Competitive Play Update – Teaming up for better matches
With Season 5 now underway, we’ll be bringing new improvements to Competitive Play, including matchmaking updates, bringing back a popular ranked game mode, as well as testing new ways for friends to play together regardless of their individual skill levels. Let’s look at where Competitive Play stands today and where we are looking to take it in the months to come.
For the last few seasons, we’ve been working to make improvements to matchmaking—with a focus on Competitive Play—in an effort to bring players of equal skill levels together. Notably, this season, we’ve started to prioritize placing similar groups with wide skill ranges into the same match: while this makes queue times a little longer for large groups, it helps to ensure a fair match.
In the previous season, we started to provide a matching rank (to show how close each player is to the overall average skill rating of the lobby), along with showing you where you stand in your skill division and how close you are to reaching the next rank. We hope this provides more transparency to your matches, as well as your progression as you continue to climb.
Game director Aaron Keller provided his thoughts around how one-sided gameplay can occur in his latest Director’s Take blog, and we are continuing to make changes as we find opportunities for improvement.
We also want to continue to provide you with Competitive experiences for different styles of play, which is why for all of Season 5, Competitive Mystery Heroes is back!
Your internal matchmaking rating (or, MMR) is adjusted after every match, not just when you get your Competitive Update—it goes up when you win a game and goes down when you lose a game. However, how much it goes up or down is based on a variety of
Read more on news.blizzard.com
