Overwatch’s first season of competitive gaming is about to draw to a close, come the 17th of August. Once it does, players will once again be relegated to the game’s Quick Play game mode as the developers at Blizzard tweak the next season. Season Two of Competitive Overwatch will be out on the 6th of September and will introduce quite a few different changes and features, skill tiers being one of them
Currently, Overwatch’s competitive mode features a skill ranking from 1-100, with players often going up or down a fraction of a rank as they win or lose. Season two will instead feature a ranking system from 1-5000, similar to the MMR system many MOBAs utilise. As a result, players will go up or down whole numbers instead of fractions. Furthermore, this will be slightly more accurate due to the larger denominations; players who were ranked 60 or higher were actually in the top 6% of all players.
However, rather than have players boast about being a rank 4000-odd player, Blizzard is also introducing skill tiers. Certain rank clusters, such as 3000-3499 will fall under a skill tier, such as “Gold”. Jeff Kaplan, the director of Overwatch, states that this is to push players to identify themselves by tier, rather than by number. The six tiers, in rising order, are as follow: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond, Master & Grandmaster. Players in the top 3 tiers will experience “rank decay” if they do not work to keep their rank high.
The larger ranking system will also mean that players will get more more currency units (10 for winning matches as opposed to 1) in future seasons of competitive. As a result, any competitive currencies they currently have will also be multiplied by a factor of 10.
In a move that is sure to bring smiles to all of Overwatch’s competitive gamers, the coin toss or “sudden death” mode is being abolished. Instead, the current maps that utilise the sudden death mode (all of which are Hybrid maps or Payload maps) will adopt a “time bank”, where teams have a set amount of time to capture an objective. The “time bank” feature is already being used in Assault maps. There are further changes made regarding time which can be viewed in the developer video at the bottom of the article.
If there’s one thing that everyone can agree upon, it’s that Blizzard takes community feedback seriously; many of the tweaks have been suggested in Forum posts that attracted large amounts of attention or from posts on the Overwatch subreddit. The game is still very much going through development, a new hero was introduced recently and they are currently in the process of teasing a new one. Overwatch’s competitive mode is getting a buff.
