While many of us are sitting back (or raging) and playing Blizzard’s team-based first person shooter, Overwatch, there are quite a few wondering what’s going on with the competitive mode. Definitely a good question, especially since Blizzard themselves have not provided us with any news about it. However, Jeff Kaplan, has just given us an update on what we can expect in the upcoming months.
Things discussed in this new video are highlighted below.
Competitive Play
- It has been built around community feedback from beta.
- Initial feedback during beta stated it wasn’t competitive enough. Players wanted to see how they ranked against others.
- Seasons will be 3 months long. They will be based off northern hemisphere seasons in the real world – the first one will be “Summer”.
- Games go into sudden death too often (35% of the time). There have been changes to reduce this.
- Sudden death will be played on the same map as the one it occurred on.
- Assault Maps maps will last longer. More chances for back and forth. Details will be released soon.
- No tiers for ranking. Your internal MMR will be correlated to an external Skill Rating.
- Skill Rating will be a number between 1 and 100.
- You will be able to see everyone’s skill rating on your team. An average will also be displayed for both teams.
- Not every match will be perfectly fair, but if you’re the underdog, you’ll gain more for a win and lose less for a loss.
- You will be able to see who is partied on teams for transparency.
- They will improve the system through feedback if needed.
Competitive Rewards
- The system will reward you with cosmetics – no power gains.
- Some player icons and sprays will only be available through seasons.
- A new golden gun system is being added to further customize characters. High skill players will get them faster.
More!
- New maps will come later this year.
- One day they want to improve spectator mode for broadcasting.
For everything else that you have been wondering about, Jeff Kaplan, does mention that more details are still to come. Sadly, there hasn’t been any talk about duplicates, and I know a lot of you are wondering about that. I know the people I play with definitely are.
