Competitive play in Overwatch is Blizzard’s way of providing a feature aimed at the less casual player. Now if you have been playing Overwatch, you’ll know that season 1 is coming to an end which means that season 2 of Competitive Play will be starting soon, and the good news is that season 2 will be a completely different beast from season 1.
Blizzard has revealed some of the changes that they are planning on making, one of which is the removal of the sudden death and coin toss feature which we covered earlier. According to the game’s director Jeff Kaplan, he believes that tie situations will be extremely rare, so players really won’t have to worry about this.
The skill rating system will also be overhauled and changed from a 1-100 ranking system to a 1-5000 system. This will be further divided into tiers, such as gold, diamond, master, and grandmaster. According to Kaplan, “We don’t want that number to be the thing you associate with you as a competitive player more than anything else. We want you to realise that the skill rating is naturally gonna go up or down as you play competitive matches… We want to focus you more on ‘I’m a gold player.’ Sometimes my skill rating goes up or down, but I think of myself as a gold player.”
Other changes include a better grouping system where players with wildly different skill ratings won’t be able to group together, meaning that your team should consist of players that are roughly on par with you. Will these changes make for a better season of Competitive Play? We’ll have to wait and find out.