Skill rating and sudden death changes are coming to 'Overwatch' Season 2

The second season of Overwatch's competitive mode will bring a much larger rating scale, the end of sudden death games and other changes to improve the competitive experience.

Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan explained all the changes coming to season two, which kicks off Sept. 6, although they will be available in the public test realm soon. Season one ends Aug. 17.

Skill rating changes

The first big change is the skill rating scale, which in the first season was a 100-point scale with 100 being the best. Players will get new scores in season 2, on a scale of 1 to 5,000, so no more frustrating fractional changes when you win big; your skill rating will change by whole numbers.

"We're also trying to take the focus a little bit away from skill rating," Kaplan said. "We don't want that number to be what you associate with you as a competitive player."

To get the focus away from skill rating, Overwatch is introducing a tier-based ranking system consisting of seven tiers: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, master and grand master. These tiers equate to roughly 500 points on the skill rating scale.

It's a mindset shift, according to Kaplan. Instead of players worrying about rank, they should think of themselves as a gold player or silver player. Even if you have a few bad matches and lose 100 points in your skill rating, you'll still be a gold player, which may relieve some of competitive anxiety in Overwatch.

You also can't drop below any tier you reach in the season even if your skill ranking drops to that of a lower tier (excluding the top two tiers). End-of-season rewards will be based on the highest tier you reach in Season 2.

The matchmaking system is also going to be stricter Players won't get matched with a wide skill range of players, instead offering a more even playing field.

For players at the top of the competitive scene, there will be rating decay, meaning if you don't play for a certain number of days, your rating will go down every day.

The end of sudden death

Sudden death is going away in the second season. While control maps like Nepal are still going to be best-of-five matches, assault or escort maps will still have the time bank system with some changes to make ties incredibly unlikely.

Teams on offense will now get an extra 30 seconds every time they capture a point after point A -- even if they're on overtime. The two-minute bonus time for teams who captures a point with less than 30 seconds left has been reduced to a one-minute bonus, making it a little more fair.

"Ties should be very very rare on the hybrid maps and the payloads," Kaplan said. "On the payloads, the only times that a tie is realistically going to happen is if nobody pushes the cart at all... On hybrids, ties will only happen if nobody initially captures the payload."

In the case of a tie, both teams will earn a small amount of competitive points.

The video Blizzard released only covers some of the changes coming to Overwatch in season two; more information will be available in the upcoming patch notes.