to respond to on a point-by-point basis but I’m hopeful a rudimentary response will confirm it’s been looked at,” Alystair said.

Game director Jeff Kaplan provided more than a rudimentary response—he forwarded Alystair’s post to the Overwatch development team and personally addressed several of Alystair’s detailed suggestions.

“Wow, this is some really great feedback,” Kaplan said in response to Alysair’s post. “This is exactly the type of constructive insight we’re looking for. All of the designers are reading this right now.”

Alystair’s suggested improvements

Alystair’s suggestions covered a wide variety of game elements, including level design, game audio, user interface, quality of life improvements, and more.

Here is a small selection of Alystair’s suggestions, along with Kaplan’s responses.

Alystair: “Statistics should be organized by grouping (& columned), not alphabetical. Eg. Medals, K/D/A, … probably best to remake it with some graphic headers.”

Kaplan: “Yes. We agree. And that’s the plan. We had a choice in the last build of whether or not to pull stats because they weren’t finished or put them in ‘Work in Progress’ — we chose the latter.”

Alystair: “Symmetra needs some [quality of life] love for shielding. ‘You’re all shielded’ sfx plays when I’ve only shielded 2 players out of 5 players. The arrows above other players heads should change color depending on if they have a shield or not.”

Kaplan: “The VO line is fixed in an upcoming build. We also have some ideas for UI improvements for Symmetra to help with team-wide shield awareness.”

Alystair: “Would Blizzard be open to community created sprays?”

Kaplan: “Yes. We’re totally open to the idea of community created content. We won’t be able to support this any time soon. Our game is built on brand new technology so it will take some time before we can really consider how to integrate things like community made sprays, maps, skins etc… Philosophically, we love user generated content. It’s just going to be a challenge to enable it.”

You can read Alystair’s full post along with Kaplan’s responses on the Overwatch forum.

Image courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment