Overwatch Competitive Play Changing Based on Player Test Region Feedback

Overwatch's competitive mode isn't available yet but Blizzard is testing the feature, giving a few players the chance to test the arena before going public.

Based on the feedback from these players Blizzard plans to implement changes to Overwatch before the game goes live. In an update on the game's official forums Jeff Kaplan explained that they're hearing feedback on:

Skill Rating
Leave Penalty
Assault Map Changes
Premade Groups Called out in the UI
Coin Flip
Sudden Death

Blizzard will be implementing a few changes based on this feedback such as reducing map time from 5 minutes to 4 minutes and the sudden death timer to 1 minutes 45 seconds. Blizzard is planning a similar "time bank" system for other maps and Escort and Assault modes. 

“What this means is that, if both teams push the payload all the way to the end of the map with time leftover, you’ll go into a second round on the same map,” explained Kaplan. “We’ll remember how much time was on the clock for each team, and then you’ll have that amount of time to push the payload as far as possible. At the end of this second round, we’ll also look at how far your team pushed the payload vs. how far the enemy team pushed their payload. Push it farther than the other team and you win.”

The reason behind this Kaplan stated to give both teams a sense of reward instead and make sudden death situations rare.

Don't expect to see these changes until fall, adding that delaying Competitive Play would become an issue.

“Competitive Play is the type of system that will require a few seasons before we reach the place where we want to be. We need to run the system through its paces, in the live game environment, so that we can see how the community as a whole uses and reacts to it. By getting the system out there sooner, we can start making meaningful improvements sooner too.”

Kaplan goes into detail for each subject on his official post here.

Overwatch is now available for Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

Adam Siddiqui, NoobFeed
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