'Overwatch' Competitive Play Returns In Open Beta; PTR Progress Will Be Wiped, Says Blizzard

Competitive play has finally returned to Overwatch, just under a month after the game’s PC and console debut, complete with the golden guns announced earlier this month. Unfortunately, it’ll be a few more weeks before you can make “permanent” progress in Overwatch’s competitive scene.

Blizzard announced the return of competitive play in a new post on the Overwatch blog, published on Tuesday afternoon, that outlined the revamped system. It’s not clear whether or not the patch currently being tested includes any of the new golden guns, that will be used as rewards for competitive play, but l eaks from Korea’s private test realm suggest we could see few on the Overwatch Public Test Realm (PTR) this week. The post also included patch notes for the rest of the changes in the patch, now available on the PTR, which is mostly limited to bug fixes.But there are a few gameplay changes, too.

Of course, the big news is the return of Competitive Play. According to the patch notes, players get access to competitive matchmaking once they’ve reached Level 25. Getting there might take a few days, depending on your average play session and experience gain, but long time Blizzard fans can probably appreciate that it’s a much faster ramp-up time than we saw for the studio’s other casual-competitive title, Heroes of the Storm. You’ll need to complete 10 placement matches to get your initial ranking, after which point players can compete with similarly-skilled players in two and a half month seasons. Unfortunately, Public Test Realm progress won’t carry over when the patch goes live but we can at least get a sneak peek at the balance changes Blizzard made to each map in preparation for competitive play.

Head over to the Overwatch blog to find out how to access the Public Test Realm.

Here are the patch notes for the competitive play patch currently in testing:

GENERAL UPDATES

Gamepad Controls

• Players can now swap the left and right sticks on a control pad

• "Legacy" controls option has been added:

• Left stick up/down moves forward/backward

• Left stick left/right turns left/right

• Right stick up/down aims up/down (these can be inverted)

• Right stick left/right strafes left/right

• Sticks can also be switched

• Improved dead-zone controls, giving players increased accuracy during off-center and diagonal stick movement

Miscellaneous

• When activating Widowmaker's Ultimate ability, Infra-Sight, her voice line will now be audible map-wide

• "Weapons" section added to the Hero Gallery

• Added McCree as an AI hero in Practice vs. AI, Play vs. AI, and Custom Game modes

• Added a variety of a social options to the hero selection and end of match screens

• Removed the "Avoid This Player" option from the in-game UI

BUG FIXES

General

• Fixed a bug that would cause players’ weapons to auto-snap straight up or down when the crosshair was aimed between 85 and 90 degrees

• Fixed a bug that caused players who backfilled and then completed a game to sometimes receive a loss on their Career Profile and not receive their XP bonus for backfilling

• Fixed a bug that would move players toward the source of a knockback rather than away from it

• Fixed a bug that caused Hearthstone-themed sprays to ignore localization

• Fixed several framerate issues that could occur when cycling through the hero selection menu

• Fixed a variety of issues with and made several improvements to ambient lighting

• Made some improvements to how AI heroes respond to one another

• Made a variety of performance and optimization improvements across the game

• Unicode keys for non-English keyboards are now displayed properly in the keybinding interface

Maps

• Players can no longer be resurrected in out-of-play areas on Ilios

Heroes

• Fixed a bug with the "Junkrat RIP-Tire Kills—Average" lifetime statistic

• Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause projectiles to hit Reinhardt instead of his Barrier Field in non-High Bandwidth games

• Fixed a bug that allowed Torbjörn to pick up Scrap while dead

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