Devs will also change rollout of future Hacked events to avoid disrupting Quick Play matches
পরিবর্তন ওভারওয়াচ 2 X’s Competitive system in its most recent Season Nine has seen the ranked mode overtake casual Quick Play as the most popular way to play the hero shooter sequel. Its developers are also looking ahead to further changes in Season 10, including adjustments to grouping restrictions and its experimental Hacked event.
Season 9, subtitled Champions, launched on February 13th, making a slew of balance changes across the board, introducing the fairly controversial ability for non-support characters to heal themselves when not in combat – while giving everyone more health in general – and increasing the size of projectiles.
There were some more specific tweaks to Pharah in particular to try and make the rocket-blasting hero less dependent on having a healer nearby, changing the way she regenerates hover jet fuel to encourage more horizontal movement than ‘feathering’ in the air while providing more speed and manoeuvrability via a new Jet Dash power when triggering her secondary fire.
While the changes generated no end of discussion ahead of their introduction, they seem to have paid off. According to Overwatch 2’s latest director’s blog, Season Nine saw Competitive Play make up almost half of the time played in-game at 45% of hours, with Quick Play at just under a third. That marks a significant shift from the more casual mode being Overwatch 2’s most popular mode at 40% of match hours against Competitive’s 35% in the past. Blizzard noted that the number of hours played in Quick Play hadn’t fallen to result in the change, but Competitive seeing a “lot more” time played.
“We’re really excited about this and take it as confirmation that people would like to see more changes and improvements to that side of the game, as well as systemic PvP improvements,” the developers wrote.
To that end, Blizzard gave a preview of forthcoming changes due to be implemented from the middle of Season Nine through into its next season. Season 10 will see the removal of grouping restrictions when playing in Competitive, which previously limited players to teaming up with players of a similar skill level. Instead, groups will be matched against other teams of a similar skill range – either “narrow” or “wide” – in an effort to allow players to stay with their friends while “keep[ing] Overwatch’s competitive integrity intact”.
Other incoming additions will be features such as the ability to view your match history and a scorecard in the Competitive progress menu, along with adding role-specific titles and the ability to see players’ rank range on the scoreboard. Beyond that, Blizzard said they were exploring a “small set” of improvements for the game’s Top 500, but couldn’t confirm which season they might debut in.
Finally, the devs commented on Overwatch 2’s recently-added Hacked event, an experimental mode within Quick Play aimed at trialling changes that could later roll out to the main game. The first Hacked event was Quicker Play, increasing the speed of payloads and captures, decreasing respawn time, and shortening matches as a whole.
Some of those changes will now be cemented in the standard mode, upping the speed of the Push bot and adding a speed boost when players spawn on Flashpoint maps and for defenders during the setup phase in Hybrid and Escort. Push will also see its timer knocked down by a couple of minutes to eight minutes in Quick Play, a change that might later come to Competitive, too.
Responding to player feedback about running Hacked events through regular Quick Play rather than the game’s previous Experimental mode, Blizzard said that Experimental “was never popular enough” to gather enough useful data – only around a fifth of players would try it at all, apparently, with most of those only playing a single match before moving to a standard mode – making it difficult to judge any proposed changes.
Even so, future Hacked events that apply “fairly disruptive” changes will now be run as a separate card within Quick Play, rather than taking over the regular mode for a set time. Some more “moderate” ideas might still take over the mode, but for a shorter period than before, with the method used for Quicker Play reserved for only those tests with “little disruption to the core game”.
