Blizzard's Scott Mercer on competitive changes to Overwatch

At Gamescom 2016 Blizzard announced that they were going to roll out Season 2 competitive changes which are now entering the public test realm and Gamereactor caught up with the game's Principal Designer Scott Mercer about competitive play and the changes being made.

"First of all, we're changing the way the ratings scale works", he said. "Previously it worked on a 1 to 100 scale rating but we're changing that to 1 to 5,000 so you don't have to deal with as many fractions [...] so it's a little more understandable from that perspective, but we're also breaking that 1 to 5,000 up into separate distinct tiers and labelling them. The names are very easy to understand in terms of Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master and Grand Master. When you play and finish your placement matches you'll immediately get into a tier, something you can identify with".

"We're also making a bunch of changes to the game modes themselves. The first season we added this what we refer to as a time bank system to our Assault maps and we're actually taking that concept and moving them more towards our Escort and Hybrid maps as well and we think that's going to add a lot there. We'll be able to write tie breaks on our Escort maps really well. The first season we didn't have ties but our tie breaker wasn't very well received so we got rid of that so now we're going to allow for ties".

Mercer also said there was a lot of small changes happening as well, such as "leaver penalties becoming a little more forgiving" and grouping people closer to skill ratings in competitive play.