Overwatch 2’s ranked distribution is both important, but somewhat of a mystery. Once you’ve learned the game and jump into some Competitive, you’ll eventually get your rank after a slew of placement games.
However, once you’ve got your rank, what does it really mean? While you can get some context for how each rank is regarded by talking to the player base and listening to content creators, it is still an imprecise, biased guess.Generally, Blizzard has kept rank distribution tight-lipped, so it’s been hard to know exactly how much of the playerbase makes up each rank. However, thanks to a post from last year, we now have a pretty good understanding of where everyone lies. Here’s everything we know about Overwatch 2 rank distribution.
So, how good are you at Overwatch 2 exactly?
What is rank distribution?
Rank distribution in Overwatch 2 is the statistic of how many players are in each rank.
Knowing just how good you are to the rest of the player base is important as you can gauge just how much more you need to improve. It also helps players know how much of the player base is in your rank.
What percentage of the player base is each rank?
For years, we only had an old message from ex-Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan about rank distribution, making it hard to guess what it looked like in the Overwatch 2 era. However, back in Season 5, Team 4 put out a blog about competitive and ranked. It included a graph showing how Overwatch 2’s audience is distributed across ranks.
The graph doesn’t indicate exact numbers as there are no values on the y-axis. However, there are 15 lines, so we can break those down numerically to the size of each bar and get a decent estimate of how the player base is divided up.
Blizzard forum user Rezeak has reverse-engineered those numbers. Here’s how the Overwatch 2 ranks are distributed (assuming Blizzard’s graph is accurate):
- Bronze: 10.2%
- Silver: 19.2% (Above 10.2% of players)
- Gold: 26.7% (Above 29.4% of players)
- Platinum: 26.2% (Above 56.1% of players)
- Diamond: 12.2% (Above 82.3% of players)
- Masters: 3.9% (Above 94.5% of players)
- Grandmasters: 1.6% (Above 98.4% of players)
Now remember, this is an estimate, and it’s not based on hard numbers from Blizzard, but instead a vague visual aid. Still, it is the best indication we have of the rank distribution in Overwatch 2 so far.
One thing to keep in mind is that in recent Seasons, this distribution would have been severely impacted.
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In Seasons 9 and 12 there were rank resets, and a new rank Champion was added. It’s impossible to say how this would have affected the distribution. It’s unlikely to have moved too much around the bottom half though.
At what rank are you “good”
Obviously this is all subjective, but purely off the statistics if you’re at least Diamond you can say that you’re good.
Diamond is where you start playing with the better half of the ranked ladder and even start matching against amateur pro players once you’ve made it to the top half of Diamond.
Although, making the argument that being in the top half of Platinum, think Plat 1 and 2, makes you a “good player” is also valid as you’ll be queuing in Diamond lobbies regularly.
Of course, just because you’ve reached Diamond doesn’t mean you’re rocking with the best of the best as it’s once you’ve gotten to Grandmaster and Champion where you’ll find the majority of tier one pros at.
What is the Average rank for an Overwatch player?
These numbers suggest that the average Overwatch player is around Gold 3. From this, we can infer that if you are in Platinum, you are above average.
While if you are in Diamond or above, you are in the top fifth of the whole player base.
Again, the Season 9 rank resets and introduction of Champion may have changed this, but this is likely still the case since those changes mostly would affect high levels of play.
