Unlabelled Overwatch - RES & You: How to filter content on /r/Overwatch

5/15/2017 09:58:00 am
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Overwatch - RES & You: How to filter content on /r/Overwatch

RES & You: How to filter content on /r/Overwatch

Posted: 14 May 2017 09:51 AM PDT

Intro

This post serves as introduction to the (apparently not so famous) Reddit Enhancement Suite (primarily its filtering function), the /r/Overwatch filtering system and what options mobile users have. While we do not know what will happen (neither do we know when it happens) once reddit gets rid of the subreddit CSS functionality this post should remain effective until then (Update: the admins decided to leave CSS up and running in parallel to their new solution). Depending on how a possible solution might look, it might be necessary to change how our filtering works or remove/alter some of its functionality. At the end of each chapter, there'll be a tldr if you're too lazy to skim the text :)

Reddit Enhancement Suite

Before I go into detail about our filtering system and all of the possibilities reddit offers, I'd like to give a small introduction to the addon Reddit Enhancement Suite (commonly abbreviated as RES) which enhances the reddit experience in multiple ways. While RES is an obvious term for a regular redditor and it's rather widespread, we were honestly really surprised about the survey result and RES: Only slightly above a third of you (36.7%) actually use RES, while a fifth (19.7%) decided not to use it despite knowing about it. That leaves an impressive number of people that don't even know what RES is: almost half of you guys have no idea what it is or what it does (43.5%).

RES is available on all major current browsers for free and regularly updated by an active community and the developers. In addition, it has an extensive FAQ and tutorials and its installation is just as easy as any other Chrome addon and after installing it you're greeted with a small tutorial and other tips and tricks. Here I'll show you a small selection of its features:

  • Comment Navigator (Provides a comment navigation tool to easily find comments by OP, mod, etc.)
  • New Comment Count (Shows how many new comments there are since your last visit.)
  • Save Comments (Allows you to save comments locally, to easily view them in the future!)
  • filteReddit (Filter out NSFW content, or links by keyword, domain (use User Tagger to ignore by user) or subreddit (for /r/all).)
  • betteReddit (Adds a number of interface enhancements to Reddit, such as a Subreddit manager, "full comments" links, and more.)
  • Inline Image Viewer (Opens images inline in your browser with the click of a button.)
  • Keyboard Navigation (Upvote, downvote, hide posts and most other major reddit actions using only the keyboard. Fully remappable!)
  • ... and many more

Obviously, the most relevant for this guide will be the filteReddit functionality, which supports - despite not explicitly mentioning it here - filtering submissions by flair in each subreddit.

Since it's free and takes no effort at all to install (and uninstall), we heavily recommend the usage of RES, whether you want to use the filter functionality or not.

tl;dr: Install RES, it's great

/r/Overwatch's filter system

When we decided to introduce filters to /r/Overwatch, we did not want to go with the simple filter system that uses reddit's search functionality to filter out everything except a single flair (we'll come to that later in more detail), but we wanted to let the users pick and choose what they want to see and what they don't want to see in any combination instead. Thankfully, /u/turikk came up with a neat solution that you can see now: On the right hand side in the side bar you can see a part where it says "Subreddit Filters" and under it all of our currently available filter categories: Highlights, eSports, Console, Fan Content, Humor and News & Discussion.

If you click one of them, you will be forwarded to a view (subdomain) of the subreddit, which will hide submissions with the flair that you've clicked on (i.e. if you click "Humor" on the side bar flairs, it will forward you to the subdomain ow-61 which our CSS translates to "the subreddit without the humor flair" (for more details of that magic, feel free to visit our Subreddit Documentation which explains this system in detail)). Other than the submissions with the selected flair gone, you will also notice that at the top of the subreddit a new bar appeared, being called and showing the currently "Active Filters". The little eye icons next to the flair indicate whether you currently see the flair (regular eye) or whether it's hidden from your view (crossed out eye). If you hover and click with your mouse over the flairs in the active filter bar, you can freely pick and choose if you want to add or remove additional filters.

While this system is very powerful and gives our users a lot of freedom, it grows exponentially which each new flair because each needs more CSS than before, for all the combinations of flairs that are now possible (i.e. if you add a 7th flair, you get double the amount of combinations, basically doubling the CSS needs for a single additional flair). Sadly, this limits the amount of filters we can have. After the CSS limit has been extended a while ago, we could add more character-limit-wise, but the new limit would be reached pretty quickly again and we'd like to avoid to juggle with very limited CSS space again as we did before the limit was extended. Also, we think 6 flairs is a good and non-confusing number of flairs (especially for Hearthstone users 😉), and we'd rather fix existing issues with the flairs with other means than throwing more flairs at the users.

Another downside is that it requires you to be on the specific subdomain of the flairs you want to be filtered. This means you either have to re-activate the flairs each time when you visit our sub in a new session, or you need to alter your bookmarks / links to include the subdomain immediately.

tl;dr: In the side bar you can click flairs and mix and match them to decide what you see and what you don't want to see. It has some downsides.

Reddit's filtering with the search

If you decide you only want to see a single flair anyway, reddit supports a filtering by flair via the reddit search. If you just search for "flair:Highlight", you can see only submissions that have this flair. On top of that, you can use other various parameters and dropdowns provided by reddit to further limit your results (i.e. by age). To make it a bit clearer, here's an example with all posts from Overwatch with the word "News" in the flair (News & Discussion) from within the last 24 hours and sorted by top: https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/search?q=flair%3ANews&sort=top&restrict_sr=on&t=day

Of course, there's only so many things that you can configure in the search and combined with the fact that you can only filter for one flair, its use is kind of limited. For some it might work, though, and it does not require our subreddit specific filters that don't work without the CSS!

tl;dr: You can use reddit's search to filter for one flair.

Use RES to filter by flair

When going through some of RES' features I quickly broached the topic of filtering by flair with it. You can do so by going in the RES Settings Dashboard, search for 'flair' and then set it up in the filtereddit module. And because a picture is worth a thousand words, I've recorded a clip for you to watch on how to do it.

This setting is saved across sessions and you don't have to set it up each time you go on reddit again.

tl;dr: RES can filter by flair, too!

Filtering on mobile

So far, all is good and fine as long as you browse the Desktop version of our subreddit. But around a third of you (35.8%) said, that they surf the sub on mobile at least 'a couple of times a week' or more. Well, I've got good news for some of you ...which sadly also implies some not so good news for the other bunch of you.

Let's start with some of the bad news: Reddit's official app, as well as accessing the website directly via the browser on mobile, is a very limited experience. A lot of stuff is not working or just plain missing. And one of them is a proper filter functionality. Of course, our fancy CSS filters don't work with it either. Thankfully, there are lot of talented programmers out there, who have the dedication and time to build apps for us to use, that bring all these functions and features back! Too bad there's a second part to the bad news: I could not find any iOS apps, that offer a filter functionality, so the most part here only applies to Android users. Sorry for that, Apple folks! Maybe someone knows an app that actually supports it. If so, feel free to share it in the comments and I'll add it to the guide.

Android apps

Obviously, there's a myriad of reddit apps for Android and I've tested a handful popular ones, so this is by no means a complete list of all good Android reddit apps that support filtering! In my experience, the preference of which app is the best for someone is highly subjective, everyone likes different things for different reasons. The best way to find out which one is for you, is to simply download them from the Play Store and just give them a try for a day or two. You'll quickly have favorites!

Here's a list of the apps that I've tested and tried to get filtering working. If you click on them, you'll see a small gif clip that shows you on how to set up the filtering to hide the flairs you dont want to see. I also list the ones that I know are popular, but do not support filtering.

tl;dr: There are more than a few Android apps that can filter by flair. Click one above to see how to set it up. Sorry iOS, nothing for you :(

Using the reddit search again

Since the search is built into reddit, it also works on mobile. You can just include 'flair:<flairname>' in the search to limit the results to this specific flair, and then set up the time and sorting you prefer. Of course this also comes with the downsides mentioned before (only a single flair, no proper 'Hot' sorting). This is also something that works on iOS.

tl;dr: reddit search filtering works on mobile, too!

Feedback and ideas

As you can see, we're trying our best to provide you with the best filter functionality that reddit has to offer. There's only so much we can do, and we're not willing to make high effort changes to our current system as long as there is no feature list and/or timeline of reddit's alternative to subreddit CSS. That does not mean that we're lazy and doing nothing. We're still and always will be open to feedback, also in regards to flairs (a good way to give us feedback is either here in this thread, sending us a modmail or head over to /r/OverwatchMeta and discuss all kinds of Meta topics of this subreddit).

To give you an idea what changes to the flairs we're still discussing and might consider in the near future, I'll give you a list with a short explanation for each. Please remember that those ideas are highly experimental and not decided and / or final!! I know many of you will ignore this and still rant or not even read it, but please be aware of this when reading the following list.

Putting a 'only flair X' button somewhere that utilizes the search functionality

We're considering adding a link to "Only flair X" that leads you to the reddit search filtering. It is not clear where it would be placed, since it would primarily help mobile users, but they can't properly use the side bar. This would at least ensure a basic level of filtering, even if you don't use any apps or anything. Once we found a good spot for this, it would be fairly easy to integrate.

Replace the 'Console' flair with 'Serious'

Many of you might be familar with the [Serious] tag that other big subreddits like /r/askreddit support. It is meant for more serious discussions where low effort/meme answers have no place and moderation is stricter. Since we have our flairs, we don't want users to tag their flaired submissions essentially a second time with square brackets, though. The flair that's used the least by far is the 'Console' tag. One thing we're considering - for the sake of a better and healthier discussion culture on the subreddit - is to replace it with a 'Serious' tag. First, we need to find a solution for the hostility towards Console users on /r/Overwatch and making sure they can still talk with each other about their platforms without them feeling neglected (if we wouldn't care for them, after all, the Console tag would've been replaced by another one a long time ago). Without solutions to this problem, the replacement will not happen and we don't want to tell our console user base to GTFO.

Rename 'Humor' to 'Fluff' or something similar to give grey zone submissions a home

Not all things in Humor are always plain humor, sometimes they overlap with other categories but are not quite high effort enough to completely fit in there. We think a more accurate name for the Humor tag would be 'Fluff' or something along those lines. This way it's more of a catch-all flair that would be a home for some of the submissions that don't really fit anywhere and are therefore misplaced in other flair categories, where users don't necessarily want to see them. We still have to consider if there are downsides and what they might be and if 'Fluff' is the proper term for it.

Changing the default flair to something else than 'News & Discussion'

Currently, all new submissions get assigned all kinds of flairs, depending on some trigger words we've set up in Automod. Of course, this does not work flawlessly. If our rules are not able to identify which flair fits the submission the best, it is automatically assigned the 'News & Discussion' flair. Since this is currently the most "serious" flair, it might not be the proper choice for it. Once, for example, 'Humor' is renamed to 'Fluff', it would be an appropriate default home for all new submissions. This way people would need to flair their submissions specifically to 'News & Discussion', otherwise it would not appear there.

tl;dr: We're toying around with some ideas that might be scraped or heavily changed!

Final words

Our flairs are just a tiny fraction of our subreddit, yet you can see how much time and effort we spend on them. We don't claim that our ideas and how we end up realizing them are always perfect and we hope you see that we always try our best to give you, the users, the best experience on this subreddit. If you're even too lazy for the tldrs between the text, here are the key messages:

  • Get RES
  • Use filters to remove things you don't like instead of talking them down
  • If you're on Android, get one of the available / popular apps
  • If you submit to /r/Overwatch, please set the proper flair on your submission
  • We're always open for feedback

- /r/Overwatch mods

submitted by /u/zonq
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Ya'll been using Widowmaker the wrong way

Posted: 14 May 2017 11:29 AM PDT

A well-timed jump, and a bullet-proof sign...

Posted: 14 May 2017 03:59 PM PDT

Top500 Genji teaching how to kill a Pharah

Posted: 14 May 2017 04:25 PM PDT

Training with holograms instead of robots.

Posted: 14 May 2017 08:01 AM PDT

Poorly done concept idea.

So, like most of us, i love the training bots for what they are, funny characters that you can shoot while testing hero changes or strats.

But we can't really do proper practice with them since their hitboxes are so big, giving us false expectations of what to expect on the battlefield.

A simple solution would be to just add normal bots with normal hitboxes! In the form of holograms!

Besides, you could have even more posibilities than before!

Soldier 76 running in a straigth line to practice tracking.

Widowmaker standing far away to practice headshots.

Pharah hovering mid air to practice air shots.

This is just my opinion on what i would like to see if the training area ever gets an overhaul.

[Btw, the bots should definitely stay on the basic training section, the one where you learn how to play with Soldier 76]

submitted by /u/Ultimatum227
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Reasons why the Healer hasn't healed you

Posted: 14 May 2017 03:06 AM PDT

I found this on r/ffxiv and while it's (FFXIV) an MMO I thought healers here would enjoy seeing this, as some of these are definitely going through my head when I'm playing Mercy

submitted by /u/Danhulud
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Suggestion: When Lucio dies, his AoE ring should disappear.

Posted: 14 May 2017 11:10 AM PDT

It's happened a few too many times that I've been given a spur of immediately dashed hope to find that the ring I'm clambering towards when in danger, a ring that indicates a safeness, a friend's presence, rejuvenation — belongs to a corpse.

Edit: So it turns out this is a bug, and that the the patch notes for the last PTR — https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20722025 confirm or at least heavily imply that this will be fixed when the PTR changes go to the live version. My apologies if this issue has been brought up numerous times beforehand. Admittedly, with some of the intentional design oversights Blizzard have in the game, I don't think it's too remiss to have assumed this was just a bad design choice.

submitted by /u/PixelPodium
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Should Symmetra Be Classed as a Defence Hero?

Posted: 14 May 2017 04:49 AM PDT

I'd like to bring this debate up again because I feel that Symmetra should now become a defence hero rather than a support.

Here is the Overwatch wiki definition of a support hero:

Support heroes can heal allies, enhance their team's abilities, and debuff enemies. They are poor duelists and perform best with their team around them.

Here is the definition of a defence hero:

Defence heroes are good at guarding locations, creating choke points, and preventing objectives from being taken. They are skilled at area denial and generally form the back line of their team.

Bearing this in mind, should Symmetra be a support hero?

Symmetra does not heal allies, enhance friendly abilities nor debuff enemies. The only two abilities that she uses for her team are her two ultimates. The shield generator supports the team by giving extra health, but so do Torb's armour packs. The teleporter is rather easy to find and destroy.

Is she a bad duelist?

Support heroes are also classed as 'poor duelists'. This is defo untrue for Symmetra, as she can deal 120dps on a beam with 7m range and tons more ammo than Winston's tickle gun. There is also the photon barrier, which I rarely see used as a supportive ability but rather for Symmetra to attack with. Using the barrier and her beam, she is easily able to duel other heroes or even take on two 'squishies' at a time. Once the beam is locked on, you have little time to kill Symm before you melt. McCree has little chance; the beam doesn't reset its charge if stunned and he has no mobility that can escape. The 0.5s 'favour the shooter' lets Symm shoot for 0.5s through walls, which is 60 damage (significant to squishy heroes) and the 9m beam disengage range work to make Symmetra difficult to escape.

However, Symmetra can't exactly play like this on attack. She works best on defence by a long way, as those turrets have no offensive capability, the attacking team doesn't need a teleporter in most cases and the shield generator can be destroyed easily as the defenders control most of the map.

Compare Symmetra to Sombra

Sombra is an offence hero. However, she doesn't deal that much damage and is supportive to a team. The argument for Symm as a support is that she doesn't deal as much damage as the dps heroes so shouldn't automatically be one, however Sombra is a 'dps' despite not dealing nearly as much damage as 76 or Pharah.

Symmetra on the Attack

An attack Symmetra is far worse than a defending Symmetra, as mentioned above. All the support heroes are flexible and can be played on defence/attack/control, but Symmetra is objectively worse on the attack, providing less use to her team. Her only proper offensive capability is to pick away at shields using her secondary fire. That doesn't mean she's useless on the attack, but she's worse on the attack.

Symmetra's Defensive Qualities

The turrets provide area lockdown, but at higher levels they (apparently) are used to spot flankers when they're destroyed, professional Symm players putting them around the map to detect enemies. Surely that is a defensive playstyle? The attacking team won't need to worry about flankers, will they? The teleporter is useful on defence as it brings back the lads from the spawn room, which is normally far away. The shield generator was created because the devs felt that Symm needed something for defending the second point.

That's my argument.

There you have it. My reasons as to why I think Symmetra is a defence hero, not a support hero. This is a discussion post, so please discuss/debate the question.

Cheers.

submitted by /u/ZealousAttacker
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The most common team comp in 2017 competitive play is quadruple tank, followed closely by triple tank with soldier.

Posted: 14 May 2017 08:12 AM PDT

Is That A Pro Genji?

Posted: 14 May 2017 02:20 PM PDT

I made a D.Va cheesecake

Posted: 14 May 2017 09:10 AM PDT

I made a raspberry cheesecake with a white chocolate D.Va decoration.

https://imgur.com/HFXKJ5l

Check it out :D

Gg

submitted by /u/ecaves
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If you took 1 ability, and took away one letter from the name of the ability, what would it now do?

Posted: 14 May 2017 09:50 AM PDT

Stole the idea from r/leagueoflegends, basically, take the name of an ability and remove only one letter from the name. What is the new name of the ability and what would it do? Ill start it off.

Ana - Nan Boost - Gives the targeted ally's nan extra stats including food making, cookie baking and years left.

Hit me with your best suggestions!

submitted by /u/Blockronic
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Blizzard can we please get the brawl rotation back?

Posted: 14 May 2017 04:42 AM PDT

Right now there isn't a single brawl that i can play more than once since they are just so unbalanced and they aren't fun at all.

1V1? I'm not great at most of the heroes it gives

3V3? yeaahh i'm so excited to play vs Roadhog, soldier and random healer

No limits barely gets used for no limits and is either 6 defense symmetra's or qp with the possibility of getting more than 1 hero

Mystery heroes is SO RNG, you can get 2 points on Route 66, almost push to the end but then the enemy gets an amazing comp and you cant do shit and lose

CTF is just waiting for the draw

The thing when uprising was up is that it was nice brawl to farm lootboxes

submitted by /u/SweetDisaster_
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When you take the road less travelled

Posted: 14 May 2017 02:56 PM PDT

Who even needs a Zarya?

Posted: 14 May 2017 03:20 PM PDT

One shot one kill, pardner

Posted: 14 May 2017 01:31 PM PDT

With the anniversary event coming, can we PLEASE have a "Next hero/Previous hero" Button in hero gallery?

Posted: 14 May 2017 08:12 AM PDT

Every single event its such a pain to take a look at all of the new cosmetics, a simple "Next/Previous hero" button(s) on the side would solve so many problems. Something like this (shitty mockup) http://i.imgur.com/SicsXgK.jpg

Pressing the buttons in any menu would switch to the next hero, so lets say you're editing Reinhardt's voicelines like on the image and click next hero, now you're editing Roadhogs' voicelines, this would probably cut hero editing time immensely, ESPECIALLY in events. Many times i've been looking at the voicelines before an event ends to see how many voice lines im missing and if i'd like to craft any of them and it is such a chore...

submitted by /u/Matroe1
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AMA Request: Michael Chu

Posted: 14 May 2017 01:33 PM PDT

edit: Front page! Hopefully Chu will see this!

I think we can all agree that Overwatch is an amazing game with great lore. Michael Chu is the lead writer and the man responsible for most of the story and dialogue. Here are a few questions to get started:

  • What sparked your interest in writing?

  • How did you start working at Blizzard?

  • What are your most and least favorite parts of Overwatch lore?

  • What other projects have you worked on?

  • What hero/character in Overwatch is your favorite and why?

  • What comic/short is your favorite and why?

  • Which hero was the hardest to create in terms of story?

  • Did you think Overwatch would become big as it's become?

  • How often do you browse Reddit and the Battle.net forums?

  • What game, other than Overwatch, do you play the most?

edit, questions from /u/Opaque274 :

  • Which hero do you think was the hardest to integrate into the lore?
  • Were there any shifts between heroes in their origin stories? (Like abilities that started on one hero, and through development, got to another).
  • Can you give any info on new media platforms that Blizzard plans to use to explore Overwatch's lore further?

edit, questions from /u/Ganbuu :

  • How did he get there? How did he start? Did you ever want to be the writer of the story in a game, or it just sort of "happened"?
  • Can the story in OW take a "big turn"? For example, could one day Widowmaker "wake up" from her brainwash and become a good guy again and change in-game accordingly? Could one of the heroes turn evil in the future? Can they die in the story but be kept in the game? Or would you only do something like that to characters who are not playable like Efi, Emily, or Brigitte? Like what happened to Mondatta?

edit, questions from u/KarmaticFox :

  • Are all of the characters going to get their own animated shorts or just a select few?
  • Any plans for more in-game character interactions?

edit, question from /u/ToonCoyote :

  • May we please get an official timeline of events (news, omnic crisis starting and ending dates, ...) and animated shorts, comics, etc? (Here is my personal version) If yes, I love you. If no, is it because you want us to speculate or is there another reason?

final edit, don't wanna overwhelm him with questions immediately. questions from /u/fallafot :

  • Which hero's lore are you most excited to expand upon in the future?

  • Jeff mentioned a while ago there was a hero that got canceled in a very early stage of development that was a cat in a jetpack. What do you think the backstory for this character would involve?

submitted by /u/creeperhat
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JKaplan will be streaming Team USA tryouts tomorrow, 11am EST

Posted: 14 May 2017 11:23 AM PDT

I love Widowmaker...

Posted: 14 May 2017 04:33 PM PDT

After 38 hours on Lucio I finally did it

Posted: 14 May 2017 02:44 PM PDT

QP is literally just like a 10 minute skirmish lately

Posted: 14 May 2017 11:45 AM PDT

I used to always party QP to practice other characters for comp. Recently I've went back to touch up a bit and it's just like one giant skirmish, no one doing anything related to the way the game should be played. I like arcade but I've a pain in my hole constantly playing that antartica map in 1v1'and 3v3

submitted by /u/Rossieboi93
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Cheers, Love! The Delivery's Here!

Posted: 14 May 2017 06:34 AM PDT

Final Design

Draft

I had an idea for a silly skin for Tracer not too long ago and finally got around to drawing it up!

I was thinking about 'casual' jobs for the other heroes, too. I have mechanic Junkrat, nurse Mercy (duh), retail Reaper... I'm a bit short of ideas for the others. If you guys have any suggestions, I'll try draw em up in my free time. Otherwise, enjoy! :)

submitted by /u/slagmouth
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What a waste of an ULT... Wait WTF!?!

Posted: 14 May 2017 01:06 PM PDT

(Major Glitch) When the game takes spawn camping to the next level

Posted: 14 May 2017 03:47 PM PDT

I don't think I'm allowed to play Pharah anymore

Posted: 14 May 2017 05:46 PM PDT

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