In a sharp contrast to Valve's Team Fortress 2, the developers behind Overwatch have so far been both communicative and fast to react. They've made plenty of mistakes along the way, there's no denying that, but they have continuously showed their willingness to improve and make things better.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the recently released Developer Update where Overwatch's Game Director Jeff Kaplan not only addressed all of the major issues that plague the competitive scene, but also announced a whole bunch of new changes to hopefully counter them. You'll find the video right below, along with a brief summary of what I believe are the most important changes:
Competitive Rating
• Competitive ranks will be on a 1-5000 scale, though this change is mostly cosmetic.
• Competitive players will be separated across 7 tiers, much like League of Legends and CS:GO. Unless you're in the final two tiers (Master and Grand Master) you will not be able to drop below your tier, so a Gold player is going to remain Gold for the entirety of the season.
• Players in the final three divisions will experience daily rating decay after not playing competitive for 7 days. The idea behind this change is to encourage continuous play rather than simply camping a high rank.
Competitive Points (aka golden guns)
• You now gain 10 times more points, your current point have been multiplied by 10, but the price of the guns has been multiplied by 10 as well.
• Normal wins will award you 10 competitive points, while draws will award 5 in order to give you something for your time, hence the point inflation.
Map changes
• The "Assemble your heroes" screen will now take less time on subsequent rounds.
• No more coin flip! Payload and Hybrid maps are now moving to the Time Bank system present in Assault maps.
• If you finish a map with under 1 minute left you will no longer be brought up to 2 minutes, but rather to 1 minute. Furthermore, the opposing team will gain an equal amount of time as you.
• Capturing point A on subsequent rounds in Assault maps will now grant you an extra 30 seconds in order to at least attempt an attack on point B.
There are more changes and additions coming with Season 2, but Kaplan didn't wish to reveal them just yet. Instead, we will be able to experience them first hand once the PTR (Public Test Realm) goes live at some point this weekend.
Personally, I can't wait! I've already spent well over 150 hours playing the Competitive Mode alone, so to see the developers this motivated to make it even better is nothing short of amazing. Here's to hoping this is the Blizzard we will be dealing with in the future, rather than the deaf and silent one.