It’s common knowledge among Overwatch players that the game uses their previous stats to determine which rank to place them in each season, but some wonder whether this system is past its prime.
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Every season in Overwatch’s Competitive play, players have to complete 10 Placement Matches before they’re put into a rank from bronze to Top 500.
More often than not, players are put at a rank pretty close to where they were in previous seasons, and people are starting to wonder if the ranking system is as accurate as it could be.
Where a player is ranked depends on their SR, which goes up and down depending on wins and losses.[ad name=”article2″]
What’s the problem with Competitive Overwatch?
A new YouTube video from Blame The Controller does a good job of summing up some of Overwatch’s Competitive problems.
Blame the Controller suggests there are “significant flaws in the [Overwatch] matchmaker” that can be tested.
The Overwatch matchmaker places players in a rank based on a few different variables: where they ranked last season, how well they performed in placement matches and “other” stats on a players account.
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Those Mercy stats from Season 4 could still be haunting you.
These “other” stats or “Anchor” stats could include very old performance, which in some cases, Overwatch could be taking into account stats that are years old for some players, which obviously isn’t an accurate representation of the player’s current abilities.
Bronze players shouldn’t get too excited, because this doesn’t mean that they’re actually Diamonds just stuck in ELO Hell, but it does suggest that the competitive matchmaking could be improved to better reflect players current performance, maybe even making the process feel more rewarding and like less of a grind.
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Ranked changes coming this summer?
Overwatch Director Jeff Kaplan did tease more “major new content” coming to Overwatch this summer, but he didn’t get any more specific than that so it’s impossible to know whether that includes ranked changes or not.
He did say a new hero was one the way soon, but ranked changes have been a constant complaint from the community, so any changes would definitely be big news.
For now, Overwatch players will just have to watch and wait to see what the new updates are actually all about.
