Director's Take - Looking Ahead to Improvements and Experiments

Hi everyone, and Happy Friday! :)

It's been a very exciting week and a half for Overwatch 2! Season 9: Champions shipped with a new and improved version of our Competitive system and a pretty comprehensive set of changes to the core mechanics of our game.

We're incredibly invested in these changes having a positive impact on the game and are committed to making rapid iterations to them to make that happen. In fact, earlier this week, we made our first pass at tuning with a set of refined projectile sizes and health changes for some of our heroes. We'll keep an eye on how these play out in order to inform you of our next set of changes.

Let's talk about the reworked Competitive Play system, which also launched with Season 9. There's been a lot of excitement around it. In fact, there's been a pretty sizeable shift in our player population because of it. Previously, Quick Play was the most popular mode in Overwatch. It accounted for roughly 40% of the total match hours in the game, while Competitive Play sat at around 35%. Those numbers have since shifted, and Competitive Play now makes up about 45% of match hours, with Quick Play around 32%. An interesting thing to note here is that the total number of hours that people are playing Quick Play isn't down; it's just that people are playing a lot more Competitive Play! We're really excited about this and take it as confirmation that people would like to see more changes and improvements to that side of the game, as well as systemic PvP improvements.

Speaking of improvements, we'll be making more changes in mid-Season 9 and Season 10. One of the largest of these will include the removal of grouping restrictions in Season 10. We'd like people to be able to play with their friends in every area of the game, however we'd also like to keep Overwatch's competitive integrity intact. Groups with a large range of player skill—what we call wide groups—will only play against other wide groups. Narrow groups will only be matched with