Overwatch season 2 competitive is now available across PC, PS4 and Xbox One, and there are some major changes from season 1 that competitive players need to be aware of.
First of all, the 1 to 100 scale from season 1 is gone. Season 2 of Overwatch competitive is using a 1 to 5000 scale, divided into 7 tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master and Grandmaster.
With a larger scale, you won’t go up or down half or a quarter of a level, you’ll go up or down in whole numbers, making the entire system feel better and more rewarding to play.
It also means that your Overwatch skill rating number is less important to your identity as a competitive player: regardless of what your skill rating number is at any given point, your tier indicates your average level of play. Game director Jeff Kaplan said , “There’s almost an association of a player being a certain number, and we kind of want to disassociate that a little bit. We want you to realize that the skill rating is naturally going to go up or down as you’re playing competitive matches. It’s a very normal thing.”
Once you achieve your tier for Overwatch season 2, you stay there for the season, even if your skill rating number drops below that tier. The exception is the two highest tiers, Master and Grandmaster: if you drop out of those tiers, you lose that tier rating, period.
If you are in the Master, Grandmaster or Diamond tiers, you will be subject to skill rating decay, meaning if you don’t play competitive for seven days, you lose 50 SR every 24 hours. That decay has a floor: you only go down to the bottom of Diamond. But these top players will have to actively fight to maintain their place.
End-of-season rewards for tiers will be based on the highest tier you ever got into, so even if you play at Silver for the last week of the season, you will get the reward for Gold if you ever got into Gold.
Competitive points will be multiplied by 10, including those banked. The golden guns will also cost 10 times as much.
“We want season 2 to feel kind of like a new beginning and a really awesome moment where everyone can come back and try the system again and feel much better about the direction that it’s taking,” said Kaplan.
Has Kaplan been successful? Does season 2 of competitive Overwatch feel better to you? Feel free to discuss in our comments section below.
- Amazing Art Style
- Balanced Mechanics
- Characters Keep You Coming Back For More
- No Single Player
- Overwhelming At First
