Today’s Winter Wonderland patch brings more than skins and snowballs

Overwatch fans are currently over the moon with the rich variety of skins available for the winter holidays, along with discounted cosmetics from last year and two seasonal game modes to experiment with. However, the discerning Overwatch player may be interested to know that today’s patch contained more than just holiday goodies. In fact, we got three new things that will seriously improve our game experience well past the event’s end in January.

First of all, you can now mark all unseen cosmetics as seen with just one button. Instead of having to dig through each hero’s menu to manually acknowledge each new cosmetic, or examine each item after they come out of a loot box, you can just hit one handy “Mark All As Seen” button. It’s a small change, but boy howdy, is it a welcome one.

Blizzard Entertainment

Secondly, we’re seeing further refinements to the player report system.

Player Warning Updates

Several changes have been made to the player report system.

Players being reported will receive an in-game message letting them know that they have been reported, along with a warning concerning continued negative behavior. Ongoing misconduct will result in silence, suspension, or a permanent ban, depending on the severity of the infraction (in severe cases, players may receive their punishment before receiving the initial in-game message).

Players who report someone for poor behavior, resulting in a disciplinary action, will now be notified with an in-game message when the issue has been resolved. We take every report seriously, along with your feedback. Thank you for your patience as we continue to fine tune these systems.

In short, players who misbehave should be getting a warning before they’re hit with the banhammer, hopefully giving them a chance to reform. Meanwhile, if you successfully report someone, you’ll get a message letting you know that someone at Blizzard listened and lay down some justice. These are small changes, but they help enforce the idea that reports are important and helpful.

Blizzard Entertainment

Finally, we got a ton of bug fixes. Some of these are visual and trivial, like making sure characters’ eyelashes or rifle magazine don’t detach during Play of the Game intros or animations. Others are much more serious. Doomfist, Mercy, and Moira all got some pretty serious bug fixes, with more tweaks to come. These are technically buffs, but they’re not blatant changes. In the coming weeks, we can expect more of these tweaks, especially for Doomfist. We can also expect bug fixes to be listed in patch notes and PTR records after player feedback.

The full patch notes can be found on Blizzard’s forums.