Season 4 of Competitive Play for Overwatch is now live and brings with it a few changes to improve (or mar) the experience for players.
The biggest change is that to rank decay. If you have a Skill Rating over 3000, thus putting you in the Diamond, Master or Grandmaster range, you now have to play 7 games per week to prevent any decay of your ranking. Originally, it was 1 game per week.
Blizzard noted in its official post that, “When you complete a match, the amount of time until skill rating decay occurs is pushed back by 24 hours and you can bank up to seven days per week. That means as long as you manage to play seven games over a one-week period, your skill rating will be safe. You could play one match per day or complete all seven in a single session.”
It also seems that Skill Ratings below 500 won’t be shown to prevent people from intentionally throwing to ge a lower rank. Also, if you want the rewards from placing in the Top 500, you now need to be in the op 500 for your region by season end. You can no longer simply reach Top 500 during the season and then drop out.
Finally, for maps with two checkpoints (Assault, Escort and Hybrid), there will now be a respawn delay if the number of attacks on a contest point outnumbers the defenders.
“If the point hasn’t been captured and the defense hasn’t regained the advantage after a specified time, the defender respawn timer will slowly begin to increase until it hits a maximum value. If the defense manages to gain the upper hand, the timer resets to zero.” This should, at the very least, prevent constant stalling from the defense.
Thoughts on all these changes? Let us know in the comments.
