I had a theory that Overwatch had a ‘loser buff’ for teams getting stomped horribly.  It started out when I noticed that if my team, OR the enemy team was absolutely trouncing the other team from 0% to 99%, SOMEHOW magically the other side got good, pushed Overtime, and would flip control.  You could also place a bet that on payload maps you’d hear “OVERTIME!” ALL THE TIME even if you had been blowing the other team apart the entire duration, until they had a few seconds left where they would magically start pushing it at astonishing speeds.

In one major example, my team was defending the payload on Hollywood so hard, the other team barely moved the car outside of the initial turn.  Then a few of us died and BOOM, they had pushed the payload from the door area, all the way down the road, around the turn, and to the second point, in like 3 seconds. What what?

As often as it happened I found it to be quite unlikely it was happening unassisted.  There are just no tools to track things in Overwatch, no Recount damage logs, character stats, rez timers.  I was taking a wild guess that the game was detecting one side was sorely outmatched and then giving them a helpful shove but had no way of really proving it.  I was hypothesizing that is was a combination of slight adjustments that would be nearly impossible to prove.

Some thoughts were, the “good” team got longer rez timers, slightly less damage.  Or, the “bad” team got faster movement, quicker spawn, faster charging ults, better armor/took less damage, faster payload movement,  etc.  I had some examples I was going to pore over after streaming.

However the Doomfist patch dropped and… this really doesn’t happen any more.  If we’re dominating hard on Numbani, we continue to dominate and easily win.  I keep almost flinching waiting for an “Overtime!!” call that never happens.  We hit 99% and WIN, no damn overtime.

Then I saw this little bad-boy in the August 1, 2017 patch notes:

https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/game/patch-notes/pc/

• Adjusted the respawn timing to limit defensive stalling strategies when the offensive team has a clear advantage and plays aggressively

THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT.  It’s written generically but I’m sure that was it.  I also felt like a single player had way too much weight on a point.  If 6 people were standing around a payload, and one damned enemy Lucio or Tracer were bebopping around the payload, THAT SHOULDN’T COUNT AS OVERTIME or a stall.

At any rate, it feels more balanced now.  Like the time Guild and I simply walked through the entire enemy team on Volskaya to take point A, then pushed to B and took it near instantly (under 2 minutes).  The other team should be allowed to suck butt unassisted.