Season 4 of Overwatch‘s Competitive Play is now underway, and players are battling through their placement matches to determine their skill rank before diving into the real action.
If you need some tips to help you get through your placement matches, check out our Season 4 tips.
To summaries, in order to get the best out of Competitive Play and ensure you shoot up the ranks, follow these five golden rules:
- Focus on the game and only the game: Don’t let the outside world distract you during a match.
- Be sure to test your skills out in Quick Play first: You don’t want to jump into Competitive Play and struggle so early on.
- Try to play solo initially until you climb up the ranks.
- Play across a variety of heroes, not just one.
- Take a break if you find yourself struggling over 2-3 matches.
Now that the basics are out of the way, let’s talk about Skill Ranking, why it’s important, and how you can improve it.
Differences between Season 3 and Season 4
If you played in any of the seasons before Season 4, your Skill Ranking will carry over, regardless of how you perform during the placement matches.
There are a few differences, however, so let’s take a look at how Blizzard has attempted to balance out the system.
- Players with a Skill Rating higher than 3000 will need to complete at least seven games every week if they want to avoid the rating decay system.
- After finishing a match, the time until the decay begins is delayed by 24 hours. You can “bank” up to seven days in a single week period, and you can complete one match each day or do them all in a bigger session – it doesn’t matter.
- To prevent players throwing their games in order to end up at the bottom ranks and enjoy steamrolling less capable players, it’s now much harder to hit the lowest and highest ends of the ladder.
Season 4 rankings and rewards
Bronze
Points: 1-1499
Rewards (CP): 100
Silver
Points: 1500-1999
Rewards (CP): 200
Gold
Points: 2000-2499
Rewards (CP): 400
Platinum
Points: 2500-2999
Rewards (CP): 800
Diamond
Points: 3000-3499
Rewards (CP): 1200
Master
Points: 3500-3999
Rewards (CP): 2000
Grandmaster
Points: 4000+
Rewards (CP): 3000
What does each Skill Ranking mean?
Let’s take a look at how Overwatch treats differently skill players, and what each ranking stands for as a means to define your skillset.
Bronze
What It Means: Bronze typically means your skillset is rather limited, and there’s some substantial room for improvement.
How To Improve: If you’re struggling to make much difference in solo queue, try playing with a friend and teaming up as a Support/Attack duo. Also try to diversify your strategy in Quick Play, and improve your knowledge of other heroes.
Silver
What It Means: Silver typically means you’re very competent across maybe one or two heroes. Beyond that, your skillset is limited, but improving.
How To Improve: Much like Bronze, it’s about trying to diversify your strategy and improve your range in Quick Play before jumping into Competitive.
Gold
What It Means: Gold means you have an above-average understanding of the more complex mechanics, but you haven’t quite perfected the more demanding heroes and abilities. You’re good, but not great.
How To Improve: At this stage you can probably play as 4-5 heroes really well. It might be time to focus exclusively on these, and perhaps diversify with an additional 2-3. You can jump in and survive in solo queue, and while there might be some pain when coming up against Platinums, it’ll be worth it for the experience.
Platinum
What It Means: Platinum means you’re better than a majority of players, but still a bit behind the pros. You understand and can play as 90% of the heroes, and can coordinate in-game without knowing or directly communicating with the other players.
How To Improve: This is probably the hardest tier to move up from, but if you’re in this area you probably don’t need any tips.
Diamond
What It Means: Put simply, you’re a very, very good player if you’re in the Diamond tier.
How To Improve: There’s not much else to do from here, because a very small percentage of players are actually better than Diamonds.
Master
What It Means: Masters are great players, bordering on superb.
How To Improve: Play against Grandmasters.
Grandmaster
What It Means: The best players around. Professional players.
How To Improve: The only way from here is down.
