Custom Games may have been more useful for scrims and tournaments in Overwatch, but this will soon change with the latest changes added to the Public Test Region.
Server browser, a feature once mentioned back at Blizzcon 2016, is now added. It will serve useful for players who want a particular map and mode to be played at that moment rather than leave it up to matchmaking to put them in a random match. Not only that, enhancements to the custom game feature will enable more customisation- not only certain heroes and maps can be banned, but specific modifiers can be made. Faster payload movement? Check. No cooldowns on specific abilities? Check. You could even make specific balance changes to specific teams- making asymmetrical game modes possible.
In addition, to help incentivise its use- you can gain XP, and thus loot boxes, from custom games.
Capture The Flag is also available in Custom Game. Despite Blizzard hesitantly including it in The Year Of The Rooster event and discussed how they are not confident at making it a proper mode, good feedback from the community has led them to make the mode available. And you’re not going to play at just Lijiang Tower either, as all Control/King Of The Hill maps (Ilios, Nepal and Oasis) are all available in its CTF variant. As mentioned earlier, many of the game rules can be tweaked here as well. So if you’re not fond of Blizzard’s take on how CTF should work, there’s enough variables to mess around with.
Aside from that, expect the usual balance changes in the PTR: Bastion is getting more love, with slight tweaks to D.Va, Mercy, and Torbjorn. Interestingly, Eichenwalde’s getting a bit change to help attackers getting more of a fighting chance at the last point.
You can check out all the PTR patch notes here. The update is now live on the PTR for PC, and expect to see the rollout to live servers on PC as well as PS4 and Xbox One soon.