News Summary

• Some features have already been added or tweaked to make teamwork easier, such as the ping system or the "Spawn Together" system, which adjusts repswn times to make players respawn together more regularly..
• Season nine is expected to launch in late February, but to help the design team introduces and evaluate changes faster, they're also launching new "Quickplay: Hacked" events which change the rules of the game in quickplay queues..
• The latter might be adjusted to make it more prominent in season nine, alongside other potential new features including "Party Frames", which would show onscreen health indicators for teammates, and revisions to the scoreboard..
• Mercy meOverwatch 2 is going to receive some changes designed to make teamwork easier, and to make bad teamwork less frustrating..
• The latter is more interesting, because one of Blizzard's proposed solution is giving Tank and Damage heroes "a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive", which would make them less reliant on Support players to heal everyone..
• "It’s our hope that staying closer to your teammates and having more information on what they're doing will help encourage team play, but what happens when your team is not working well together?.