Competitive play season one has officially ended and Overwatch players have been very vocal about their discontent with the ranking system.

 According to game director, Jeff Kaplan, those complaints haven’t landed on deaf ears and Blizzard is taking action, in fact they don’t like the ranking system either which is why they have decided to revamp the whole thing. The Overwatch community can expect to see some major changes in season two.

Among those changes and one of the most significant is the introduction of skill tiers which will also result into skill rating no longer being measured on a 1 to 100 scale. Instead, it will range from 1 to 5000 with the idea of providing players better feedback on how each match affects their individual rating.  Focus will be, however, on the tiers which are as follows:

Bronze- 1-1499

Silver - 1500-1999

Gold - 2000-2499

Platinum - 2500-2999

Diamond - 3000-3499

Master - 3500-3999

Grandmaster - 4000-5000

It’s noteworthy that once players reach any tier from Bronze all the way to Diamond they won’t drop out of it even if their skill rating falls below the cutoff for their highest achieved tier. Master and Grandmaster tiers are a whole different story since a bad losing streak can potentially set you all the way back to Diamond. In order to keep top players playing rather than resting on their laurels, any player with a skill rating over 3000 will experience what will be known as skill rating decay, that is, they will lose 50 points per day after not playing at least one match on competitive play for 7 days, not to mention that they will automatically be dropped from top 500. Speaking of which, in order to qualify for top 500, players will be required to have at least 50 matches won on competitive play. It's also worth noting that players with more than a 500 difference in skill rating will be unable to play together on competitive matches. 

Another big change is that Blizzard is doing away with sudden death and instead tied games will end in a draw, which according to them will be a rare occurrence thanks to some tweaks they’ve done to map objectives, map rotation rules, and the way the time bank will be handled. 

In regard to rewards, the competitive points awarded for a win will be 10 and 3 for a draw but likewise the cost of gold weapon skins will now be 3000. Additionally, any stored points will be automatically multiplied by 10 but players with more than 6000 points at the beginning of season  two will be unable to accrue more points.

Other changes include hero balance updates as follows:

All the changes mentioned are already available to the public test region and will possibly change and become available to other platforms after extensive testing. 

You can read the full patch notes here and watch Kaplan’s full developer update below:

Competitive play season two is scheduled to begin on September 6, 2016.