No Hero Limits, backfill enabled, no XP penalty for repeatedly leaving, and only griefing/afk and abusive chat report options (poor teamwork disabled)
For players that don’t particularly care for rank, and just care about playing the game for fun (without the chaos of Arcade rulesets) and having a short session of Overwatch.
Normal “Unranked” Mode - for the (maybe not so serious) player wanting to experience proper, intentionally balanced Overwatch
Competitive ruleset with backfill enabled.
1 Hero Limit, with Switching Sides instead of ending after a single round and throwing you back into queue
No SR, uses MMR to find players at and around your skill level.
Gives smaller Competitive Point sums than normal Competitive Mode, a place for players who only play Comp for Golden Guns
Leaving too many games will result in an XP penalty.
New hero/maps are available for Normal Unranked mode.
For players who want to take things seriously, but not too seriously. This is the large majority of Overwatch players, who do not enjoy encountering “practicing” players, but still want to have a reasonable, no-stakes, more-relaxed-compared-to-Comp-Mode, game.
It would also allow new heroes and maps like Brigitte) to be played in a Competitive environment with serious players trying to test out their strategies/team comps with the shiny new hero/map.
Revamped Competitive “Ranked” Mode - for players who want to prove their worth
Uses MMR to find players at and around your skill level. Does not use SR, SR is completely detached from MMR to give higher confidence to the matchmaking algorithm to sort for fair equal skill level players and fair/equal matches
SR is used to group players into tiers and thus skill brackets, but MMR is the larger focus.
Two skill groups;
Skill Group 1 - Bronze to Platinum
Deranking removed from Bronze to Platinum. No more GMs intentionally deranking down to Bronze/Silver/Gold.
You don’t lose SR if you lose a match in Bronze-Plat, but SR rewards are MUCH smaller. Like, single digits.
Progression requires a slow, steady, quantitative improvement in your skill in order to climb out of these ranks.
Losses can potentially end in increases in SR if your performance was far superior.
If you end a season in a particular tier, you will not get placed below that tier next season. You’re fully graduated from the tiers below you, and your record for placements next season directly correlates to where you will start in that season.
For example, if you end at 2700 SR, you’re in Plat. If you win all placements you start at 2900.
If you lose all of your placements you start at the bottom of Plat again.
Skill Group 2 - Diamond to Top 500
Diamond and up has decay.
Losing a match means you lose SR, just like we have now.
Deranking can only happen between Diamond and up.
You can never drop below 3000 SR, except if Blizzard decides to issue a soft SR reset.
Unlike Skill Group 1’s SR gains (which can be single digits), SR gains are normal, just like today’s current SR gains. Perhaps even a little higher, to enable Top 500 players to actually reach the 5000 SR mark.
Also unlike Skill Group 1, placements function just like normal, just like today’s current placement system. You more or less continue where you left off where you ended, with one exception.
Placement penalty on the last week of a season. If you’re a GM who intentionally put off placements until the last week of a season, you do NOT continue where you left off in GM after completing your placements, you start in high Diamond instead and have to grind. You should have decayed you if you didn’t play all season, so the game will effectively apply that decay.
Edit - Addressing Common Arguments
Ranked Overinflation / “not earning”/ “not where they deserve to be”
“Have you ever played the offseason? It’s terrible…”
“No one likes No Hero Limits”
“The long queue is because no one plays No Hero Limits because no one enjoys No Hero Limits”
I wholeheartedly agree, I want a way to practice proper team format that isn’t competitive play. It’s possible to set up scrims but I don’t know enough people who’d want to play competitively let alone scrim regularly
I think a Normal mode would also allow new heroes and maps (Brigitte) to be played in a Competitive environment with serious players trying to test out their strategies/team comps with the new content.
New hero/maps are disabled for Ranked for a season, but available for Normal Unranked mode.
And another problem with scrims are generally you must have a microphone in order to be able to play in one. Not everyone can or wants to use a microphone. I personally rarely use one, yet I’m not a low rank such as bronze or even silver, I’m diamond. Those that argue that a microphone should be compulsory are, well, sorry… morons. A microphone can help, but it’s not absolutely necessary! If it wasn’t for the common requirement of scrims being that you all need to use a microphone then I’d play scrims.
As for OP, I agree. We need something like competitive without the skill rating aspect (which to be fair isn’t all that accurate for some players).
Arcade fills a very particular niche of being specific playlists and chaotic game modes from Blizzard. So yeah, it’d be mostly unscathed. Only No Limits would be completely removed (as it would have returned to QP).
It could also be a home for permanent PvE Junkenstein/Uprising.
Not the 500% movespeed/health/damage stuff. Custom Games has that covered.
Yes, and… That’s what I’m concerned about, there’s already few people who play Arcade, so if No Limit’s is returned to QP, Arcade will just look like one of those abandoned mining town’s you’d see in horror movies.
Like you said, it’s a niche, and it’s unfortunate that it is. It’s only saving grace at that point is if a permanent PvE game-mode was included.
Although I feel that standard competitive matches take too long to complete and I don’t like No Hero Limits, this is probably an improvement for the ability to earn comp points outside of competitive play.
FFA/DM, Total Mayhem, and Mystery Heroes are the highest voted Arcade modes in the poll that Kaplan posted. They have the highest player turnouts.
Arcade could also be home to a routinely reoccuring double XP weekend (that isn’t enabled for Quick Play), in addition to a permanent PvE, where all Arcade modes have double XP to ensure player counts are high.
This game need urgent an unraked mode. Quickly play was suppose to be it, but with all “it’s QP mindset” it’s really frustrating to have a decent game since this part of community should be at Arcade mode when you can do whatever you want and there are proper modes for each of them, but they concentrate at QP and rarely you can practice and have a decent comp to simulate ranked.
I do agree with this but I’m not sure about the changes you suggested to comp. I feel like if you did the changes to QP and added the unranked then it would be fine. Also how long would the unranked matches last. Would they be QP length or comp mode length. As in each team either does or doesn’t get a round to attack/defend.
It is this thread again.
If you have ever played offseason you would know why such “normal” mode won’t work.
It just turns into another QP not to mention why someone would play that just for few comp points if they can just go comp mode and get more?
No Leavers - People leaving is one of my top gripes about QP. If you have somebody drop out, you usually lose that point, regardless of whether you get a backfill immediately. They take time to select hero and get to the fight, and have 0% ult charge. Also, backfilling is no fun
Full Comp Point Rewards - Everybody gets 10 points for a win. I think the points need to be significant to get everybody to really try. Also, pegging it at the same level as Comp takes all the players who only want the points and moves them from Comp to Normal. Players would still get more points from Comp with the season rewards factored in, and that means anybody farming points in Comp is actively trying to climb, which is good for the game as a whole.
Bans - Any players with a Competitive ban are also excluded from Normal. Fairly self explanatory. If you’ve proven through leaving, throwing etc that you don’t belong in a Competitive environment, you probably don’t belong in a Competitive-Casual environment either.
Other than that, I love it. Competitive CTF really showed me how much I’d enjoy a lighter, more casual competitive mode. It’d be a great way to try out new heroes without worrying that you won’t be able to play them in actual competitive situations.
Edit: Also, having seen concerns about Comp games lasting too long, what if Normal games would stop at a Draw more often. If both teams take points A and B for instance, they call it a Draw. Or what if they give a team the win provided the took point B with something like a minute more time left than the other team did.
I’d love this! I don’t think I’m quite good enough for comp, and the environment tends to be too stressful and not enough fun, but I like to play fairly seriously (ie, good team comps and actual effort). I’d play it all the time.