Overwatch 2 Game Director reveals matchmaking changes ahead of next Season 3 patch

Overwatch 2 Game Director Aaron Keller has revealed matchmaking changes that have been made, as well as updates for the upcoming mid-season 3 patch.

Ranked in Overwatch 2 has been quite a controversial topic lately, with plenty of players complaining that the game’s competitive mode is completely unbalanced.

With lower-ranked players frequently appearing in GM games and cheaters even causing the servers to crash if they’re about to lose, OW2 has been a mixed bag when it comes to competitive.

In a recent blog post, Aaron Keller explained a series of changes that the team has made and what they have planned in future patches.

OW2 devs reveal matchmaking updates

According to Keller, Season 3’s primary ranked goal was to optimize matching players of a similar MMR on the same role.

“For example, when making matches, we put more emphasis on the DPS players on each team being closer in skill than we do for the DPS players on one team being evenly matched with tank players on the other team. This has worked, and matches have a much tighter skill delta between players of the same role,” he explained.

He went on to note that queue times have dropped and match quality has risen, but there have been some issues that the updates have caused, too, especially with groups of players with large skill differentials.

dont normally tweet about stuff like this but it is just ridiculous to me how i can be top 5 and consistently get lobbies like this dont even know why i bother playing anymore https://t.co/akPB8Fhp2V pic.twitter.com/3A9TfQ6B1x

— CLEAR (@CLEAR_OW) February 23, 2023

Keller further touched on players’ ongoing complaints about encountering users of varying skill levels in their ranked games, but claims that this issue has gotten better than it was before.

“Prior to Season 3, the worst 5% of Grand Master level matches would have players 7 divisions apart, the equivalent of Gold 3 to Silver 5. When we initially shipped 2.3 this leaped to 12 divisions apart or greater. We have made numerous changes since then, and are making changes almost daily, and this has now been reduced to 9 divisions.”

The Game Director concluded his post by revealing more changes would be coming in the next mid-season patch to further improve upon this, but didn’t indicate when that would be.