The recent Winter Wonderland update for Overwatch led to immense backlash from the fans. The reason? A part of the update was the exclusive winter skin Blizzard released for Mei, which fans responded to highly negatively, accusing it of being nothing more than a seasonal recolor.
That might still have been okay and palatable, but Blizzard classed it as Legendary, the most expensive tier of character skins- and that definitely wasn’t going to fly with fans. Making matters even worse was the percolating fear and belief that this would be the last Legendary for Mei for a while to come, which meant that Blizzard had wasted her Legendary with something as superficial as this.
Responding to all of this criticism and backlash, Jeff Kaplan, director of Overwatch, admitted that Blizzard had been off with this exclusive skin, also noting that there would be a new Legendary for Mei early next year. “Sorry you are disappointed with Mei’s winter skin,” Kaplan said on the Blizzard forums.
“We don’t have a specific rule for what makes something Legendary or Epic. We just sort of make a gut call based off of what we think is cool. Coolness is very subjective, and based off of the community reaction it seems like our gauge was off on this one. Our reasoning for it being Legendary was that we completely redid the visual effects for Cryo-Freeze (we turned the ice block into a snowman). We thought that was pretty special and we had done it specifically based on community suggestions from months ago when people were speculating that we might have a winter event. Apparently, lots of people don’t agree with us and that’s ok. It’s all good feedback and we’re learning something for future events.”
“For people concerned that Mei is not going to get another Legendary for a long time, you need not worry. We have something pretty awesome for her early next year,” he added.
I guess that is the best response we could have gotten in a situation like this- Mei getting another Legendary soon should in particular calm a lot of tempers. Overwatch is available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
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