Overwatch 2 made some controversial changes to competitive play when it launched last year. Now, rather than seeing your SR change after each match, your rank will only update every seven wins or twenty losses. This means that you can play for long stretches of time without seeing any changes to your rank whatsoever, a move that many players have found frustrating and unrewarding.
Now, Blizzard is tweaking this new system, giving us more immediate feedback on how we're doing in competitive games. As of the start of season 3, your rank will change every five wins or 15 losses, reducing how long we have to grind until we see improvements. This will also come alongside other changes to competitive play, hopefully making matches much fairer than they have been so far.
This reveal comes courtesy of a developer blog post, which sheds more light on how competitive works now, and what changes we can expect down the line.
The first thing the team reveals is this change in how our rank will move up and down. Once this is implemented, there will also be an update to the UI that will make our competitive progress always viewable, rather than only accessible after a win.
This will come alongside changes to the matchmaking in role queue. Rather than ensuring that, on average, the teams are of a similar skill level, the game will try to pair ranks up by role. This means that, for the most part, Platinum Tanks should play against other Platinum Tanks, but could team up with a Silver DPS if the other team has one as well.
Beyond that, even more updates to ranked mode are planned, addressing one of the other huge complaints from the fanbase: decay. Starting from season 4, you'll no longer go down a rank at the start of the season, forcing you to climb back up to your previous spot with teams that might not necessarily reflect your personal skill level.
While plans after this update are much vaguer, it seems that we'll be seeing some more transparency with how the game works soon.
"We’ll continue to build out competitive updates in season 4 when we add information about your current wins and losses to the competitive update screens," reads the blog post. "We’re hoping this additional context will help you better interpret changes to your skill tier and division in the update."
Of course, it remains to be seen if this is enough to please a community that has been largely disappointed with the launch of Overwatch 2. However, with season 3 making changes to competitive play, ultimate charge, and perhaps most importantly, monetisation, this could turn its fortunes around. Updates are mostly accomplishing what Blizzard sets out to do, as we saw with Roadhog's nerfs removing his one-shot ability, so it's very possible that season 3 will improve competitive play for the fans.
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