❘ Issued: 2023-03-10T22:33:26
❘ Updated: 2023-03-10T22:33:35
The latest Overwatch 2 patch made balanced matchmaking a higher priority for Competitive matches than Quickplay games.
Overwatch 2’s matchmaking has faced heavy criticism since its launch, with many users experiencing lopsided games featuring bronze players in GM lobbies.
Although the issues have been addressed multiple times by the devs, who say the matchmaker is still a work in progress, the most recent March 7 patch made some big changes to help with competitive integrity.
A new blog post by Game Director Aaron Keller reveals that until then, the matchmaker was the same with Quick Play and Competitive, but now everything has changed.
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Overwatch 2 updates Quick Play and Competitive skill differences
According to Keller, when players line up for matches, the matchmaker will look for players of equal skill – but it will often need to expand to players with larger skill differences.
“Over the past week, we’ve made changes to the system that have decreased the skill level between players in a match significantly for both high and low MMR matches,” he explained.
More changes to OW2’s matchmaking are coming.
Keller further stated that in Season 3, they modified how the matchmaker expands over time, but it ended up removing their control over turn-by-turn behavior, meaning that skill differences would be the same in Quick Play and Competitive.
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It’s not clear why the devs’ control over queues was removed, but now it’s back and it’s tighter than before.
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“In the patch we released on Tuesday, we implemented the first of a series of system changes (more to come in Season 4) that give us back the flexibility to tune these modes separately and give us new ways to tune the system,” he. revealed
“This week we’ll be tweaking these values to increase the skill set in Competitive as much as possible while keeping the timeouts for that mode.”
Ranked matchmaking is getting much stricter.
Of course, this could very well result in longer queues for ranked players, but that may be a small price to pay for better quality matches.
Article continues after announcement
Hopefully, we’re one step closer to perfecting Overwatch’s ranked play and we can finally put the horrors of seeing golds in the Top 500 matches behind us.