In a new video, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan has explained some of the upcoming changes to competitive, ranked gameplay. The end of season 1 means Kaplan and crew will be testing out their new changes starting Sept. 6. Changes to Overwatch ’ s competitive mode include an overhaul of skill ratings, the death of Sudden Death and the addition of time-bank to hybrid, assault and escort maps.

Read more on the changes to season 2 of ranked Overwatch below.

Skill Rating Changes

Season 1’s 1 to 100 skill rating scale is no more. Season 2 will be utilizing a 1 to 5000 scale, divided into 7 tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster.

Why?

• Players would go up or down a fraction of an amount, but would be unclear on why or how much they would go up or down.

• The number itself became too foundational to how players saw themselves. “If you had 60 skill rating, you were in the top 6 percent of all Overwatch players, but it didn’t feel like that. A lot of us go back to our old school days and go, ‘What, did I get a D on this? 60 is terrible,’ but 60 is an amazing skill rating,” said Kaplan.

• The focus will be taken off of skill rating so players will no longer feel that a certain number represents them as a competitive player. Kaplan said, “There’s almost an association of a player being a certain number, and we kind of want to disassociate that a little bit. We want you to realize that the skill rating is naturally going to go up or down as you’re playing competitive matches. It’s a very normal thing.”

With a larger scale, you won’t go up or down half or a quarter of a level, you’ll go up or down in whole numbers, making the entire system feel better and more rewarding to play.

Each tier covers about 500 skill ratings, so in season 2, a player can say “I’m a Gold player, I’m on average playing at a Gold level” regardless of what their skill rating number is at that particular moment.

Once you achieve your tier for the season, you stay there for the season even if your SR drops below what you initially had to do in order to enter that tier. The exception is the two highest tiers, Master and Grandmaster.

Kaplan and his team hopes that this mitigates the disappointment felt by players over “losing” their rank and never gaining it back, a bitterness widely felt to be unfair for many factors outside of individual skill (such as leaver penalties, getting grouped with smurf accounts, bad coin flips and so on).

End-of-season rewards for tiers will be based on the highest tier you ever got into, so even if you play at Silver for the last week of the season, you will get the reward for Gold if you ever got into Gold, “which should feel much better,” according to Kaplan.

Competitive points will be multiplied by 10, including those banked. The golden guns will also cost 10 times as much.

Format and Game Mode Changes

All of Sudden Death (including coin toss) is going away.

• Control maps like Nepal will always have a winner.

• Assault maps like Volskaya or Hanamura will continue to use the time bank system, where you have a set amount of time to play, and if your team finishes quickly, then the next round has the remaining time to use.

  • Other adjustments:

    • After initial first-round capture of Point A, a bonus 30 seconds are given. This enables the losing team to coordinate a final comeback push in an aggressive period of time. Before, when the point is captured in overtime, the map would end and the losing team would never even have a shot at the second objective.

    • You used to get 2 minutes of bonus time after capturing a point with 30 seconds left, now that’ll only be a minute from now on, making competitive more aggressive.

    • If one team gets bonus time, the other team gets bonus time too. “It needs to be fair to both teams in order to be time-based,” said Kaplan.

• Hybrid maps like Numbani or Kings Row, and payload maps like Dorado and Gibraltar, will also use the time bank system. If you push the payload to the end with three minutes left, you will get another round to see how far you can push it.

• Ties should be very rare on hybrid and payload. Payload ties will only happen if neither team pushes the payload at all. Hybrid ties will only happen if nobody initially captures the payload on either team.

• There will be Ties instead of Sudden Death so that both teams can get at least some competitive points, which is why the competitive points have been multiplied. Neither team will receive as many points as a win.

Because competitive takes a while, some time was also trimmed during subsequent hero selection screens and so on.

Assorted Concerns

Players grouping with widely disparate skill ratings: The system in season 2 will be “way more aggressive” with how far you can be from one another. On PTR you must be within 500 skill rating, but Kaplan and the team are open to adjusting this if it proves too aggressiveness. The team hopes to strike a balance between the desire for people to play with their friends versus the unfairness of very different skill raitings grouping with one another.

Skill rating decay: If you are Master or Grandmaster, as well as Diamond, you will be subject to SR decay, meaning if you don’t play competitive for seven days, you lose 50 SR every 24 hours. That decay has a floor: you only go down to the bottom of Diamond. The idea is for these top players to earn and keep their spot, not just sit pretty in their tier. They’ll have to keep active in the system. The 7 day limit should keep this requirement from feeling too brutal and making sure the top competitive players check in and continue fighting for their spot.

Top 500 players: To be ranked in the top 500, you are required to have at least fifty matches played. A top 500 player isn’t just someone who completed placement and got really lucky, but someone who is active and aggressive in comp mode.

Detailed patch notes are en route as are other modes of communication. “We want season 2 to feel kind of like a new beginning and a really awesome moment where everyone can come back and try the system again and feel much better about the direction that it’s taking,” said Kaplan.

Season 2 of Overwatch ’s competitive mode starts Sept. 6. Are you excited for all of the new changes? Feel free to discuss the end of season 1 and the dawn of season 2 in our comments section below.