While Blizzard is far from perfect, there is one thing we can (almost) all agree on – they put meticulous care in their maps and map designs. From individual roof tiles to clever naming puns and references to other games, Overwatch maps are a sight to behold.
Perhaps because of this, it’s a little odd to find severe, game-breaking glitches on any of them, but that is exactly what happened on Oasis. A control-map, it has three different sub-maps that each have a capture point each.
Whichever team captures 2 of the 3 wins – it’s a pretty simple concept and one that is shared by many other maps. During a ranked game, however, some players discovered that just maybe, things weren’t so simple after all. Reddit quickly found others that had experienced the same thing – in round 2 or 3 of the game, all but one player would spawn in the correct sub-map…and one would be stuck in the previous sub-map.
This is particularly annoying as it means that the player that got ‘held back’ is trapped there. The doors to the safe zone lock when the round is over and if there is no active round in that sub-map, they stay close – this means that a trapped player can’t even commit suicide in the hopes of re-spawning in the right place as the safe zone prevents this quite effectively.
The only way to resolve the issue is to leave and rejoin in order to get to the right map zone. This, however, means that players risk getting a penalty in ranked matches, so sitting it out until the end of the game can the ‘safest’ thing to do…though it means that the team then is one player down.
What many players don’t realise is that the three sub-maps for each game are actually all part of the same, connected map. This means that, rather than being rendered separately, the map has 2 locked and 1 unlocked section at any given time. Because of this, it IS technically possible to move to the wrong section by accident, or even intentionally in custom games, it’s just very difficult.
Where Blizzard has found out about these issues, they have patched them out, such as, most recently in Nepal. It won’t be long until the hole in Oasis is patched too, so if you are trying to experience this glitch first-hand, you better hurry.
The most recent control-map, Busan has several places that let players move to the ‘wrong’ region – people discovered them while the map was still in testing on Beta servers. One of these ways, for example, has Tracer jump on top of one of the trains that run through the station and then holding on for dear life – it’s not pretty, but you’ll be dragged through un-rendered mountainsides and all-out glitchy places! Other players have also had success with Sombra and in low-gravity games – it’s all a question of technique…according to Reddit anyway.
