Hi all! We’re back a little earlier than we had originally planned. Think of this as a bonus Dev Chat!

We’re going to mostly focus on maps and level design this go around.

Off we go!

Map Pools… You were right. We were wrong. Map Pools are going away starting in season 4. We aimed to provide a bit of freshness each season and concentrate the number of maps that people were playing, however player sentiment around map pools was pretty low, the map roster doesn’t have enough maps where we truly need them, and the impact they had on seasonal identity was fairly low. Additionally, the cadence for maps leaving and returning to the pool didn’t align with the time it took to make changes to the maps. Gibraltar was supposed to return in Season 4 but the playtesting and iteration we were doing for the map started calling that deadline into question. There’s the possibility that we bring map pools back in the far future when we have...

With the launch of Overwatch 2, we have welcomed over 40 million players, both returning and new, to the world of Overwatch! Since becoming free-to-play, we've continued to combat disruptive behaviors, including gameplay sabotage, abusive chat, and cheating. As explained in the introduction to our Defense Matrix initiative, we've already made strides to push toward a fairer gaming experience for all our players. Today, we have a few updates we'd like to share about how we’re continuing to ensure Overwatch 2 is a fun and safe game for everyone to enjoy.

The Overwatch team has been preparing to conclude Season 2 as we gear up to Season 3, and we’re incredibly thankful for all the player feedback we’ve seen over the past months. We’d like to take some time to reflect on this past season and give you a sense of where we’re going in the future.

Here’s more info about what we’re doing now and how we’re thinking about longer-term changes.

Ramattra stormed the hero lineup

We watched Ramattra closely when he first released, including community gameplay and conversations. We started asking ourselves some challenging questions about his kit’s performance based on your feedback—What was the community’s first impressions of his kit? Is his kit approachable? Which abilities and moments are resonating with our community? What are the sore spots?

The next set of questions focused more on his viability—How’s he performing as players learn how to play him? What compositions is he fitting into? Are there early dom...

Welcome back, heroes, for part 2 of our matchmaking series! In part 1, we talked about how matchmaking works: It’s an incredibly complex system that needs to consider many different inputs to make every single game as fair as possible. For part 2, we’re going to address some community concerns regarding the matchmaker from the perspective of the competitive game mode. Let’s get into it! 

TL/DR

• Your ranked games are formed based on your internal matchmaking rating (MMR), regardless of your displayed skill tier. MMR changes based on the result of each match, with the amount of MMR you ...

Hi everyone!

This piece is aimed at looking at some of the topics that have come up in the community over the course of Season 2. This won‘t be comprehensive enough to look at everything that players are talking about, but our intent is to do this every few weeks, so we will be able to start diving into smaller topics as we go. Also, the goal here is to keep you up to date on what we’re thinking and planning, but not necessarily to be the source for all the reasoning and detail behind those decisions.

So let’s get to it!

The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. There was confusion around players’ real rank and how that translated to their skill level, difficulty forming groups with friends, and a negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar). We will be implementing some changes in S3 and quite a few more in S4 all aimed at creating more clarit...