Do you feel that your competitive ranking in Overwatch 2 is not as high as you would like it to be? Are you being matched with players who are far above or below you in ability? Do you really think somewhere in the back of your mind that "Overwatch 2 is jerking you around"? When things don't go your way, it's easy to think that you are being tricked by Elo's shenanigans and broken SBMM. But for some players of "Overwatch 2," it turns out that the conspiracy was real.

The Overwatch 2 patch notes (opens in new tab) released yesterday, November 17, revealed a strange truth." We have resolved an issue that prevented some players from getting out of Bronze 5 even after several rank updates."

Overwatch 2's competitive rankings are divided into seven medals - Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, and Grandmaster - further divided by numbers from 5 to 1. If you win a match, your rank goes up; if you lose, your rank goes down. This part is very brief, but for a more detailed breakdown, please see the explanation (opens in a new tab) of how ranks in "Overwatch 2" work in a match.

In this ranking system, Bronze 5 is the absolute lowest. I myself am a terrible online shooter, but Bronze 5 is a rank that the vast majority of players would leave behind in a heartbeat. Think of it this way: even if you exclude Master and Grandmaster, the median rank in Overwatch 2 is Gold 3. This is your cold, hard, middle road, and the numbers back it up: in 2018, Jeff Kaplan, former director of Overwatch, found that 32% of Overwatch players ranked Gold (open in new tab), 21% Silver, and 25% Platinum ranks, 21% are Silver, and 25% are Platinum, he revealed. Only 8% remained at the Bronze rank, a smaller number than the much higher Diamond rank, which accounts for 10% of players.

From a distance, it is a bit interesting to see that they are stuck at the bottom of the list. But it is also undoubtedly frustrating for the players who are forced into that position. For one thing, they may be at a loss to figure out why they are stuck in that crappy basement rank. More importantly, Overwatch 2 players on Reddit have confirmed that the bug not only looks bad, but actually affects MMR ratings.

"The lowest quality game ever to get out of Bronze 5," wrote Illuminaso (opens in new tab). 'It's a complete grab bag. Some players belong in Bronze 5. Some are true grandmasters. It's impossible to tell them apart; the MMR doesn't seem to exist." [Enable_Duck_Protocol (opens in new tab) added:" For a while in Bronze 5, every match was either my team steaming the opposition or my team getting steamed."

"Sorry. [SeeOurTea (opens in new tab) writes:" Over the past month, I've seen several people complaining about not being able to get out of the Bronze 5, even after winning seven in a row, or at least most of their games. And people's response to that was that the person just needed to get better, they were being carried along, etc. Perhaps those people were discouraged that they were really bad at the game.

The bug fix means that players can now rank up or out of Bronze 5 appropriately, but they are not automatically boosted to the appropriate rank, so there will probably still be a bit of confusion until the rankings are sorted out. Blizzard has not clarified how many people were affected by this bug and whether it is in any way related to the October issue where players were assigned to a lower competition rank than they should have been (opens in new tab). I have made an inquiry and will update if I receive a reply.