"Overwatch 2" is now spinning like an oil tanker into a new future, and while Blizzard still intends to offer single-player content for the game, the focus on the larger story is largely gone, and the current focus is on Battle Pass seems to be on making the new event feel like, well, an event, rather than just another excuse to sell the

A new blog post details some of the improvements Blizzard is making for competitive play, saying that Blizzard has noticed something generally more interesting about getting a wide range of skill ranges to participate in a particular match: "A wide similar groups with similar skill ranges are now prioritized in the same match. This helps ensure fair matches, although queue times are a bit longer for larger groups.

Season 5 will also see the return of the "Competitive Mystery Heroes" mode, a fan favorite that randomizes team composition and maps. Many were quite disappointed when this was removed and had so much fun, so this is a bit of payback in a difficult time.

Then there is a large section on how skill ratings are calculated, leaving the three most important factors on how MMR is adjusted. the third factor is basically that if you don't play often, the game becomes uncertain about you, and when you probably the most interesting, because it means that you will make major adjustments when you return.

Subsequently, the distribution of competitive ranks on PC was visualized and it was found that "Overwatch 2" has more Grand Masters rank players than ever before; Blizzard attributed this to simply having more players participating in competitive matches than ever before, and that the game is now more competitive than ever before. Blizzard attributes this to the fact that more players are playing against each other than ever before, and also simply because players have grown in skill.

And the kicker, Blizzard reminds us, is that "if you don't play often, the game doesn't know much about you." This is mostly an unintended side effect of adding MMR decay to inactive players in Overwatch 2."

Blizzard is making "incremental adjustments" to get more players out of the Bronze 5 and will monitor the impact closely stating.

A new option for competitive play is Team Queue, which requires players to be in groups of five, with no grouping restrictions. It has a different skill rating than the other competitive modes and rolllocks teams into one tank/two damage/two support heroes; it will launch on July 11.

Judging by Blizzard's recent focus, competitive is clearly where the players are. My favorite part was when the game director said that "Overwatch" matches sometimes devolve into "stomps," which is a term used by Blizzard to refer to a game in which a player is playing a game of "Overwatch" against another player. This is because "Overwatch" matches can sometimes be a "stomp."