Overwatch clan system? Players excited by leak on Russian PTR
Blizzard EntertainmentAn Overwatch clan system may be coming soon if a recent leak on the Russian PTR is anything to go off of.
The August 12 PTR update made a series of custom game changes including new browser tabs for the most popular, recently played, and favorites. While this is very nice news for players who are into custom games, the Russian version of the PTR has fans intrigued.
As spotted by users on Reddit, the “browse” tabs on the Russian version of the PTR is instead listed as “guilds” when translated.
It’s no secret that the Overwatch developers have been interested in the idea of a clan system and evidence of it even leaked during the BlizzCon 2021 Overwatch 2 presentation.
In a blog post on Blizzard’s website showcasing the Overwatch 2 ability trees, a screenshot showed “Clan C9” right next to the player’s tag — a feature that doesn’t exist in the current version of Overwatch.
Since then, fans have been anxiously waiting for news and if it would ever arrive before Overwatch 2. This new PTR leak may be just what they’ve been waiting for.
“As a localization specialist myself I can say that it’s a very odd mistake,” the original poster of the ‘guilds’ translation leak stated. “You can’t just translate ‘browse’ as ‘guilds’ unless the client provided you with some kind of context.”
Blizzard Entertainment“Most likely a translation error. The translator probably put a string for OW2 into the OW1 file,” another added.
“The only idea I have other than a copy-paste error is Blizzard having a shared translations database for multiple projects and this string being reused from other projects,” someone else pondered.
So, it’s not clear exactly what this leak entails, but it seems like something is definitely happening behind the scenes. In addition to the BlizzCon leak, this PTR translation issue have definitely caught players by surprise and in a good way.
Unfortunately, as a guild/clan system wasn’t formally announced, it seems that even if one was on the way before Overwatch 2, it may still be a work in progress. Hopefully, we get a formal reveal soon, especially if a Clan system could eventually lead into a tournament or team queue system.