[2024] [Morgan Maddren] on S12 rank reset. Highlights: it's a soft reset, there will be placements, rank thresholds are shifting.

The reason Morgan says 2 weeks is that we've learned a lot from our research on Stomps. You'll hear a lot more about that topic if you read tomorrow's Director's Take(over), but we can see that stomp rate does increase in Competitive when we do the type of Rank Reset we did in Season 9.

The good news is that they don't increase very much because we're not doing a full reset. The soft reset we do preserves a lot of data about your previous rank, but it also gives players that had been randomly slightly held back by their teams a chance to climb (and a chance for the people that were carried a chance to fall...). These anomalies would have resolved themselves with enough play, but we don't all have infinite time! This disruption lasted about 2 weeks last time before stomps returned to the exact same rate, and we feel pretty confident that the effect will be similar with Season 12's Rank Reset.

I don't want to downplay how hectic things might feel today though - we do think there are still too many stomps in the game right now. I just don't think it's fair to blame the Rank Reset for that. Tomorrow's blog will be explaining one of our next big efforts to address stomps that applies to Competitive Play.

I actually didn't mention this in tomorrow's blog (I probably should have), but we'll be using Predicted Rank to make Narrow matches for players in Placements. This means it will be a lot easier to play Placements with your friends, which is the best way to play Placements anway! If you've never played a Competitive match in OW2 before your first game will still be Wide, but for the rest of us we can show Predicted Rank for the first game and that first match of Season 12 can be Narrow with friends in range.

The resets we've done in OW2 don't affect Quick Play.

When we launched the changes that made the Wide and Narrow partitions this was definitely a big problem. Since then we've made the payout for that type of behavior extremely low. My apologies that it didn't launch (and for several weeks was not) in a great state, but do you have any recent examples of players doing this that we could investigate?

This is too big of a conversation to have in a reply to a reply on reddit, but we agree we could do a better job with some aspects of handling alt accounts. We've been thinking about this problem for a long time and we still aren't ready to talk solutions, but we haven't given up on trying to solve this problem.