Major upgrades coming to Overwatch competitive play

Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan released a video today that gives us a glimpse of what’s to come with season two of the game’s competitive play.

As Overwatch’s first season of competitive play comes to a close, Blizzard has anticipated our need to know how next season will be fairer, better, and more reflective of a player’s actual skill level.

To recap some of the pain points players suffered through in season one, a player’s skill rating was hugely dependent on the combined performance of a team. Skill ratings fluctuated wildly depending on how many matches were won or lost in any given gaming session. The rating also increased and decreased by varying amounts each time, with no apparent reason behind the different range.

Then there was the infamous sudden death mode which Overwatch used to break ties. Players extolled how unfair it was for teams to be assigned the attacker and defender role for sudden death, as certain maps were thought to be advantageous to either one side or the other.

Blizzard has heard these concerns and come up with some solutions, which are explained in the video below:

To parse through all of the information given to us in the video, here are the highlights summarized in buckets.

Player skill rating: Instead of using a scale from 1-100, the scale will now range from 1-5000. Kaplan explains that skill ratings given on the 100 scale did not intuitively capture just how good players actually were. With a larger scale, skill ratings will no longer go up by a fraction of a number. In addition, players with hugely disparate skill ratings will no longer be able to group up in the same competitive match. Players will need to be within 500 skill rating points of each other.

Skill rating tiers: Skill rating numbers will still go up or down, but that number will no longer define you. Instead, Blizzard has created seven tiers that will each encompass a range of skill ratings. In this way, your skill at Overwatch can be measured in a way that won’t change from day to day, or even match to match. Additionally, with the exception of the top two tiers (master and grandmaster), once you achieve a tier you will not drop below that tier for the duration of the season even if your skill rating drops to the next tier range.

Skill rating decay: For players in the top three tiers of play, inactivity from competitive play for seven days will cause your skill rating to drop at the rate of 50 points for every 24 hours.

Competitive points: You will get ten times as many competitive points as you did this season, but golden weapons will also be worth ten times as much. So no, you probably still can’t afford them.

Sudden death: It’s gone. Ties are technically possible, but they should be rare due to some tweaks in time given on each mode. On assault maps (e.g. Hanamura, Volskaya Industries), bonus time has been modified to reflect how long matches have actually been taking. Time banks will be more valuable on maps where you are escorting a payload — if your team reaches the destination quickly the first time, you will have a chance to use your remaining time in a future round to push the payload farther. Even if a match ends in a tie, competitive points will still be rewarded.

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Top 500: For those aspiring to enter the top 500 in competitive play, there is a pre-requisite of 50 competitive play matches. This prevents anyone from miraculously placing into the top 500 after just playing placement matches, and then just riding that position until the end of the season.

Season one of Overwatch’s competitive play ends on Aug. 17. Season two is slated to begin on Sept. 6.