Overwatch 2’s Terrible Competitive Mode

Ranked matches are very important to the health and long term lifespan of a video game. One of the things that kept me coming back to Guilty Gear: Strive and League of Legends: Wild Rift was trying to improve or maintain my rank. As someone that never had aspirations of being a professional player, I still want to know that I’m better than 50 percent of people that play a specific game, and rank matches is the only way to achieve this. And in the best case scenario, most of your games with be against people that are near your skill level. This motivates me and makes any video game fit the football cliché, “it’s a game of inches.” The rareness of this feeling and confusion on how Overwatch 2’s ranking system works, has made the entire competitive mode feel pointless.

There are several problems with OW2’s ranking system, but the first is a lack of transparency. In most games there is a bar that goes up when you win and down when you lose, it’s designed to show how close you are to ranking up or show that if you lose your next game you can kiss your Gold rank good bye. The first Overwatch was like built in this way, and while it had it’s problem, you at least saw your rank increased or decrease — usually decrease in my case — after every match.

In OW2, you get a ranking update when you either win seven games or take twenty loses, and the count resets after either of two happens. So far this has resulted in several hours of me alternating between wins and loses with no clue if my rank is improving or decreasing. To make matters worse, I’m complete unclear what matters more, a win-lost-record or personal performance.

After ranking Bronze 5 — the lowest rank possible — after placement matches, I won seven games in a row and had a positive kill-death-ration in every game, along with consistently being in the top three performers in the match regardless of team. How was my rank reward for what I thought at the time was a stellar performance? By giving me a Bronze 5 yet again, so if OW2 competitive mode is a “game of inches” the game says I hadn’t moved an inch in several games, despite scoring multiple touchdowns and winning half of them in landslides.

At the time I came up with three reason for why this may have happen. The first was that I was playing with a friend that was higher rank, so maybe the system was giving me less points for wins due to his involvement — something I would’ve known in the OW1 system, but have to guess in the OW2 system. Second was that everyone’s rank from OW1 was lowered when converted to OW2, and since I was a Bronze rank the last time I played OW1 years ago, the game decided to really punish me and not improve my rank at all despite clearly improving, because it remembers me being bad years ago. Third, and the option I thought was least likely, is it was a glitch and OW2’s ranking system is broken.

To my surprise, the third option ended up being the reason and Blizzard said they would be giving a boost to all affected players. This was good news and bad news. Good news because it means it wasn’t my fault that my rank didn’t improve and it’s a possibility my rank will improve next time. Bad news, because I already decided I was going to write this article ripping OW2, but then it became unclear how accurate everything I was planning to write would be, so I felt obligated to play enough competitive matches to find out. It took much longer to reach seven wins this time, and I played much worse with multiple game featuring me carrying a negative kill-death-ratio. Yet despite me having a losing record overall and playing worse than the time I won seven games in a row, my tank rank jumped three spots from Bronze 5 to Bronze 2.

Eventually my Zarya and D.Va skills were enough to carry me out of Bronze, and since I hadn’t been Silver ranked in a long time, I decided to take a break from playing tank once I hit Silver 3. I then decided to play support, because support was clearly the least popular role, meaning I had almost no wait to get into game — it would usually take several minutes to connect to a match if I choose tank or damage. Kiriko became my new main, because I found her play style fun and could aim decently well with her hard to aim kunai.

I barely played support in OW1, and with everyone’s rank was being dropped for the sequel, I understood being placed in Bronze 5. What I didn’t understand was staying in Bronze 5 three ranking updates in a row, after I had a winning record before each update and had a positive kill death ratio. At the time I believed I was getting screwed and didn’t deserve to be ranked so low, but I now realize my stats just wasn’t good enough. While I was generally helping the team, I simply wasn’t healing enough and had to improve my skill to rank up. Eventually I become a Gold 3 support, but dropped to Gold 5 by the end of the first season. Gold isn’t being elite in Overwatch, but it’s the best I’ve every been and it was in a role I didn’t play in the first game with a character that didn’t exist back then, so I was happy with my progress.

Improvement and achievement are feeling that have been completely lost in OW2’s second season, and what has replaced it is a video game version of card gambling games like Blackjack and Poker. The issues with season 2 started to show up the moment you got your report card for season one. I ended the first season as a Silver 5 tank, a Gold 5 support, and a Silver 4 damage. I expected the first two rankings, because I’ve struggle with tank ever since they nerfed Zarya and I lost more than enough games for my rank to drop despite not losing enough to see it drop. And Gold five was my visible rank in support, and my win/lose record was close to even since my last rank update, so I expected no change. But my damage being Silver 4 shocked me.

After three rank updates in a row, I stayed Bronze 1. I had personally given up all hope of ever advancing and I was okay with that. I only got to Bronze 1 by riding Sombra’s hacking fingers and the moment she was nerfed, my ascent through damage rank was over. With damage being my worst position, it wasn’t a big deal that I stayed Bronze. I had recently been using the most overpowered hero in the game Sojourn, but I didn’t believe my stats were good enough for me to finally leap over the Bronze 1 obstacle. Yet, I apparently did. Due to this being an unexpected occurrence that didn’t happen after a good set of games, I didn’t feel any of the excitement that hit me when I finally left Bronze 5 or hit Gold rank for the first time. I felt robbed of an experience, but little did I know that the feeling of being robbed would turn into a negative emotion you just adjust to when playing OW2 competitive matches.

Season 2 lowered everyone from there season one rank. This was a source of frustration for many, because it took a long time to earn their ranks and being forced to grind again was a depressing prospect, yet the game gave you no choice but to play in your new lower rank with players whose skills you should be better than. That should be better than is underlined for a reason, because according to Blizzard your rank didn’t actually change and it’s only the visual that was lowered. This means that all the players in Silver matches I’m playing in are actually Gold rank like I was by the end of season one, but the display says otherwise. Personally, my support matches in Silver felt like support matches in Silver, and as a Gold player, I was putting up insane stats that I normally wouldn’t if I was in my normal rank. And my friend had top 500 players in his Diamond ranked matches, so clearly something was going on with the match making.

But untrue rankings isn’t the biggest issue with competitive mode, that’s uncompetitive play that results in one sided beat downs over 70 percent of the time. This isn’t just my opinion, because even some of the top Overwatch YouTubers are complaining about uncompetitive match making, and it was combining the information in the video below with my own personal experience did I realize that OW2 has become gambling.

My favorite betting game is Blackjack. To this day my best accomplishment in gambling was taking $25 dollars that an casino app gave me with a requirement of having to bet over 500 dollars to withdraw the $25 and any other winnings that came with it, and successfully winning $576 dollars. While there was some strategy to winning in Blackjack, I mostly got luck with the cards the app was drawing for me and never believed I became a great Blackjack player. Recently I’ve been unable to climb out of Silver in my support role. My girl Kiriko’s ultimate had been nerfed, so I could no longer consistently get a team skirmish win once or twice a game with her ultimate. I’ve also been getting some of the worst teammates for many games and went on consistent losing streaks, until I would break them with the occasional two game winning streak. I found this to be so frustrating that I stopped playing for about three weeks, and found nothing to have changed after playing a few games when I returned.

All this changed one night when I won ten games in a row and returned to Gold 5. Unlike the other times I ranked up, this didn’t come with the same sense of accomplishment, because with the except of two games, none of the matches were close and I was just a role player on a superior team. If this was a game of Blackjack, I was consistently drawing 20s, meaning only one number — 21–could beat me, something that rarely happens. Games were often decided after the characters were selected.

If your team’s tank is Junker Queen and the other team’s tank is Roadhog, you were just drawn a bad hand and are likely to lose. If your team’s damage are Sojourn and Junkrat and the other team’s damage is Sombra and Genji, you were just drawn a good hand and are likely to win. While obviously character advantage has been an issue with OW2 from the start, in the middle of a long losing or winning streak, you’ll get the disadvantaged hero on your team, yet still win or lose, because the skill gap is so vast between opposing players, it didn’t matter. And that’s when it becomes even more aggravating, like what’s the point of having distinct ranks, if the teams are drastically imbalanced more than 70 percent of the time?

Overwatch 2 can still be a great game, when competitive matches are actually competitive and the player feel comfortable with how their rank is being decided. The problem is, actually competitive matches have become endangered species and working to improve your rank no longer feels like it’s worth the effort.