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Overwatch: Principal Designer Scott Mercer details changes to its second competitive season

Overwatch’s second competitive season is up and running, and things are already quite different compared to the multiplayer shooter’s premiere offering.

Speaking with Stevivor at Gamescom last month, Blizzard’s Scott Mercer, Principal Designer, helped to explain competitive mode’s biggest changes.

“I think we’re all very happy with Season 1,” Mercer began. “But there some issues that we’re certainly trying address in Season 2.”

First up, changes to the way players are ranked.

“You want to see how you rank against other players, and as you perform better throughout a season, seeing your ranking go up — I think that’s what some of the players really enjoyed,” he continued.”From that perspective we’re definitely in the right ballpark.

“One of the big issues, I think, was people came out of their ten [ranking] matches and their score was something like 46. But what does that mean?”

I confessed that I didn’t know – but I thought my own ranking of 52 meant I was fairly average.

“A huge number of players were actually between 45 and 55,” Mercer said. “So 52 is actually above average.

“So yeah, we know we’ve had this issue,” he asserted. “We needed to work on the skill rating scale.”

So that’s what Blizzard did.

“We changed [the scale] to from 1-100 to 1-5000 – did some math behind the scenes, broadened out the competition across that, and then added these seven tiers,” Mercer said. “They have names I think people are pretty familiar with: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grand Master. It’s a pretty easy to understand progression there.”

The tiers play into match by match progression.

“Now, you’re not just given a pretty big number — you’re also split into a tier. Now, you get a better understanding of how you stack up. I think that’s an important thing to work on there.”

The other big change? Sudden death needed to die… well, suddenly.

“We really thought sudden death was going to work,” Mercer said, conceding that the attacking team could usually stack the deck with a bunch of tanks and survive long enough to take a match-winning cap. “It does work but not as well as certain players want it to.”

For other changes to Overwatch’s second competitive season, head here.


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Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.