This Experimental mode is anticipated to be available until the morning of Monday, January 11th (PST)!

Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – January 7, 2021

A new patch is now live on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.

To share your feedback, please post in the General Discussion forum.
For a list of known issues, visit our Bug Report forum.
For troubleshooting assistance, visit our ...

Welcome to Season 26 of Competitive Play

Season 26 of Competitive Play is here!

Unlocked at level 25, Competitive Play is designed for those players who want to put their skills to the test, and offers a more serious experience than our Quick Play or Arcade Modes.

GETTING STARTED

Before you can kick off your competitive career, every player will be required to complete five placement matches in a selected role to obtain their seasonal skill rating for that role. Within the standard Role Queue competitive mode, players will earn separate skill ratings (SR) for each role in Competitive Play, for a total of three distinct SRs. This rating will be a number between 1 and 5000, with higher values indicating a greater skill level. Players will also be assigned a tier per role based on their rating—Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, or Grandmaster – and climbing into the next tier is possible as you improve. Open Queue will utilize the sam...

Let’s clear this up:

Cut and dry to me. One could argue the feeding rule. I try to make an effort to confront the player directly first, if they refuse to cooperate or fail to group up, then I report. I also know that i...

Thanks to the development team for working to keeping the community a great one!

UPDATE (Dec 22)

We have issued a manual action wave against players with confirmed instances of gameplay sabotage. We encourage everyone to take this time to review the purpose of the Priority Pass feature and its intended function within Overwatch.

Report only goes so far because we can’t report players who simply plays badly. I myself rarely report for gameplay sabotage (only for abhorrently blatant feeders, AFKers, or use (or not use) abilities to hinder their allies gameplay).

The Avoid as Teammate function is a short-term function designed to simply get away from a specific player during your current session, however it is limited in order to make sure it does not impact matchmaking. In your proposal of a solo-only experience, this function would nothing to improve consistency in matches because each person will still get 11 total random players in their mat...

So I should be subjected that every single match be filled with solo-queue randoms not knowing if any one of them is going to be toxic, uncooperative, plays in a way that I just don’t do well with (and vise versa)?

The times displayed are still estimates and will vary. Is this just a one-time instance or are you seeing this consistently throughout your games?

Splitting up between Solo Queue and Role Queue is a way, but I think the developers have shut down that possibility as they don’t want matchmaking to take even longer to make happen.

As it stands now, is the person who groups up in a 6-stack consistently have the same level of overall skill as that of a person who solo queues consistently? I don’t believe they do and that is what I (personally) think is unfair.

I think it is important to remember that prior to the introduction of the role queue, the game was already collecting role-specific performance and win rate stats to help shape the SR/MMR for off-roles. Now assuming everything we publicly know about the matchmaker has remained true to this point, a player who has not touched an off-role since the introduction of role queue, any MMR associated with that role should be considered “unstable” and subject to significant swings in MMR/SR gained or lost until the game becomes more sure of their skill. I think this is what Josh Nash means by “grandfathering” the MMR.

Having any sort of reset would...

Once again, I am going to ask about this as it has never really been explained publicly, only just confirmed in a few past developer posts. Why is group-size a priority of matchmaking? I get in any given single game of Overwatch, this rule feels more fair, but when I look at the grand scheme of things and seeing the balance of the overall Competitive ladder, I would think that demonstrating the skills of good team coordination would be more beneficial for all players, and the best way to do this is by grouping up.

However, because g...

Hey everyone! Now that the Priority Pass is live on the Retail environment, we wanted to make sure we were clear on the feature’s intended function, goals, and what constitutes misuse of the feature.

How It Works: Intended Function

The Priority Pass is intended to offer players a reward for queueing “Flex” on the role queue screen, thereby helping to fill games’ most needed roles and increase the rate at which matches begin. When you queue for “Flex,” you are essentially signing up for all three roles and will be assigned a role based on which have the lowest population at that time. Based on the final result of the match (win, draw, or lose), you will be awarded differing amounts of Priority Passes, i.e. if you’re looking to maximize your Priority Pass accrual rate, you’ll want to play to win! These Priority Passes can be used to “skip [part of] the line” when queuing for roles currently experiencing high volume (transparently, this is most ofte...

I much rather equip the “End of 2020” icon, but its not loaded in the forums yet.

The graphic designer in me is intrigued when I saw this and I wish to ask what exactly does Trey do that requires Illustrator? Is he just planning out the overall map design to build in 3D later? I assume based on his role it’s not to do art texturing or graphics to the maps.

Server crashes like the one Josh describes above usually results in the “Server closed due to unexpected error” and that will not have a penalty. If you were penalized it is more likely due to a disconnection. In any case, Blizzard does not refund skill rating lost, but it is easy to recover it by simply playing Competitive game to full normally and allow your SR and hidden MMR to resync.

Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – December 18, 2020

A new patch is now live on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.

To share your feedback, please post in the General Discussion forum.
For a list of known issues, visit our Bug Report forum.
For troubleshooting assistance, visit our ...

Hi All!

As we’re wrapping up the year, Dan and I wanted to check in with you guys and see if you had any questions about Workshop.

Curious how it works? How it came to be? The people behind it? Where it’s headed? We’re collecting questions and would love to hear yours!

Appreciate the report - Have this one logged and is under investigation.

We have identified an issue with Junkertown that was resulting in an uptick in collapsed matches. We have temporarily disabled the map from Quick Play and Competitive Play while we investigate the issue. You will still be able to access the map in Custom Games and the Arcade.