Update: Blizzard has confirmed on the forums that a majority of players have been found to have placed too high on the PTR, and players will experience abnormal drops in skill rating until they reach the SR they should be actually at. This change will not affect live placements. This post has been updated with my latest observations of the effect of these changes.
Overwatch Season 2 will feature an overhauled rank system, with ongoing testing in the PTR.
Instead of ranks 1-100, Season 2 has now taken a leaf from fellow Blizzard game Heroes of the Storm (HotS) with skill ratings of 1-5000. Players will now be sorted into different tiers based on their skill rating range.
The new tiers and their skill rating range are as follows:
Bronze: 1-1499
Silver: 1500-1999
Gold: 2000-2499
Platinum: 2500-2999
Diamond: 3000-3499
Master: 3500-3999
Grandmaster: 4000-5000
Given the multiplier of 50 to create rank 5000, a common formula most players are using to estimate Season 2 rank is: Season 1 rank x 50. Therefore, a rank 50 player in Season 1 is likely to expect placing at 2,500.
However, this is unlikely to be the case. Players have been reporting placements that are inconsistent with the formula outlined above. Developers have recently patched the PTR with a "fix" that affects the majority of players, who were deemed to have "placed too high".
As a result, many are reporting that the rank they are placing or currently is at is far lower than what the S1 rank x 50 formula will indicate.
So with a view to managing expectations for the average player, where can a rank 50 player expect to place in Season 2, assuming a 50 per cent win rate in placements?
One may wish to look to HotS for a quick gauge. With an identical league system from the same company, it may be assumed that we can expect similar tier distribution goals for Overwatch. Based on information from HOTS Logs (their equivalent of MasterOverwatch, a player stat tracking site), we may expect the tier distribution to look similar to this:
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| HotS Tier Distribution Chart. Source |
As we can see, the majority of players (59 per cent) in HotS falls into the Bronze to Gold ranks. At the highest levels, only 2 per cent of players will achieve Master Rank and above.
Going by data on MasterOverwatch, only players ranked 74 and above in Season 1 will achieve Master rank. The average player at Rank 50 will likely place around mid-Gold tier, or 2250 skill rating.
Myself? With a Season 1 high of 49, my PTR placement was 2150, which appears to fall in line with the distribution chart above.
So if you're trying to establish a Season 2 placement goal, you may get a more accurate picture by using the percentile of players your rank placed you in, and mapping it to the tier distribution table shown above.
A couple of factors to consider:
1) Like MasterOverwatch, most players using HOTS Logs are likely to be among the better players in the population, so the distribution is likely skewed upwards. MasterOverwatch's skill rating distribution data showed rank 60 and above to be 14 per cent of the population, but Game Director Jeff Kaplan later revealed that Blizzard's data showed Rank 60 and above to only be 6 per cent of Overwatch's player base.
So players at the 50th percentile of participants in Season 1 (or rank 50), is more likely to place somewhere in the middle of the Gold tier rather than at 2500.
2) HotS is a different game, so don't expect Overwatch's distribution curve to look exactly the same. If you place below where you think you should be, don't despair — until the distribution becomes clear, you may be exactly where you should be relative to Season 1.
Which skill rating do you think you'll get in Season 2?
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