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Season 9 of Overwatch 2 brought some major changes to the game, one of the largest being a total revamp of the game’s competitive system. Well…sort of. Strictly cosmetic, Season 9 of Overwatch 2’s ranked season aims to provide more insight into your wins and losses and give you a more accurate idea of your rank. And yes, it’s an improvement over the other ranked seasons, where you didn’t even get a numerical value representing your rank. But it’s still the same nightmare we’ve lived in since Overwatch 2 began.
Overwatch 2’s Ranked System Still Sucks
Let’s discuss how poor Overwatch 2’s ranked system was before Season 9. Before, you would get a ranked update after you play a series of up to 20 games. Your rank would update whenever you won five games or lost 15 games. Theoretically, you could lose 14 games but then win your next five, and your rank would update, likely leading to a demotion due to the amount of losses. Frankly, I’m still not particularly sure what the goal of this system was. It provided no transparency into how you performed game to game, and it was incredibly demotivating when you knew you had to play out the rest of your games, only for a demotion waiting for you.
Still, I digress. This system is gone, and a new and improved ranked mode is here to take over. Now, the game functions more like other competitive games. You still don’t have a “Skill Rating” that most other games do to track your progress. However, you see your progress after each game through a percentage, which naturally goes up when you win and down when you lose. Reaching 100% will result in a promotion, while hitting 0% will result in a demotion, with one free game intended to act as a demotion shield.
The Lack of Transparency Still Exists
The biggest issue with Overwatch 2’s ranked system was always their tendency to shove in too many things rather than opting for simplicity. Games like League of Legends and Valorant will always cause the community to rant over matchmaking issues and character balance, but at the very least, they have a simple system: Did you win a game? You get some points. Did you lose a game? You lose some points.
However, Overwatch 2 adds so many bells and whistles to its ranked system that it’s hard to parse completely, even with their attempt at adding some transparency during your climb. How much percentage you get towards your next rank can be influenced by several different factors that the game claims to know. Some of these make sense and exist in other games. If you are on a large and continuous win streak, naturally, you should be getting more points. However, if you’re on a big loss streak, you’ll naturally lose more points as you likely don’t belong in the rank you’re playing in.
However, things get messy when the game decides to know whether or not your team should win or lose. You can get more points if you win a game that “you weren’t favored in,” while you can lose more points if you lose a game that you were favored in. I’m assuming this means the enemy team just had a higher rank than you collectively, but nowhere will this be clarified. This has led to lots of frustration in the community because sometimes, these factors don’t really make sense and just lead to a more frustrating climb.
The Matchmaking Issue
These confusing changes aren’t an extreme issue by themselves, but they’re compounded by some of the worst matchmaking decisions to date, as Blizzard implemented a soft rank reset to go along with this season. It made sense on paper. Not only were there some pretty big changes to how your rank is portrayed, but Blizzard also added a new rank, Champion, intended to lessen the gap between low and high Grandmaster.
What ended up happening was a disaster in mid-ranks, where Platinum and Diamond players found themselves consistently matched with Masters and Grandmasters players who were struggling to calibrate their ranks as well. Now, you have a massive mismatch of players with an exceedingly wide range of skills consistently fighting each other. Think I’m wrong? Weeks into Season 9, top players who consistently hit the highest of ranks are still struggling to climb out of Masters.
Perception is Important for Overwatch 2 Ranked
Even if these issues aren’t as huge as the community is making it out to be (only Blizzard would have information about that), Overwatch 2 has always had a huge issue with player perception when it comes to Ranked. It’s a wonder why players are still lacking information that the original Overwatch game gave its players. When you start up a competitive game, you still can’t see the ranks of individual players. Most players hide their ranks behind a “Private Profile” to combat toxicity, but this conceals crucial information that would assist in team building. (And spoiler alert, the toxicity is still there in spades.)
Now, with this new ranked system, we have more questions rather than answers. Why was my team expected to lose this game that resulted in an absolute stomp, which greatly hurt my rank? Why did we win a game that felt like an uphill battle, but it turns out, we gained less competitive progress because we were expected to win a game? This model and attempt to add transparency is the mistake: Blizzard needs to keep it simple like its original iteration and how most other ranked systems in other games work. Overwatch 2 continues to become a great game, but it suffers from its wish to differentiate itself from its past. It’s the players who are suffering because of this.
