Jeff Kaplan, Game Director of Overwatch, has released some details of the upcoming season of the game's Competitive Play. As seen on the developer video update, some changes and new addition will be made on the game's second competitive season. A 15 minute video from Kaplan includes all the expected changes from the game. It is a long video presentation as expected.
However, we were able to breakdown all the notable highlights from the video itself. Among these improvements are the addition of skill rating tiers and the Sudden Matches removal, which was considered by the several Overwatch players as a likely unfair coin toss. Based on the reports from IGN, competitive ratings on season 1 fall on a range between 1-100, which Kaplan states that it was not right for a couple of reasons.
In the upcoming season, the game will introduce a new rating system that has a scale of 1-5000. According to Kaplan, the new system will help players to not feel frustrated about having constant fluctuation on their skill ratings. He also added that skill ratings are normally to either go up or go down when playing competitive games. With the new system, those numbers are now to be replaced by these additional seven tiers; Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master and Grand Master which is more meaningful enough.
According to Blizzardwatch, players who are below the Master and Grand Master skill rating will not get demoted. For example, if a gold player drops his skill rating below 2000, which is the requirement for gold, he will not be demoted back to silver. Season rewards will be based on the highest tier the player achieves during the whole season's duration.
'Tie Breaker' rounds are also set to be removed based on the video, which most player is not pleased about. For control maps there will be no overtime and will stay as best-of-5. For Assault Maps, the time bank system will remain as is but it will only be bumped up 1 minute instead of the previous 2 minutes. Lastly, Master or Grand Master players will be subjected to skill rating decay, so stay active as possible. Other proposed additions will be smurfing and spendable competitive points. However, there are no further information about it yet.
