ScottMercer

A few people have asked about “What constitutes a Masters or Grandmasters” match, so let me answer that for you all. When Hero Pools come back, they will be active in your match if the average SR amongst all the players is greater or equal to 3500 SR. So if you’re at 3495 SR, you could be in a match with hero pools if other players in the match have higher SRs and raise the average above 3500. If you have a SR of 3510, you could end up in a match with an average SR below 3500 and not have hero pools. One other thing to note is that you can still end up in an “Master and Grandmaster” match even if you or other players are in placements.

We’ve been continuing to read, listen, and watch feedback on Hero Pools from members all across the Overwatch community, and we’re going to make additional changes to the feature to address many of these concerns. Let’s jump right into what we’re doing!

Hero Pools Will Now Use Overwatch League Data

Starting this weekend, Hero Pools eligibility will be determined using hero usage rates from Overwatch League games. While initially our data showed that there were many similarities in hero usage between online high-level Competitive Play and OWL matches, online hero usage over the last few weeks has seen a lot of changes due to the release of Patch 1.47’s balance updates, Experimental Card, and Echo. There were some significant differences between online hero picks versus the most played hero compositions in Overwatch League. Yes, I’m looking at you, Mei and Reaper. Determining Hero Pools with online data did achieve our goal to increase hero variance in m...

The results of your matches in the Role Queue Beta are not being thrown out and will be used by the matchmaking systems to help determine your skill in season 18.

What the blog post was trying to explain is that the Role Queue Beta season’s stats in your player profile will only be available for a limited time, and they will not be added to your career competitive totals that you can see when you choose “ALL COMPETITIVE SEASONS” in your career stats.

We’re now over halfway into the Role Queue Beta Season, and the introduction of Role Queue into Quickplay and Season 18 are just around the corner on September 1. We wanted to take the opportunity to address feedback we’ve been reading on our forums and other social media, as well as provide some insights into how these systems work.

The primary goal of this feature has always been to increase the quality of Overwatch matches, and it’s been great to see so much positive feedback about match quality in a role queue world. Creating high quality online multiplayer games of Overwatch has multiple components and Role Queue has helped us do this in several important ways.

We believe the most exciting, fun games are between players of similar skill. Role Queue allows us to track your skill with the three roles separately. So, when you play as a 2100 SR Tank we try to match you with 2100 SR Damage and Support players, both on your team and on the enemy team. We can’t guarantee...

Hello everyone!

Starting with Season 16 of Competitive Play, Grandmaster players (players with SR >4000) will no longer be able to queue for competitive matches in a party size larger than two. In an effort to have higher quality and more fun matches for everyone, Overwatch actively tries to place parties of similar sizes together to create fair matches. For the vast majority of players this feature of the matchmaking system works reasonably well. For our Grandmaster players, making fair matches is always more difficult simply because there are fewer players of their skill level to place together. It’s even harder if we allow Grandmasters to queue with larger groups. We believe this change will help create better quality matches for all Grandmaster players.

Thank you and please continue to share your feedback about Competitive Play!