There’s still more to come in Overwatch 2 Season 5, despite much of the focus being on next season. One thing that many fans have been looking forward to since it was announced is a Team Queue mini season, and now we know when that will start.
In a blog post discussing some Competitive updates, Blizzard revealed that Team Queue will start on July 11. The Season 5 mid-season patch is expected to go live at the same time.
Team Queue is a ranked mode that requires you to be in a team of five players (the old Looking for Group feature would sure come in handy here!) before you can queue up. However, unlike in the regular Competitive modes, there’s no restrictions on grouping. Your team can have two Bronze players and three Grandmaster players if you can gather such a group together.
As you might expect, this mode is likely to be wildly imbalanced. “Players should expect matches in Team Queue to be more challenging and play out differently due to having no skill rating restrictions,” the blog post reads.
Blizzard said it’s running the mini season to help it improve the main Competitive modes. “We considered alternate versions, including a solo-queue-only mode, but we wanted this to be a test alongside the availability of the current Competitive ruleset so as not to impact queue times in the main modes,” Team 4 wrote.
The rest of the blog post is an interesting read. It touches on matchmaking and how skill ratings are calculated after each match. For one thing, those who don’t play Overwatch 2 for a while will have their matchmaking rating lowered while they’re gone.
“We’ll also increase our uncertainty rating the longer the player is inactive,” Blizzard said. “This uncertainty rating allows players to gain and lose MMR more quickly, so when the inactive player returns, they can jump back to their previous rank if they perform well, or they can lose MMR faster if their actual skill has decayed.”
The post also includes a peek at how players are distributed in Competitive ranks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of players are in the Silver to Platinum range.
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