Overwatch - Competitive Mode Explained - Overwatch Ranked System Guide for Beginners
262Competitive play saw its first light in the Overwatch beta, but was criticized due to its grindy nature. It was fairly easy to climb the ranks providing you put the time into it - and the overwhelming feedback that blizzard received was that people wanted to know what their skill was and how they stacked up against others. That's what the new and improved competitive mode seeks to accomplish. On June 28th, competitive launched on the PC platform, with the consoles a few days behind with the xbox one competitive releasing on June 30th and releasing on July 1st on PS4
Players compete in 6v6 matches on control, escort, assault and hybrid maps with some additional scoring adjustments and modifications to the way sudden death is implemented. You need to be level 25 or higher to participate, and you need to finish 10 placement matches before you'll be placed in a ranking. And Don't worry - you can still group with friends if you've finished your placements and they haven't!
On top of competing and earning skill rank, unique rewards are available for participating in competitive play. Finishing your placement matches gets you a spray and player icon, and winning matches will provide you with competitive points that you can use to buy cosmetic golden weapons. It's purely cosmetic though - so don't worry! The golden guns are no more effective than their normal counterparts.
At some point during the season Blizzard is also going to activate a top 500 leaderboard for each platform. There are some unofficial leaderboards and stat tracking sites that I use as well - links in the description
Stat Sites: http://www.overbuff.com https://www.masteroverwatch.com
Speaking of leaderboards and stats - let's talk about the skill rating a little bit. Once you complete your 10 placement matches, you'll be given a skill rating between 1-100. Higher values indicate a greater skill level. Skill ratings will rise and fall as you win and lose matches. This number correlated with your MMR, which is hidden - but is what ultimately feeds the 1-100 rating. There are many factors that influence the amount of skill rating you gain and lose. I'm going to go into a little bit of speculation here because Blizzard hasn't officially released this, but I've spent about 12 hours in competitive since launch and this is what I believe to be the case. The first and most important factor is whether your team is favoured to win or the underdog. This means there is a difference in your teams skill rating average. Because the numbers 1-100 are derived from your MMR, there can be two teams with a 55 average but due to the background mmr there is still a favourite and underdog (according to avg mmr). If your team is the underdog and you win, you receive more points. If you lose the game as the underdog, you'll lose less points since the loss was expected. If you lose as the favoured, you'll lose more points. The game also takes into account your individual performance by comparing your performance with how other players perform on that map, with those heroes, etc. So if you are favoured to win, and also have a really bad game (dying more than usual and not killing or taking objectives) you could stand to lose more rating. Hopefully more info will come out on the specifics of this calculation, but for many reasons Blizzard will probably keep this fairly in the dark and just give us a general idea of what is going on.
Now let's talk about Seasons. Seasons will follow the same seasons as the northern hemisphere - so we'll have 4 seasons per year. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. Each season will be 2.5 months in length and have a 2 week off season. The current season actually started in June - because of that, the first summer season is a shorter duration than the rest and will end on August 18th, with the Fall season presumably starting at the beginning of September.
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