Overwatch’s Blizzard World map has never been universally beloved, but shortly after Blizzard decked its halls with holiday cheer yesterday, the map apparently decided to go full Grinch.

Teams found themselves beset on all sides by busted spawn rooms and glitched payloads. Now Blizzard World is shut down.

Overwatch’s annual Winter Wonderland event is back, which means snowball fights, festive cheer, and yetis or whatever, but mostly skins.

This year, everyone is a furry, except for Mercy, who’s a World of Warcraft elf.

One of the original appeals of the Overwatch League’s formula was the idea of teams travelling around the world to play in each others’ home cities, surrounded by whooping, hollering, body-paint-covered hometown crowds.

But that didn’t happen during season one, and reports afterward alleged that it wouldn’t be a thing until at least 2020. Now, OWL commissioner Nate Nanzer has said road games are coming to season two after all.

A media guy for the Dallas Mavericks has been bugging the team for two years to let him do an Overwatch-style hype video, and they finally relented. It was worth the wait.

Every time Overwatch players hear Zarya shout her trademark Russian ult line — "Ogon' po gotovnosti!" — a sinking feeling of inevitability sets in. It means that you and your team are going to be dragged together by a tiny black hole and then lasered down, or obliterated by a ghost dragon or something. There is, however, a hard counter to Zarya's ult: a basketball.

One of the great online gaming paradoxes is the group-finder, a feature intended to bring people together that often does the opposite. It’s a mainstay in online games, a one-size-fits-all solution to the ever-present social gaming problem of “How do I meet people and progress?”

Functional, accessible and a little impersonal, the group-finder makes connecting with others so easy that, in effect, these connections are meaningless, and the people connecting, disposable. It’s possible that group-finders aren’t delivering on their promise long-term, at least in the games I’m playing.

Good Smile Company’s big-headed McCree figure is every bit the roguish cowboy fans know and love, even if his high noon is a lot lower than normal. 

There’s taking your ball and going home, and then there’s whatever Toronto Esports just did. After a few days of unusual tweets from the organisation’s president and founder, including an unanswered challenge issued to Overwatch League’s new Toronto team, Toronto Esports suddenly dropped out of Overwatch’s minor league, Contenders, over a naming dispute.

In a further statement to Kotaku, Toronto Esports’ president cited issues with “the recent changes to the Contenders rules,” which supposedly go “against our core company values.”

Other shows might be bigger, but every year Blizzcon brings out the absolute best in cosplay.

Kim-Seang “Nesskain” Hong—formerly a Blizzard fan artist—is now a Blizzard artist, and has worked on the last few character reveal trailers, including the latest one, Ashe.

Overwatch has had a handful of sizeable patches in the past, but the next major one — which presumably will include new hero Ashe — is going to necessitate a full reinstall of the game.

There was a time, hard as it might be to remember, when Overwatch's wackiest hero was a peanut-butter-loving science ape from the moon. Earlier this year, however, he was usurped by a mech-piloting, robo-voiced, Thunderdome-battling hamster who's also from the moon. How do you top that? Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan isn't sure he wants to.

This year’s BlizzCon was an odd one on a lot of levels, but I was personally stricken by the number of friends and acquaintances who told me they’d taken weeks or months off from playing Overwatch.

Last year and the year before, it was an obsession. Lately, though, it’s felt a little stale. Despite that sentiment, game director and proud internet papa Jeff Kaplan isn’t sounding the alarms just yet.

Overwatch fans disappointed with Ashe should know that six new heroes are in the works, Blizzard has told Kotaku, and that fans hoping for more diversity in the popular game’s cast of characters will hopefully find what they’re looking for in upcoming updates.

In many ways, Overwatch’s newest hero Ashe is a contradiction. She’s pinpoint-accurate at a distance, but she’s not a sniper. Her HP pool drains faster than a water balloon hitting a ceiling fan, but she can get down in the thick of things and help capture points.

Like they have the last few times there’s been a new character reveal, Blizzard got in touch with props and costume builders Henchmen Studios to create an almost 1:1 real-life replica of Ashe’s outfit and gear.

Esports is a brutal world: there's a lot of gamers and not a lot of positions. But what happens when you have to compete for one of those positions while playing at 200ms at best? That's the unfortunate reality for Australia's Overwatch World Cup members, who have been trialling under some truly crappy circumstances.

Announced over the weekend, the dual-wielding Ashe has finally given a playable face to the Deadlock Gang. More important, however, is that Overwatch finally has another core damage dealer, instead of the ability-centric heroes that been so prominent of late.

In Overwatch, as in soccer, there’s annual league play and international World Cups. This weekend belongs to the second. Before OWL’s second season gets underway, teams from around the world will represent their nations at BlizzCon in the Overwatch World Cup.

It’s one of the game’s most entertaining events for all the same reasons people love the soccer World Cup: it’s messy, unpredictable, and often full of “holy shit” moments that professionalised teams are trained to stomp out at all costs.