We're coming to the end and the finale of season one of competitive Overwatch. It's been an interesting season, with a lot of experimental changes, including the Sudden Death system, shortening overtimes to prevent 6 Tracer teams dashing around the place, and it even introduced the 1 hero limit too. We've seen lots of different changes, and Blizzard has been listening to the community when it came to competitive Overwatch. People were vocal about many things, such as not having a hero limit, and especially the Sudden Death / Coin Flip system. Luckily, Blizzard have announced many changes that a majority of players are going to like, and there's a lot of competitive changes that are going to lead to an exciting season of Overwatch. So, lets dig right into it!

Skill Ratings and Skill Tiers

- Ranked Tiers

Skill Ratings as you know it are changing! That's right, Blizzard are moving to a sort of hybrid system of Dota 2's MMR style, and League of Legends Skill Tier system (Bronze, Silver, Gold). First off, Blizzard are going to be moving away from the 1-100 skill rating system, although it's not going to be much more complicated. It's going to move from 1-100 to 1-5000, for a couple of reasons. Mainly, because of the fact that Blizzard are now introducing a new "Tier" system, where you're going to be in a different skill tier around every 500 skill rating points. For example, a gold player will be in the 2000-2499 skill rating area, meaning that you're going to feel a lot more satisfied when you rank up. The other reason Blizzard have moved to this system is because initially, they didn't want people to identify as a "52" for example when it came to competitive Overwatch. They just wanted to use it as a general idea to show you how you're performing as a player. Because of how people felt, they ended up feeling pretty bummed out when they went down a few skill levels, naturally. To prevent this, Blizzard introduced the new tiers for you to play for.

- Tier Progression

This is a great thing for multiple reasons as well! This is so players can go up and down in skill rating depending on a win or a loss, and can still say "Ah, I lost a couple of games the other night and my skill rating went down, but on average I perform and play like a Gold Player!". They also plan on making it feel less of a big deal when you go down a rank, as the skill tiers will have a similar system to the way the Season High skill rating works. You will be able to get to Gold, and when you have a couple of bad games and drop down to Silver, they want you to understand that you're still on average, a Gold player. Blizzard want you to lose a couple of games and then say "Oh well, maybe if I play some tomorrow I can get back to where I belong, back in the Gold skill rating!". In short: losing a little bit of your skill rating doesn't mean you've gone down in skill as a player, you may have just been unlucky and witnessed the system kind of dealing you a bad hand. Play a bit more to get back to where you belong and get back into progressing onwards!

Finally, you're not going to be able to drop out of certain tiers. More specifically, you're only going to be able to drop out of the very high end tiers, where the minority of players are. These are identified by Blizzard as "Master" and "Grand Master". For all the other tiers, once you become Gold after getting out of Silver for example, you ARE Gold for that season. This means that if you've been playing pretty mediocre at the last week of the season, there's nothing to worry about! This of course ties in with the current system, as you have your season/career high which is what you're going to be rewarded for at the end of the season. So this means, that the known tiers that we will now have in season two are "Bronze, "Silver", "Gold", "Diamond", "Master" and "Grand Master".

End of Season Rewards and Competitive Points

- The Rewards

Luckily, this isn't going to be overly complicated! Quite a lot of simple changes you're going to understand quickly. Firstly, at the end of season two, it's going to be pretty much the same as the end of season one. You're going to get your rewards based on the highest tier you receive within that season. You still get your competitive rewards based on your season highest, so don't worry if you drop out of that exclusive Master tier at the end of season two. As mentioned, it's similar to the season one rewards, players that are around the 70 skill level will get greater rewards, even if they may have dropped down to the low 60 mark, so there's really nothing to worry about there! So what's the more interesting change?

- Competitive Points Changes

That's actually the change to competitive points. Because of the tie system Blizzard is going to be introducing (this will be explained shortly, don't worry!), they are going to be multiplying competitive points by ten. There's really nothing to be worried about, as you're still going to have your current banked skill points multiplied too, but this is also going to come along with the fact that the golden guns and weapons you're going to be getting in Overwatch are going to have their competitive points cost multiplied by ten also. This makes sense, but it's information you're going to need to know.

General Changes to Competitive Play

- Bye Bye Coin Toss, Hello Time Bank!

Lots of changes, eh? Yep. And lets just dive right into them. We're going to be seeing a change that many people are probably hoping to see, and if you're in the majority, you're going to be happy. You can now say farewell to Coin Toss / Sudden Death ladies and gentlemen. Blizzard have finally confirmed they're ditching the system. So what's happening then? Time bank will be coming to hybrid maps such as Numbani and full payload maps like Dorado and Gibrilatar. If you push the payload all the way to the end and have 3 minutes remaining, you will now have that time to see how far you can push the payload. Ties will be introduced, however rare on these maps now, the only time a realistic tie will happen is if neither teams push the cart, which would be an extremely rare case within itself.

- Small Changes to Assault Mode Maps

For Control maps like Nepal, it’s still the best of five system and you’ll always have a winner. For assault modes, maps like Volskaya or Hanamura, they’re still using the time bank system, which means you have a set amount of time to finish a match quickly. One thing Blizzard have done is after the initial first round capture of point A, they’ll always give a bonus 30 seconds as they’re awkward times when you would capture a point in overtime and the map would just end and you wouldn’t have a shot at the second point, encouraging great comeback moments. On the flipside, where they used to give you 2 minutes of bonus time, when a match would run out and you’d go below 2 minutes, say 30 seconds, they’d bump you up to 2 minutes, now it’s only a minute. Blizzard are tuning this off of the player feedback too, which is pretty nice. The bonus time is also being given to the other team, just to make it fair for both sides in the fight.

- Hybrid Maps

On hybrids, ties will only happen if nobody initially captures the payload checkpoint. Blizzard acknowledges that ties aren’t the most satisfying for players, but they’ve learned that sudden death is not satisfying either, and one team got dealt the short straw and had to live with it, whilst a tie just kind of leaves it for you to move onto the next game. Since ties are so rare, this should be fine anyways. In the current system, you could have 4-5 or more back to back sudden death finishing games, but if you have that happen with ties in season 2, you’re most likely setting a record in reality. It shouldn’t happen. Overall time bank coming to escort and payload maps will make it a lot more exciting and competitive.

- Trimming off Time

Blizzard have also looked at places where they could just trim down a bit of time the match takes to help make games not be as long. For example, when you assemble your heroes the first time, it’ll be the same, however later on in the game it’ll be a lot shorter time period than the first initial hero assembly.

- Stricter Restrictions with Dynamic Queueing

Blizzard have also had concerns with players grouping up with wide skill ratings. For example, you would sometimes see a team of 3-4 players, where the skill ratings go from around 40-50 and then 1 player was a skill rating of 71. They’re addressing this problem by making it a lot more restrictive in terms of who you can queue with. The new skill rating system only allows you to queue with other people who are within 500 skill rating above or below you (this is with the new system of course). If players are too annoyed by this, then Blizzard will most likely loosen up on the distance, but Blizzard want you to understand what they’re dealing with: It’s hard to battle this, as there’s the desire to play with your friends VS the unfairness of wide skill ratings spread across a team, as this can ruin a competitive match for both teams. This might change before the initial release, as Blizzard are taking feedback from players upon the PTR release (check it out and help out yourself if you feel like doing so, it’d really help the competitive gamemode!).

Changes for Top 500 Players

- Skill Rating Decay

The top end players are going to also be experiencing something new: Skill Rating Decay. This will only really affect Master or Grand Master players, as well as Diamond. You will be subject to this new feature (of course only the Top 500). This means that if you don’t play competitive Overwatch for a week, you will lose 50 skill rating every 24 hours. You will only go down to the bottom of Diamond, you won't just become Bronze after a long time, so don’t worry too much. This is to encourage top end players to fight to keep their high rank and not to just get their high rank and sit there for the rest of the season.

- Tougher Entry Barrier for Top 500 Players

The top 500 players will also have to play at LEAST 50 matches to get there. This means that high end players haven’t just played a couple of good games and got to the top, they’re genuinely a very high skilled player. Lucky players basically won’t just get put in the highest skill rating after some good placements.

So, anything else?

This is the majority of the important information that we as the public have got at this time! It looks like it's going to be an extremely exciting season ahead of us with some really important changes being added to Overwatch. Hopefully the community will be a lot more happier with these changes, and it also looks like the Top 500 players are going to have a little bit more competition too! The new skill rating system is pretty awesome, but in reality, we can only see the true extent of these changes when season two finally comes along!

Don't forget to check out the PTR region if you're interested in checking out these changes before everyone else, and also if you do, don't forget to help out Blizzard by giving them any important feedback you might have from your experience, you can help shape the future of competitive Overwatch and make the experience more enjoyable for everyone, including yourself! Have fun, and good luck next season! Remember to keep an eye on the patch notes that get released in the near future for more details on the Season 2 update(s) too!