Upcoming Overwatch Season 6 Changes - Shortened season period to make for faster Competitive Play

Seong Mo "Daram" Jeong, Junseok “Tonny” Bae

Aug 22, 2017

The developer updates regarding the upcoming Season 6 changes have been introduced on the Overwatch official Youtube channel.

With Jeff Kaplan introducing the developer updates, this video mainly covers the details about Season 6 of Competitive Play, which will begin later this month.

The main theme of the changes in this Season is to add “speed” to Competitive Play. Thus, the season period will be changed from a three-month to two-month, and the points acquired from winning games will increase, making a quick change to Competitive Play rank. Although each reward you would receive at the end of the season will be reduced due to the shortened season period, the number of rewards per year will increase overall.

The condition of Control Maps will also change from 3 control points out of 5 to win the match, to 2 out of 3. This has been implemented based on the statistics that there are a number of cases of 99% vs 99% holds on control or 2v2 which takes an unexpectedly long period of time in Control matches. Jeff mentions that, through this change, they are planning to reduce the psychological fatigue coming from playing one game for far too long, and set the speed of the game to be similar to that of Escort or Assault.

▲ The system will change to the best out of 3 in Control Maps

Furthermore, the Skill Rating Decay that top-tiered players complained the most about will also change. From Season 6, the number of played games required to maintain Competitive Play points will be reduced from 7 to 5. Moreover, the amount of skill rating that decays when you don’t satisfy the number of games will also be reduced from 50 to 25.

The placement system has also been adjusted so that players who have been deflated to the lower-tier, even if they have progressed to the high-tier, will be able to be placed more accurately in the upcoming season.

Lastly, the higher-tiered matches will be more balanced, but the queue times might become slightly longer.

The current Competitive Play Season 5 will end on August 28th (PST), and the upcoming Season 6 will begin on August 31st (PST), 3 days after the end of the previous season.