Overwatch’s next season of Competitive Play will be starting soon, and Blizzard Entertainment is making a very important change. From Season 16 onwards, Grandmaster players will no longer be able to compete in parties larger than two players. It’s solo and duo-queues or bust.
Regarding the changes, developer Scott Mercer said, “In an effort to have higher quality and more fun matches for everyone, Overwatch actively tries to place parties of similar sizes together to create fair matches. For the vast majority of players this feature of the matchmaking system works reasonably well. For our Grandmaster players, making fair matches is always more difficult simply because there are fewer players of their skill level to place together.”
Allowing GM players to play in larger groups further exacerbates the problem. This change will apparently lead to better matches for the rank as a whole. Time will tell if this is actually the case, but at least it will reduce the number of smurf accounts from appearing at the higher ranks- at least, for those who like to play in parties of three or higher for the same.
Overwatch has seen a number of updates lately, with the Storm Rising event going live few weeks ago and ending on May 6th. Havana is a new Escort map that’s currently on the Public Test Realm and should hit live servers next month. There’s also the Workshop, which gives players immense freedom in creating custom game types.