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casualjacobwrites · 18 days ago

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Overwatch Season 15: Thoughts on Perks

(Just something I threw together in a couple of hours.)

Perks: Neat idea in theory, but shouldn't be in the main game.

What are perks and how do they work? If you played the Junkenstein's Lab mode during the Halloween event, you have a general idea of what perks are. They are, essentially, ability enhancements applied to a hero's existing kit. For example, Sombra can choose to gain the ability to hack her allies for 100 healing over two seconds, or Soldier can choose to increase Biotic Field's healing by 100% for critical health allies.

In Junkenstein's Lab you choose ability enhancements at the end of each round of a match; however, how it works in season 15 is very different. At the start of the match you have what is essentially an experience bar under your health bar in the lower left of your screen. Based upon what I saw on streams today by getting eliminations, assists, and/or healing the bar fills up. The rate at which it fills seems a bit inconsistent or at least not very clear (a recurring theme for perks). A player starts at level one, which is just the basic hero kit. At level 2 you get to choose between two "minor" perks, and then if you manage to get to level 3 before the round or the match is over, you are given a choice of two "major" perks.

Rather than waiting for a death or the end of the round, as soon as the bar fills, you can select your perk, which brings me to my first bit of concern around perks: Having to stop in the middle of a match to apply a perk. The entire idea behind perks is to provide players with a potential to turn a fight or an entire match around to their advantage. This means you will want to apply that perk as soon as possible, but that might not be as simple as it sounds. Today I watched a streamer pause to try and read her perks only for a Winston to jump on her and kill her while she tried to pick between the two.

I understand that, eventually, players will memorize and be able to use muscle memory to select their desired perks. What's messy and clunky now will be a quick one-second decision in a few days or weeks after the start of the season. Yet, for new players or for players who are on a hero they're unfamiliar with, finding a few precious seconds during a match to decide on a perk will be a pain point.

Leaving aside the awkwardness of choosing amid the chaos of your typical round of Push, the other issue as that for many of the perks, the choice is a no-brainer. When it comes to her Major Perks, Juno has to choose between being able to do critical damage (AKA headshots), something her gun is incapable of doing normally, or getting a reset to her Double Jump anytime she activates her Glide Boots. Regardless of your feelings on supports behaving as DPS (that's a whole other essay I could write), even the most stereotypical "healbot" support player is going to choose the ability to headshot over the Double Jump. It's simply too good to pass up the opportunity to increase your lethality and thus your odds of surviving a one-on-one duel when that Genji or Moira inevitably tries to target your backline.

When I look at perks, I think of the old Talent Trees in World of Warcraft. On the surface, each tree was supposed to make a class feel unique and give players the option of flexible play. In practice, however, if you wanted to do the most damage or have the most effective healing, there were talents you simply had to take no matter what you preferred or liked. That was just the way the math worked out and if you wanted to raid (or at least be good at raiding), you had to have the same build as every other Beast Master Hunter or Demonic Warlock. Perks in Overwatch are going to suffer in the same way. We have an illusion of individual player choice, but ultimately there's going to be choices that will offer better benefits and make them a must-choose for every single match no matter what. I guarantee before season 15 starts I'm going to see videos on YouTube and TikTok clips telling players what perks are the best to pick for each hero.

Of course, it would be helpful if you know which perks do what and that…isn't exactly very clear for some of them. While Juno's aforementioned headshot or Double Jump reset choices are straightforward, other perks' descriptions are vague at best and outright confusing at worst. One of Genji's Major Perks is called Blade Twisting. Its description reads as thus: "Swift Strike deals 25 additional damage over time when used shortly after an Elimination." My first question upon reading this was what does it mean by shortly after an Elimination? Three seconds? Five seconds? Ten? Twenty? What is my window for applying that damage over time?

Looking over at Genji's brother, Hanzo, we have Sonic Disruptor. "Sonic Arrow hacks nearby health packs for 12 seconds." This is an interesting thing that could be used in very niche situations (and I stress very), but what counts as "nearby"? Is it the same range as Sonic Arrow, or does it extend a bit further than that? Furthermore, could it override a health pack hacked by Sombra, or can Sombra override his hack? (Other food for thought: How many of you can recall where every health pack is on every map that would make this perk even remotely worth taking? Do you know how many players I see in my Silver and Gold matches ignore health packs entirely?) Meanwhile his other minor perk basically turns Storm Arrow into a very, very tuned-down version of his old Scatter Shot. (Again, we have a situation where there's a very obvious choice to choose.)

Cassidy's Quick Draw Minor Perk is just confusing to read. "Fan the Hammer shots are individually controlled and can crit for 50% more damage." I do understand the sentence, but in my head I'm trying to work out how that's going to feel to play. I assume it means I have to press my right click and the gun will behave like my primary fire except do more damage on a critical hit. What I don't know is whether or not I'll have a limited time in which I can do it, or if it's just constantly available with zero cooldown. If it's the latter, then that feels incredibly broken.

And that's the biggest issue overall: Balance. To put it bluntly: How the fuck can you balance all of this? I'm no game developer, but I feel pretty confident in saying the answer is that you don't or that you can't. Some of these perks are going to make heroes broken. Add to it that more talented players are going to earn their perks far faster when against less talented players, and that's going to mean more one-sided matches. Quite simply, it's going to lead to many unfun moments where you feel humiliated and stomped. Then you consider that some of the heroes' perks are simply underwhelming (pour one out for Mercy) or so niche they may as well not be there at all, and that foretells a giant mess with a good deal of hotfixes and tweaks made over the entire season. In a worst-case scenario the entire system will have to be overhauled.

I appreciate what the dev team is trying to do here, and I do see that some of this is probably leftovers from what we were promised when Overwatch 2 was originally announced. They can't give us that, but they can offer this to us. Despite the fact I've spent the past however many words pointing out the issues, I'm still willing to give this a shot. I've played Overwatch since the beginning and I don't see myself leaving it anytime soon. Yet, I can't deny that I'm feeling apprehensive about Season 15's start and what's to come. Of course, I could be completely wrong and things won't be as bad as I worry they will be. It wouldn't be the first time in my life I panicked over changes that turned out fine.

I suppose I'll just have to play the game to find out for myself.

#overwatch 2 #overwatch 2 season 15 #I'm just some dude who likes the game

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casualjacobwrites · 2 months ago

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SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using

his dyslexia;

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there.

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain;

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again.

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ��Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice.

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later:

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether.

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them.

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that.

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation.

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

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