The Overwatch 2 devs have revealed a plethora of changes coming to Competitive at the beginning of Season 3, mid-way through and at the start of Season 4.
Players from all ranks have been critical of Overwatch 2’s ranked system since launch with the matchmaker frequently creating what they perceive to be uneven games with Bronze gamers going up against Grand Masters.
While the devs have made some slight improvements since, Season 3 will mark the first big change to ranked with some big updates planned for the mid-season patch and then the season after.
In a fresh developer blog post, Blizzard explained what it has planned and has made a series of updates based on community feedback to create a better experience for fans.
Overwatch 2 announces ranked changes in Season 3 and beyond
The first thing coming when Season 3 begins will be that players will no longer need to either win 7 games or suffer 70 losses to get a rank update.
Now, players will get a rank update after winning just five matches or racking up 15 losses – whichever comes first.
This should let players see how they’re progressing at a much faster rate than before, but that’s not the only change the devs have in the pipeline.
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“In the mid-season patch for Season 3, we’re also updating the UI, so information about your progress toward a competitive update will always be viewable,” the devs added.
Plus, in Season 4, the developers say they plan to remove seasonal competitive rank resets along with rank decay.
On the matchmaking side, Blizzard also revealed that they’re going to start matching roles with similar MMR on both teams. This means that matches should hopefully not be stomps depending on which squad has the higher-ranked tank.
“The goal with this change is to make the average MMR between each role more evenly matched to each other instead of looking more broadly across the entire team to balance things out,” the devs revealed. “This is a major change to the matchmaker, so we’ll be actively monitoring for any unintended side effects.”
Although Season 3 won’t feature a new hero, these updates should make the next couple of months of Overwatch a lot more bearable for those looking to climb the ranked ladder.