After a brief interlude of one week, the third official season for Overwatch's ranked mode has officially opened its doors to the many hopefuls competing for the number one spot in the popular team-based hero shooter. During the offseason, players could play a special playlist with the competitive ruleset without having their skill rating be affected by their performance.
After thew game's ranked mode got a major overhaul in season 2, Blizzard Entertainment has decided to tweak the game's skill rating feature for season 3.
After giving the Skill Rating system a major overhaul in Season 2, we noticed both the Gold and Platinum tiers were significantly overpopulated. This meant that some players were initially achieving inappropriately high skill ratings and then experiencing a downward adjustment within the first few matches of the season. This also meant that competition within the Gold and Platinum tiers could vary widely from match to match.These issues have been addressed in the third season of the ranked mode, with Blizzard aiming to spread out the players over the tiers more evenly by tweaking the game's skill rating. Effectively, this means that you will get placed lower in the rankings than you did in season 2 (I dropped about 300 points after my placement matches and I swear only some of that is because I'm not terribly great at that game), but Blizzard says that this would normalize as the season progresses.
Overwatch Season 3 is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and will run for about 3 months so that should give you more than enough time to fight to your heart's content (or angrily sit in spawn yelling at your team members as some people seem to think it is best to do).
How did you fare in Season 2? Are you going to try and beat your Season 2 record in Season 3? Let us know in the comment section below!