Is it faster to jump around?

Is it faster to jump around to the objective rather than just plain old walking? When watching competitive gameplay of Seagull, instead of just walking normally he spends all of the time running from spawn to the objective hopping around. He will do this with almost all heroes, with Bastion, Hanzo, and Genji, his mains.

Is it faster to hop around, or to just walk?

Solution 1:

No, it is not faster to jump than to walk ! However is does help to get in the mood !

This kind of behavior is very common for pro players and streamers during startup phase, mostly to keep the attention (of themselves and/or of watchers) on the game. It is boring to wait for the start or to walk to the first objectives, both for the player and the watchers. While this is very important for streamers, this is quite often just a sign of impatience.

In other games, this can have a slightly different form. Like clicking on buildings like crazy in RTS, moving back-and-forth on a MOBA lane, doing on-place 360° in FPS and so on...

I even saw pro players having such behaviors in Hearthstone, a card game with no movements at all.

Solution 2:

The reason to bunny jump in most of the games is to keep yourself in movement and don't be an easy target as to use some of game mechanics in your favor. In some games it improves your move speed but it's not the case with Overwatch (fully).

I gonna limit my text to Overwatch, but this is old as Doom and Quake games.

If you watch the latest ESL Tournament most of the players were jumping all the time, why that? 3 reasons:

1. Keep yourself in movement (Or stay away from my hitbox):

   • The hitbox in your head is gigantic, it is wider than you body, if you move in 2 axis, you let one easier to your enemies hit

     Hitboxes in overwatch

2. The game don't penalize you for moving:

   • If you played counter-strike you must be used to stop before shot to get better aim, or to compensate it with several techniques. You don't have it here, so you can jump and shoot all the way straight.

3. Jump may improve your speed, only under some conditions.

   • Not just jumping, but going diagonal of your direction. In some speedrun videos people abuse the lack of normalized movement in some games. What is that?

   If you tap to walk foward, you walk 1 unity foward. If you tap to strafe, you go sideways 1 unity. But if you tap 2 butons, you walk 1*sqr(2).

   Most of the games normalize that movement like Overwatch, but it seems that when you jump under some conditions you bypass that normalization, like with Lucio's speed boost.

   Overwatch strafe jump to keep movement with Lucio's boost