With season 1 of Overwatch's Competitive Play ending, the game's director, Jeff Kaplan, took to YouTube to talk about what's in store for the coming season.
There are many updates for the second season of Overwatch in general but Kaplan focused on discussing those that will be affecting Competitive Play specifically.
Some of the things players can expect for season 2 of Overwatch Competitive Play include:
• Skill ratings will now be scored from 1 to 5,000. This is to address concerns with going up or down by fractional points.
• Skill ratings will have tiers. There will be seven tiers, with each roughly covering 500 rating points. This was introduced so that players don't fixate on their skill rating. A player can instead say they're on the gold level, which can have a skill rating of between 2,000 and 2,499.
• Once a tier is achieved within the season, a player will remain in that tier, regardless if their actual skill rating drops below that tier's range. This will apply to all tiers, except for Master and Grandmaster, the two highest levels.
• Rewards given at the end of the season will be based on the highest tier achieved by a player.
• Competitive points earned will be multiplied by 10 but golden guns will cost 10 times more as well. Multiplying competitive points was done to address ties. This way, all participants will get something for their effort. Competitive points awarded will not be the same as a tie, but they will at least be something to make up for the players' time and investment in a match.
• All of Sudden Death is going away.
• When one team gets bonus time to make a final push for a match in assault mode, the other team will also get the same, even if they have minutes remaining.
• The time bank system will also be enforced on both hybrid game mode and full payloads.
• Groups with members with wildly different skill ratings may no longer be able to play together. The exact skill rating range that players have to be in to play together has not been specified, but going by with the new system, this could be pegged at 500 skill rating points.
• Skill rating decay will be in place for players at the Diamond, Master and Grandmaster tiers. This means that those on those tiers who don't play competitive Overwatch for seven days will lose 50 skill rating points every 24 hours. Kaplan said this is to make sure that top-ranking players don't just reach a level but actually keep playing throughout the season, even if it's just to check in.
• Top 500 players will be required to play a minimum of 50 competitive matches during the season.
Kaplan said more details about planned changes for Overwatch will be revealed in the days leading up to the launch of season 2.
Season 2 of Overwatch's Competitive Play is set to begin Sept. 6.
