Overwatch announces changes coming for Season 16 of Competitive play

Bill Cooney

Overwatch announced big changes coming to Competitive play in Season 16 centered around the game’s higher level players.

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Grandmaster is any player above 4000 SR which, without getting into statistics, obviously represents a pretty small portion of the Overwatch community.

Players at all levels have been vocal about the need for change in Overwatch’s Competitive play and it looks like Blizzard is finally doing something, at least for the best players in the game.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/update-for-competitive-play-season-16/338345[ad name=”article2″]

No more groups in Grandmaster

Starting in Season 16 players in Grandmaster will no longer be able to group up in parties bigger than two people for Competitive games, so anything past duos won’t be allowed anymore.

Since there are less players in Grandmaster, the Overwatch team said making fair matches in the rank is already difficult and having large groups of players only adds to it.

Some players are taking the latest Overwatch news quite well, as it might bring much needed balance to higher elo games.

Overwatch developer Scott Mercer announced the changes on the game’s official Blizzard forums and said they made the switch to “help create better quality matches for all Grandmaster players.”

The change has been welcomed by some high-profile Grandmaster players, but others don’t think it will do anything to fix the game’s competitive troubles.

There is a sizable portion of Overwatch players who think there needs to be a better fix to the lasting problem in Competitive.
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Will other Overwatch players see changes to Comp?

The changes might be welcomed for some, but they do nothing for the vast majority of players who aren’t in Grandmaster.

Maybe Blizzard is starting small with the changes to competitive Overwatch and rolling out changes for higher ranks before they do more major impactful updates for everyone else, but only time will tell.

It seems like everyone who plays Overwatch ranked has a complaint about something in Competitive play, so hopefully these are just the beginning of the changes coming in 2019.

About The Author

Bill is a former writer at Dexerto based in Iowa, who covered esports, gaming and online entertainment for more than two years. With the US team, Bill covered Overwatch, CSGO, Influencer culture, and everything in between.