Overwatch‘s most important change since the game’s launch hasn’t quite gotten off to the start Blizzard had hoped for.
September 1 was supposed to mark the start of Season 18 and with it, the roll out of Role Queue into Competitive Play. After two weeks of a Beta Season, Blizzard appeared confident that the 2-2-2 system was ready to hit the competitive circuit.
As it turns out, however, it appears as though Season 18 has been plagued by a Role Queue bug, which is placing professional players and Grandmasters into Gold.
Initially, Blizzard had assured players that there wouldn’t be a hard reset of MMR.
“The results of your matches in the Role Queue Beta are not being thrown out and will be used by the matchmaking systems to help determine your skill in season 18,” Overwatch developer Scott Mercer explained last week.
“To help us seed your role’s SR after initially completing placements we’ve been tracking your match results as you play the three different roles for several months,” he said.
“This also means that the more games you played on each role, the more accurate we could be with your new role SR.
“We appear with the Role Queue Beta to have done a decent job overall with seeding, but of course there will always be exceptions.“
However, Season 18 went live and it was obvious that things hadn’t quite gone to plan, with multiple reports of high-tier players and even some professional players being placed alongside Gold players.
Developer Bill Warnecke wrote on the forums that the team was well aware of the issues, acknowledging a bug where high-skilled players were both receiving low ranks, and also receiving as little as 2 SR with every win.
“Hey everyone, we’re looking into a bug with competitive matchmaking. We’ve temporarily disabled competitive play while we dig into the issue,” Warnecke said.
Warnecke then updated in another blog post, confirming that Season 18 had been temporarily disabled.
“Hey everyone, when Season 18 went live matchmaking values from prior seasons weren’t being respected.
“We’re extending the Role Queue Beta Season while we work on a fix for this bug, we expect to be ready for Season 18 early next week.”
Season 18’s start date is now expected to launch early this week. As a consequence of the extended beta, the Competitive Play card will say it is ending in “less than a minute”, but you can still jump into the beta.
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