5 Improvements Overwatch’s Competitive Ranked Mode Desperately Needs

More Competitive Points

Overwatch’s new competitive ranked mode has some nice incentives for serious players. The golden guns, as advertised by Blizzard, are basically a badge of pride that you can carry around to show other players how much time and effort you’ve put into the ranked competition.

However, as nice as that sentiment is, one golden weapon will cost you 300 competitive points. You can get competitive points by winning a match, and you’ll also be awarded them based on how well you perform by the end of the season. Here’s the catch: you only win one, single competitive point each time your team wins a match. This means that you’ll have to win 300 matches if you want to buy a golden weapon for your favorite character. And well, if you have more than a few favorite characters you’d like to collect weapons for, you’re going to have to win a ridiculous number of matches to get there. And we all know how long a match in Overwatch can last.

Maybe instead of awarding one point per win, perhaps points can be given for each objective achieved within a match. Heck, just having a small increase in points for each win would go a long way too.

Leavers Should Be Punished, Not You

At the moment, if players leave in the middle of the match, they will receive a penalty. However, what about the rest of the teammates they left behind? If you’re unfortunate to get a leaver in your team, you’ll be given a few seconds to leave the match as well without any penalty. However, you’ll have to take a loss. That’s a little silly.

Having a leaver on your team makes a match unbalanced and you’ll be at a severe disadvantage while going up against an enemy team with six members. It’s only fair that you should be allowed to leave a handicapped match without any repercussions. However, having to take a loss means that your skill rating will go down as well, and you’ll basically be punished for someone on your team who decided to leave or drop out.

Not only that, even if you do win, the increase in your skill rating will be diminished because of having one less person in the match. Whether you’re on the team with the leaver or not, winning a match with a missing player will result in less progress earned towards your skill rating.

Get Rid of that Coin Toss

At the moment, match ties are decided by a random coin toss that determines whether your team will be the attackers or the defenders. The attackers will have to try to capture a point, and the defenders have to defend it. If the attackers manage to capture the point within the time limit, they win. If not, the defenders win.

The problem with this tiebreaker is that the time limit is extremely short, and even in normal control matches, it usually takes a lot longer before an attacking team can rally together and take over a point. The short time limit works in favor of the defending side, and the randomness of the coin toss has left many players feeling a little salty. Besides, ordinary control matches usually give attackers a chance by having two control points they can take over. With only one control point on the line, the tiebreaker greatly favors the defending side at the moment.

Thankfully, it looks like Blizzard will be doing away with the coin toss starting next season. But for now, players will just have to make do with the random nature of the tiebreaker.

Skill Ranking Shouldn’t Suffer So Severely After a Loss

As all Overwatch players will be aware by now, the only way to increase your skill rating is by winning matches. If you lose a match, you’ll automatically lose progress in your ranking bar. This is problematic. Not only do you lose a ridiculous amount of progress with each loss (sometimes you’ll lose an entire rank), the amount of progress you gain with each winning match is tiny. This makes it very difficult to increase your skill rating because even if you have a 50-50 win-loss ratio, your ranking will suffer from an overall decrease.

Not to mention, the skill rating system doesn’t seem to take into account how well you perform individually in a match. You could be doing a great job as a support character, and healing up your teammates as they take damage, but you’ll still lose ranks even though you were playing your part well and had nothing to do with the loss.

Instead of looking at the winning results of a match, we feel that a player’s skill rating should be determined by how well he or she performs in a particular role set by the character they choose.

Support Characters Need More Love

Speaking of support characters, it would appear that they’re getting the shaft yet again in Overwatch’s competitive ranked mode. Even after winning a match, it looks like support and healer characters get way less of an increase in skill progress as compared to more offensive characters who are focused on dealing damage to the enemy team and getting kills. This shouldn’t be the case.

If you’re a support character like Mercy or Lucio, your role should be to focus on healing up the party and protecting them from enemy damage. Your skill rating should be determined by how well you fulfill that role, and how well you managed to keep the team alive. As a support character, you shouldn’t be expected to rack up as many kills as the tank and offense characters.

However, Overwatch’s skill progress bar is looking a lot like it’s focused on a player’s KDR instead of how the player fulfills their designated role. Overwatch is all about choosing a good team combination with players focusing on different objectives in order to work together and win. Right now, the way the ranked progression works seems to go against the game’s basic premise of teamwork.