Director’s Take – Building on Feedback

As many of you know, two weeks ago, there were a series of changes made to the Overwatch team, as well as other teams across Blizzard. Writing a public blog is difficult in the wake of these events. I want to express gratitude for the absolutely amazing people who worked on our game that are no longer on our team. I want the community to feel informed, and I want to convey our excitement about what is to come in Season 9. To be honest, it’s a lot to balance – but one of the things we’ve been most proud of is how we’ve kept lines of communication open between the team and our community, and we intend to continue that.

In that spirit, yesterday, we shared the exciting changes you are going to experience with Competitive starting in Season 9. I’d like to give a bit more insight into why we are making these changes. In our previous Director's Take, we talked about improving the game’s core PvP experience. There are different ways that we look at improving the game, but one of the biggest is listening to your feedback.

Season 9 starts in less than a week, and the two biggest and best changes coming to the season and a lot of it is driven by feedback from you – our players along with our team’s vision to make the game more fun and challenging for everyone.

The first is the reworked Competitive system, and there is a lot of improvements to rank transparency, new skill tiers, and new competitive rewards. We started talking publicly about this in September when we referenced a video that summarized many of the problems that existed with the current system. Some of these were:
 

Our top goal with this rework is to make the system easier to understand. The old system hid too much information from players and gave it to them too infrequently. This is why we’re updating your rating after every match as well as including additional information, through modifiers, about why your rating went up or down a certain amount. Including the division range of all the players on the VS screen