Director’s Take: Competitive Updates for Season 12

news.blizzard.com:

Hey all, Gavin Winter here from the systems team.  You’ve probably learned at this point that if I’m talking, I’m explaining topics in more detail than anyone asked for and the tone will be at least slightly irreverent.  You can expect more of that in today’s Director’s Take!

In Season 9 we talked about how we wanted to make each new Competitive Year a big event for the game, but we also mentioned that our mid-year patches would be bigger than others too.

Over the past several months our Versus, Player Experience, and Features teams have built several systems that are designed to improve our core gameplay experience for Season 12.

Let’s start with a feel-good feature everyone will be excited about, avoiding more players we don’t like!

We talked about this feature in a Developer Update earlier this year, but we’ve used that time to push this feature even further since then!  The system now features 15 avoid slots, with two different types of slots making up those 15.  You have 3 “Pinned” avoid slots that allow you to permanently avoid a player.  Unlike our old avoid slots, these Pinned slots never time out.  The other 12 “Recent” avoid slots time out after 7 days, like in our previous system.  They also use a priority system that takes many factors into account when determining whether an avoided player can be placed in a match with you. 

For most of our players, these Recent avoid slots function the same as our previous avoid slots—effectively always preventing these players from being placed in your match.  It is important to note that it’s still possible to get players in Recent avoid slots in your matches though.  This can happen when you’re at very high Rank or if you’re in lower-population regions during off hours.

As queue time increases, we’ll slowly begin ignoring players at the bottom of the Recent list.  You can reset the duration of each player on the Recent list individually, sending them back to the top of Recent list.

The new system also automatically