Five reasons the average player should wait to place in Competitive Season 2

Season 2 unexpectedly got an early release on September 1, five days ahead of the originally announced date.

While most will likely want to get into a new competitive season asap this weekend, average players looking to achieve the highest possible rank in placements may wish to consider these five reasons to wait before jumping in.


1) Major changes to the rank system

Season 2 of competitive Overwatch sees the rank system getting a complete overhaul. Players are no longer ranked 1-100, but from 1-5000, with tiers ranging from Bronze to Grandmaster. A quick look at the new tier system can be found in this post.

While Blizzard has certainly earned gamers' trust with its past game releases, it is not immune to hidden bugs and unforseen issues. PTR testing for Season 2 was only available for about two weeks.

In that two weeks, two major issues were uncovered regarding player placement and skill rating:

•  It was discovered that a majority of players were placed too high. A fix to adjust the distribution of players across skill ratings was implemented on the PTR. This build has since gone live.
• Mercy, Lucio and a few other unnamed characters were found to have placed too low. A fix was promised as "in flight".

The skill rating changes resulted in a majority of PTR players experiencing "abnormal" losses in rank, as the adjusted system attempted to correct player skill ratings.

Two days later, Season 2 went live, with no mention of whether support ranking had been fixed.

Was two days enough for developers to gather enough data to determine if their skill rating adjustments had worked? Was the promised support ranking fix included in those changes? It may be best to monitor the forums for feedback from early players before deciding to do placements, because...

2) There will be no second chances

In the case any bug or issues with the ranking system is found and fixed, affected players will be unlikely receive any corrections to their rankings.

A major bug was discovered on KOTH maps in Season 1. Although it had been reported since PTR testing, the bug went live, and was only fixed two weeks into the season. Players who were unaware of the glitch, and who had a good portion of their victories on KOTH maps received lower rank placements and next to no XP gains on their wins.

Once the fix was in place, players who had placed and played competitive in the first two weeks received no ranking adjustments for their KOTH wins.

Given that there is no other frame of reference for how Blizzard handles bugs in live, early players risk being affected by as-yet undiscovered bugs without restitution to their ranks post-fix.

3) Seasons are a soft reset

Placing highly can determine the quality of your experience not just in this season, but in future ones. It appears that placement matchmaking in Season 2 is influenced by your Season 1 rank. A good number of players on the forums are reporting being matched with and against players who were around their first season rank, and being placed in tiers that are about equivalent to where they were in Season 1.

Even if you are confident in your ability to climb out of a low rank, consider that ranking up from lower levels can be a long grind. If you are not used to the meta or gameplay at lower ranks, it can be a very frustrating experience to be teamed with players unfamiliar with what higher level gameplay looks like.

And if you lack the time needed to play hundreds of games, it may take several seasons to climb back to the skill rating you really belong at.

So for the average player who may not have much time to play, placing as high as possible may matter not just in Season 2, but in future seasons of Overwatch. So what's waiting a couple of weeks to see if there are any issues with skill rating that Blizzard needs to fix?

4) You could be playing placement matches against much higher-ranked players

From this placement thread in the forums, it appears that most players ranked 40 to 60 in Season 1 are being placed into the Gold and Platinum tiers. So there is every chance of having to play against Season 1 rank 60 players during placement even if you were a rank 40 player.

If you did not play in Season 1 and are starting in Season 2, the matchmaking system will have no frame of reference for which players you should be matched against. This increases the likelihood of you being placed against players whose skill levels may be much higher than the average player, which likely means you.

5) Let the ranks settle

With most players placing into Gold and Platinum, these two tiers currently contain a huge range of players at varying skill levels. Which is why there are extreme cases where a Season 1 rank 37 player could face a former rank 73 player in competitive.

It'll take some time for top players to rise to the higher ranks, and for others to fall to where they belong skill-wise. The longer you wait for players to settle into their rightful ranks, the better your chances of getting truly even placement matches for your skill level.

So how long should you wait?

Players who play in good groups or are highly skilled are less likely to be affected by the above issues. However, it also appeared that the longer a player waited to place in Season 1 as bugs were fixed and the game further tuned, the more likely they were to receive a better rank.

Based on Season 1, two weeks seem to be long enough for bugs or major issues to be discovered and fixed, which would give you the best shot at a fair placement. However, the main goal for everyone playing Overwatch is to have fun, so there's never a bad time to start as long as you don't get too hung up about skill rating.