Season 1 of Competitive Mode in Overwatch is coming to a close, and Season to will start late September. Details of the new changes to Competititve has been detailed in a developer update video by Game Director Jeff Kaplan.
The first changes are making the skill ratings from a scale of 100 to a scale of 5000. This is based on feedback as how people perceive the 1-100 scale being on skill rating 60 is supposedly a high percentile, but we always associate that with a B, as in that great. blame school grades. Now, a wider margin means it should not feel as bad when you are losing many skill rating points and only gaining a minuscule of it.
Aside from that, Skill Rating Tiers are back. You will generally be not demoted to a lower tier in case of losing too much skill rating and will stick to the highest tier you managed to get in.. except in the top tiers of Master and Grandmaster. Top tiers will also be imposed Skill Rating delay to encourage top players to keep playing after getting in a good spot. Competitive points will not be worth 1 per win, as its base value, including the ones earned by everyone currently, and the golden gun rewards,will be multiplied by 10.
On terms Game Mode changes, Payload (Escort) and Hybrid maps will now use both the distance and time bank systems. Sudden death is now gone, and a tie can happen (though Jeff assures it will be a rare occasion) and both teams will be rewarded for the effort. 2 Control Point (Assault) maps will also have tweaks to the time bank system: 30 seconds added for capturing point A, and minimum time in the bank for subsequent rounds are lowered to 1 minute from 2 minutes.
Lastly, to address grouping up with friends across widely disparate Skill Ratings, you can now group up with friends that have a skill rating gap of 500.
These changes will arrive on the Public Test Region (PTR) on PC to those curious to test it out prior to Season 2’s launch.