Season 2 of Overwatch’s Competitive Play is set to be coming to an end next month, though the beginning of season 3 won’t be too long afterwards. In fact, season 3 will be kicking off on December 1st, and with it will come some changes to how it calculates skill rating.
The news was announced through a blog post that the game’s principal designer Scott Mercer recently published, where he talked about the problems with skill rating in season 2 and how they will try to fix it with season 3. He said the following:
“First and foremost, we always want to provide the fairest matches that we can. Fair matches of skill between the teams provide the greatest chance for you to have fun in Overwatch. At the same time, we’d also like every new competitive season to feel like a fresh start. These two goals end up being somewhat contradictory. If we completely reset everyone’s Skill Rating (SR) at the start of a new season, then players of all skill levels would end up playing against each other and having poor quality matches until the system could reevaluate each player’s skill. Because of this, we don’t fully reset your SR when a new season begins, and instead use your SR from the previous season as a starting point.”
He goes on to discuss how they will attempt to fix distributing players into their skill tiers, as there were problems with this in season 2. Due to how they calculated skill rating in season 2, it resulted in many people being in higher tiers and fewer people being in lower tiers. This resulted in player skill ratings dropping quickly, as well as the skill gap between tiers being larger than they should have. They’re testing different ways to fix this for season 3, with one of the ways currently being to tune everyone’s SR to be slightly lower at the start.
Overwatch is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. You can check out the full blog post by clicking right here.
Published: Oct 25, 2016 10:33 am