Season 3 of Overwatch Will Kick Off in December with a Few Changes to Skill Rating

[ffronw]

Season 3 of Overwatch Will Kick Off in December with a Few Changes to Skill Rating

//cdn.themis-media.com/media/global/images/library/deriv/1358/1358248.jpgBlizzard is prepping for the third season of Overwatch Competitive Play, which will kick off on December 1.

The second season of Competitive Play in Overwatch is still in progress, but Blizzard is already preparing for Season 3. One of the biggest changes players will see is a change to the amount of downtime between seasons. Season 2 will conclude at 7 PM ET November 24, and Season 3 will kick off one week later on December 1. During that week, you'll see a timer displayed that counts down to the start of the next season.

As you'd expect, Season 3 will bring with it some changes to the game, and it sounds like most of them will focused around matchmaking and rankings. In a post on the official Overwatch forums [http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20749698219#post-1], designer Scott Mercer explained what those changes would be.

Blizzard is testing what Mercer calls "a different way of determining your starting SR for Season 3." Rather than wipe all stats and start everyone fresh, Blizzard will start you off in Season 3 with a slightly lower Skill Rating than you had in Season 2. Of course, that will affect some players' skill tiers as well. Mercer says,

"This change will mean that some players will not start in the same tier for Season 3 that they were placed in for Season 2, and that your SR gains from winning will be a little higher at the beginning of the season. After you play enough matches, however, your SR gains and losses will go back to normal."

All of these changes are being tested on the PTR right now, so if you want to see how things are changing, you can head over there and check things out.


Permalink

 

[hentropy]

I'm not sure if Blizzard is learning the right lessons from Season 2. Elo hell is real and even if you play consistently well, climbing is more a measure of luck at the mid ranks. I made it to Platinum but I always felt that if I just got another round of placement matches (10 is too few anyway), I could easily get higher.

They've said several times they don't want to make it feel horrible when you lose a single game. It's fairly easy to address this, but Blizzard seems averse for some reason. Don't punish teams that bring it close. If a KotH map goes to five games and each game flips back and forth, goes into Overtime, and ends up going for 40 minutes, then for the love of god do not dock the losing team 30 fucking points. Give the winning team normal 20-30SR for pulling out the close one, but dock the losing team only 5-10. When you get creamed, that's when you lose more points. If you win before the other side had a leaver or troll who was doing nothing (which should be read from the stats), then the winning team shouldn't get much, and every other losing team member should only lose a little. Leaver penalties should be ramped up to include massive hits to SR after 3 or so disconnects.

I already checked out of S2, partially because I'm taking a break from the game in general, but also partially because Competitive is still a largely toxic cesspool of people bickering over whether or not Torbjorn or Hanzo is viable. If I'm forced to stay in High Gold/Low Plat because it's extremely difficult to rise consistently in that Elo, then I may not even play S3, barring some other big change that forces you to either try and herd cats, get lucky, or drop rank.

 

[bjj hero]

I feel more should be done to mitigate losses caused by leavers.

It should recognise close losses and reflect it in the sr change. It should also recognise when you lose but take all of the gold medals when the rest of your team avoided the capture point like it had ebola.

The biggest thing tha affects my sr change? Whether I solo queue.

 

[RaikuFA]

How about harsher penalties for leavers? I quit playing competitive for that reason.

 

[Battenberg]

Only thing I REALLY want to see is a rebalancing on how they assign/ take points for wins/ losses so that healers don't get screwed over compared to dps regardless of how good they are. Seems like that would actually be a good first step to fixing the problem they have atm with everyone in gold/ plat by putting the people who "main" dps but are bad at it (we've all had the misfortune of playing with them) into a more appropriate rank.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

I'm not sure if Blizzard is learning the right lessons from Season 2. Elo hell is real and even if you play consistently well, climbing is more a measure of luck at the mid ranks. I made it to Platinum but I always felt that if I just got another round of placement matches (10 is too few anyway), I could easily get higher.

They've said several times they don't want to make it feel horrible when you lose a single game. It's fairly easy to address this, but Blizzard seems averse for some reason. Don't punish teams that bring it close. If a KotH map goes to five games and each game flips back and forth, goes into Overtime, and ends up going for 40 minutes, then for the love of god do not dock the losing team 30 fucking points. Give the winning team normal 20-30SR for pulling out the close one, but dock the losing team only 5-10. When you get creamed, that's when you lose more points. If you win before the other side had a leaver or troll who was doing nothing (which should be read from the stats), then the winning team shouldn't get much, and every other losing team member should only lose a little. Leaver penalties should be ramped up to include massive hits to SR after 3 or so disconnects.

for the love of god this. it's so frustrating to have 2 teams go back and forth 5 times at an amazing standstill to only end the night being -120 rank from where you started that day.

Also super frustrating when someone disconnects, the other team notices that, uses 3-4 ults to steamroll the imbalance, and when the DC comes back we are stuck having an uphill battle in the next round.

 

[Pinky's Brain]

At the end of the day if you lose 50% of your matches the matchmaking is doing it's job.

That's unfortunately a very hard truth for many people to swallow.

 

[Bobular]

I feel more should be done to mitigate losses caused by leavers.

It should recognise close losses and reflect it in the sr change. It should also recognise when you lose but take all of the gold medals when the rest of your team avoided the capture point like it had ebola.

The biggest thing tha affects my sr change? Whether I solo queue.

My biggest issue with Overwatch is that none of my friends play it on the same system, I have friends with XBox, friends with PS4 and I play on PC. This means I'm stuck playing with random people, this can sometimes lead to some awesome games but just as often can lead to games where I know I didn't preform my best and still got 3-4 gold medals.

Then you'll have guys blaming everyone else because they got gold eliminations so it's clearly not their fault. I rate the medals from best to worse:

Objective Time - actively contributing
Objective Eliminations
Healing
Eliminations - thinks the game is Team Deathmatch

Yeah I know it's not always so cut and dry and there are perfectly legit tactics that will result in just getting eliminations, but I'm personally getting sick of being stuck with people who just want to kill other players and don't care about the objective.

 

[RaikuFA]

At the end of the day if you lose 50% of your matches the matchmaking is doing it's job.

That's unfortunately a very hard truth for many people to swallow.

Except I haven't won a single match due to a teammate leaving in the middle of a match. We need a harsher penalty for these people.

 

[bjj hero]

I feel more should be done to mitigate losses caused by leavers.

It should recognise close losses and reflect it in the sr change. It should also recognise when you lose but take all of the gold medals when the rest of your team avoided the capture point like it had ebola.

The biggest thing tha affects my sr change? Whether I solo queue.

My biggest issue with Overwatch is that none of my friends play it on the same system, I have friends with XBox, friends with PS4 and I play on PC. This means I'm stuck playing with random people, this can sometimes lead to some awesome games but just as often can lead to games where I know I didn't preform my best and still got 3-4 gold medals.

Then you'll have guys blaming everyone else because they got gold eliminations so it's clearly not their fault. I rate the medals from best to worse:

Objective Time - actively contributing
Objective Eliminations
Healing
Eliminations - thinks the game is Team Deathmatch

Yeah I know it's not always so cut and dry and there are perfectly legit tactics that will result in just getting eliminations, but I'm personally getting sick of being stuck with people who just want to kill other players and don't care about the objective.

overwatchlf is great for that.

Im not talking about getting the most kills so clearly my team suck, this is not team deathmatch. But when you get gold medals in kills, objective time and objective kills (and im no overwatch master) it makes me wonder what the rest of the team were doing.

 

[hentropy]

Have you ever considered that high gold/low plat is exactly where you belong?

Well ideally, that may very well be the intent. Blizzard, with this announcement basically admitted that there are way more people in gold and plat than originally intended, where you have a huge amount of people between 2000-3000, meaning that you have a great number of people of wildly varying actual skill in the same skill tier. I play half the heroes on the list competently if not quite well, I get on mic, I try to work around what my team is doing. I'm honest about my ability with certain heroes, particularly when I play Reinhardt (because no one else has picked him). I can tell when I'm being shut down as a certain hero and adjust accordingly. As a result, in about 3/4ths of matches, wins and losses, I have some of the better individual stats. I believe I'm playing the game "right" and in the best way I can to help my team win. And yeah, the game at this level is just filled with "mains" who can only play one hero, instalock, and don't know much about how to build with or work with a team. Sometimes they're relatively new players or ones that don't play as often, likely getting lucky in placement.

And that's the frustrating part about it. I wouldn't mind yo-yoing in the ranks where I'm at currently, if the games actually felt balanced and fun. You know, competitive. About 1/8 feel like that for me, if that. It just ends up being a coin-flip where you hope your team is coordinated and not immediately toxic, or isn't just full of silent "mains" who need to be carried and built around. Most games are just lopsided stompings, or someone leaves, and you just have to hope that you're on the right side of the coin flip. And that's what it feels like, your entire fate rests on a coin flip. That even if you ARE a Diamond-level player (some anecdotes about people with multiple accounts backs this up), it is very hard to climb simply due to the circumstances of what that area is like.

It's always going to be difficult to try and assign an individual score to what is very fundamentally a team game. You could take individual play out of it and just give a set number of SR for every win and loss, or you could take team performance out of it and base someone's SR on a much more complex set of individual stats than what is being employed now (of course we don't really know, because Blizzard is cagey about how they determine SR). The hybrid system they're using now can work, but it needs a lot of changes to truly reflect team performance and individual skill.

 

[Fijiman]

Meh. I'd maybe care more about the competitive game mode if I had a team worth of people I gamed with regularly, but as it stands I'm lucky if I have one person to play with most days I play Overwatch. This also hasn't helped my mindset that I'd rather just fuck around in the training modes and kill bots all day rather than get my ass handed to me all day because I can't get a decent team for more than five minutes most days.