Last week developer Blizzard Entertainment shared a new blog post for free-to-play hero shooter Overwatch 2. In it, the developers address competitive play improvements. Among them the team noted matchmaking updates, bringing back a popular ranked game mode, as well as testing new ways for friends to play together regardless of their individual skill levels.
Your internal matchmaking rating (or, MMR) is adjusted after every match, not just when you get your Competitive Update—it goes up when you win a game and goes down when you lose a game. A player that beat a stronger team will have a greater increase in their MMR rating. Inactive players will have their MMR lowered during their absence.
Going into Season 5, the devs noticed that there are more Grandmaster players compared to the past seasons. However, the team also noted that more players have ended up in Bronze 5 than Blizzard wanted:
“This is mostly an unintended side effect of adding MMR decay for inactive players in Overwatch 2. We’ve started making incremental adjustments in Season 5 to enable more players to climb out of Bronze 5 in a way that doesn’t upset the distribution of the curve. This is an issue we plan to closely monitor in future weeks and seasons.”
At the moment, hopping into Competitive with friends requires players to be within a certain skill range of one another. For Grandmasters, it is further capped to stacks of two. However, the team still wants to find ways to elevate full-team competition. Enter: Team Queue as a mid-season Competitive mode.
This mode requires players to be in full group of five in order to queue but there are no restrictions whatsoever. This means a team composed of players with any combination of ranks can play with each other. The mode servers as a first step to improving the core Competitive experience for OW2 in the future.
