Especially when viewing the competitive possibilities of Overwatch as an esport.
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– Sudden Death will be eliminated entirely. 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 current skill rating system of 1 to 100 will be bumped way up to a scale of 1 to 5,000, meaning instead of going up or down “half or a quarter of a skill rating” after a round, your rank will shift by whole numbers. Kaplan explained that he doesn’t want competitive mode to be a disheartening slog, and if you slip, you should have some time to pick yourself back up again. We want you to realise that the skill rating is naturally gonna go up or down as you play competitive matches…
Further to that end, whatever tier you achieve in a season you will stay in regardless of how much your skill rating drops. “You should feel pretty good even though your playing may be in the Silver skill rating for the last week of the season, but if you ever got into Gold, you will get the reward for Gold”, Kaplan notes regarding the change. This process may take a few weeks for all regions, but once fully deployed all games including those in Quick Play and Competitive Play will be running in high bandwidth mode by default. We’ll have to wait and find out. In its place, all hybrid and payload maps will feature a time bank (similar to those seen on assault-style maps).
Players will get a decent number of competitive points for a tie.
Blizzard will be getting more “aggressive” with the skill rating difference between players which will now be 500 within the 1-5000 scale.
Diamond, Master and Grandmaster division players’ skill rating will now decay, if you don’t play the game for 7 days, your SR will drop 50 ratings every 24 hours. This so players can classify them, selves as Gold player for example.
One interesting point that Kaplan makes is that he wants Overwatch’s overall playtime to be sped up for those in Competitive Mode. “It’s a very normal thing; the system is calibrating to where you are as a player.” . If the recent problems around Hello Games and No Man’s Sky on PC have shown us anything, it’s that a lack of information from a developer can seriously tarnish not only their reputation, but also the perception of any future titles or expansions they might release.
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Overwatch Season 2 is expected to begin in late August or early September 2016.
