When Competitive Play first debuted in Overwatch during the closed beta, Blizzard gathered a good amount of feedback regarding what was working and what wasn’t. According to director Jeff Kaplan in conversation with Eurogamer, while there was some happiness with the system, it also led to frustration “because it was unfinished.”
“We got enough sentiment from the competitive community that we realized we needed to make some changes.”
Kaplan then explained that, “The system that we had implemented was what we like to call ‘progression-based’. We thought there was a lot of coolness to doing this kind of system and that’s why we had the one month reset, because it feels good to go through the progression more than one time.
“What was not implemented, was what we called our ‘heroic rank’, where it would show a stack ranking of top players who hit that rank. There was a misunderstanding among our playerbase that everyone was going to get to heroic rank, which is not true, just like it’s not true that everybody will get to legendary in Hearthstone.”
One of the bigger issues of the old system is that once players reached a tier – like Advanced or Expert (starting tier is Challenger) – they would never drop a tier even with numerous losses. The new system will actually take wins and losses into account when deciding whether you advance or fall down a tier.
Seasons will also last two and a half months with a week off in between seasons. “There’s obviously way more details than that, but we’re not fully ready to unveil the system as a whole, but I think those were the things that people were most concerned about.”
Overwatch‘s Competitive Play is expected to release sometime this month so stay tuned for more details.
