Overwatch 2 devs confirm major Ranked changes in Season 3

Overwatch 2 Ranked is where a lot of players go to test out their skills. The system hasn’t always been well-received in the sequel, and Blizzard will now be making some changes in Overwatch 2 Season 3.

The process of Overwatch 2 matchmaking and its skill-based setup is usually dictated by a staggering number of factors that go into a complex algorithm.

It does its best to divide players up into skill levels suited to them and prevent matches from becoming horribly lop-sided in one team’s favor.

However, the lack of transparency when it comes to Overwatch 2’s Ranked mode hasn’t gone down well with players since the game’s launch. Fans have cited the competitive mode as “trash” and in response, the devs announced back in December 2022 that changes were coming.

A hefty blog post from the Overwatch 2 team has delved into the game’s Ranked mode, the current state of it, and explained how player feedback is going to influence the mode in Season 3 – as well as Season 4 and beyond.

“Our team is aware of some community pain points with competitive and matchmaking. We have a set of improvements coming to matchmaking, and we’re also working on updates to the competitive system,” the devs said.

Firstly, player ranks have only been updating once a certain amount of wins or losses were accumulated, meaning players had to wait for ages to see what their new rank was. This will be changed: “For competitive play in Season 3, we’ll reduce the number of wins between competitive updates from 7 to 5 wins or 20 to 15 losses. For our matchmaker, we’re implementing role delta changes that will match similarly ranked players within each role.”

Blizzard are also trying to tighten up the gap in skill levels when it comes to matchmaking: “We’re implementing some updates to the matchmaker that try to place pairs of players with similar MMR on each role on either team.”

Other smaller changes are coming too such as a midseason UI patch for Season 3 that will show how close you are to your next competitive update, and also the “Top 500 players will see their Top 500 leaderboard rank updated after every match rather than in competitive updates.”

In addition to all of this, Overwatch Season 4 will see the following update: “Starting with Season 4, we’re planning to remove seasonal competitive rank resets and all current and past seasonal rank decay.”

All of these potential changes won’t be it though, as toward the end of the blog Blizzard make it clear that they will “continue to watch for your feedback and improve upon the overall ranked experience over time. Our goal continues to be delivering matchmaking that feels fair and balanced for everyone.”

With the Overwatch 2 Ranked system being far from perfect in the eyes of the fans, it’s great to see the devs take criticism onboard and try to improve this area of the game.

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There will also be other exciting changes coming in Overwatch Season 3 in the form of rewards, and some big-time nerfs are also on the way.

Image Credit: Blizzard