OVERWATCH 2 COMPETITIVE PLAY UPDATES: TEAM UP FOR BETTER MATCHES

Now that Season 5 is underway, we have some improvements for competitive play including updates to matchmaking, the return of a very popular competitive game mode. Plus, we’ll be testing new ways for groups of friends to play together no matter their individual skill level. Let’s take a look at the current state of competitive play and see where we want to go over the course of the next few months.

CURRENT STATE OF COMPETITIVE PLAY

Over the past few seasons, we’ve focused on improving matchmaking (focusing on competitive play) so that players of similar skill levels can play together. Most notably, this season we’ve made it a priority to match up groups that are similar but with a wide range of skill levels in the same matches. That results in longer wait times for large groups, but the matches are fairer.

Last season, we started awarding matchmaking rank (to show how close each player is to the overall lobby skill level), plus we started showing where you rank in your skill division and what how close you are to moving to the next rank. We hope this will bring more transparency to your matches and your progression as you climb the ranks.

Game Director Aaron Keller gave us his thoughts on how mismatches happen in his most recent Director’s Corner blog post, and we’re continuing to make changes as we find opportunities for improvement.

We also want to ensure competitive experiences for different playstyles. That’s why, throughout Season 5, Mystery Heroes Competitive Play will be back!

SKILL LEVEL CALCULATION AFTER EACH GAME

Your internal matchmaking rating (known as IEI or MMR in English) is adjusted after each game and not just when there are competitive updates. It goes up or down when you win or lose a game. However, how much it goes up or down is determined by certain factors in that game. Here we detail the three main ones:

• What is your skill level compared to your opponents?
• How long have you been in Overwatch?
• How often do you play that specific competitive mode?

Matchmaking Rating (MMR) and its Impact on Match Difficulty and Cooldown Times

Regarding the first factor, if a player beats a stronger team, they will have a bigger increase in their internal matchmaking rating. The higher the matchmaking rating (MMR) of your opponents, the more challenging the matches should be. While it’s extremely important to keep the matchmaking rating (MMR) of both teams as similar as possible, it’s very rare for them to be exactly the same. We want to ensure low cooldown times for all players at all times, so there will sometimes be bigger differences between the two rates.

Skill Assessment and Matchmaking for New Players

As for the second point, your experience and how far you are honing your skills are also important factors. When a player is new and qualifies for competitive play, our matchmaking system doesn’t have much information to assess their skill level. In most cases, we got a general understanding of his current ability in just five games, which aligns with his first competitive update. However, this is a general estimate, so new players will see their skill level and division change frequently.

MMR Adjustments for Inactive and Returning Players

And with this, we move on to the third point. The same can be applied to returning players after being inactive. That’s one of the reasons we remove their divisions if they don’t play that mode or competitive role for a full season. Inactive players will lose MMR while they remain absent. The more time the player spends inactive, the greater the increase in the uncertainty index that we assign to him. The uncertainty rate allows players to lose or gain MMR at a faster rate. So, if an inactive player comes back, he can go back to his previous rank if he performs well, or he will lose more MMR if his skill level actually dropped.

These are the settings that change your MMR with each match. And it is with your current MMR that we determine which game is best for you each time you play.

ENSURING RANK COMPETITIVENESS

In the transition to Season 5, we have seen that there are more players in Grandmaster compared to previous seasons. This happens for several reasons. The main one is that since Overwatch 2 is now free to play, we now have more players than ever in Competitive Play, which skews the distribution of ranks. For our higher ranks, we’ve seen more players achieve and hold higher ranks than ever before.

Competitive Rank Distribution – PC Players

This is a good thing, as it shows that many players are developing their skills. Either way, we want to make sure that the higher ranks remain competitive. While we feel this rank distribution is working well, both Grandmaster and Bronze reflect a wide variety of skill levels and we want the skill to be well represented.

Specifically, we saw that there are more players than we’d like in Bronze 5. This is an unintended side effect that was caused by adding the MMR drop for inactive players in Overwatch 2. We’ve started making incremental adjustments in Season 5. so that there are more players who can get out of Bronze 5 without interfering with the curve distribution. We plan to monitor this matter closely in future weeks and seasons.

TEAM ROW

Despite our efforts to make matches more balanced and competitive, we don’t want to forget that the best gaming experience is when friends work together. This can be quite a challenge as we cannot compromise on competitive integrity in matchmaking.

Increasing Competition for Full Teams in Competitive Modes

In our main competitive modes, we have a requirement that players who want to play together must have similar skill levels, based on their divisions. In Grandmaster, we limit the number of players who can play together in pairs. While these party restrictions work well for a lot of our players, we want to find ways to increase the competition between full teams.

Introducing Team Queue: Competitive Mid-Season Mode

For Season 5, we’re introducing Team Queue as our competitive mid-season mode. For this mode, you will need to be in a party of five players to get into the queue, but there will be no party restrictions. That is to say, that the teams will be able to have any combination of ranks among their players and play without problems. Team queue skill level will be separate from your competitive play skill level, whether in open or role queue, and only applies to you as an individual (meaning you can switch partners whenever you like). In a team queue, only one tank, two damage, and two support hero compositions will be playable. Build your team in advance and decide who will play each role.

Team Queue Test: Improving the Competitive Overwatch 2 Experience

This team queue test is the first step in improving the competitive Overwatch 2 experience in the future. We did consider other options, such as a mode where only solo matchmaking can be done, but we wanted to have this as a test with the current competitive modes active at the same time, so as not to increase the wait times in the main modes. . Team queue matches should be more challenging and play out differently since there will be no skill level restrictions. We look forward to hearing your feedback on this limited-time mode, which will launch on July 11.