Fairness coming to competitive season three

So Blizzard has announced that Season 3 competitive mode starts December 1st. Season 2 ends November 24th, which means there will be less time in between the break than we had last time. They completely overhauled Competitive mode for Season 2 but its still not perfect, despite completely changing everything about it. A lot of players have cried ELO hell, the idea that once you're surrounded by shit teammates there's no escaping your low rank. This is where I've been at in Overwatch for pretty much all of Season 1 and most of Season 2.

The beginning of Season 2 for me was pretty good. I was almost gold but I just didn't put in enough time because I'm too busy working, hanging out with friends, and teaching them guitar moves. Once they learn the basic more we're gonna start writing songs for our band. Even though I'm a great guitar player its still difficult teaching people from the very beginning. "This is a C chord..." More on that later in another post.

Anyways, for Season 3 they aren't completely changing everything like last time but they are making some major tweaks. In a forum post principal designer Scott Mercer explained that they want to change things in two ways. First, they want players to quickly get into matches with players of equal skill. And second, they want it to feel like a fresh start. Kinda conflicting ideas but we'll have to wait and see what happens. He went on to say:

“Another area of Competitive Play we’re trying to improve for Season 2 is how we distribute everybody into their Skill Tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, etc.) based on their SR. When Season 2 started, we had WAY more players in Gold and Platinum than we initially intended, and way fewer in Bronze and Silver. This was the result of how we calculated your initial SR for Season 2. We tried to partially reset player SR at the start of Season 2, but the results were not as we expected. Instead, below-average players started Season 2 at a higher SR than they should have been given their performance in Season 1. This meant that as they played in Season 2, their SR would often drop to a lower value, which didn’t feel great. It also meant that there was a much wider variation of skill in the Gold and Platinum tiers than we wanted. This is something we want to avoid in Season 3.”

In the end Blizzard has decided to go with fairness over everything else. Skill rating will be lower at the start but we'll have higher than normal skill rating gains.

The new skill rating system is already effect on the ptr, which has a bunch of other changes that I've written about here.

I'll try out all this stuff on my day off tomorrow. Lately, I haven't had as much time for gaming because pesky work gets in the way. If only I didn't need money to buy games, but now I don't have time to play the games I buy. Quite the conundrum I'm in now.