The skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) system of Overwatch 2 had been broken for a while. Bronze players were paired with top 500 players in December 2022 and lately, Gold players have been put in lobbies alongside Grandmaster-level players, which leaves the game unbalanced for all parties involved.
The developers of Overwatch 2 promised to fix competitive issues in December, but the issues persisted in the months that followed. The game’s director Aaron Keller addressed the matchmaking problems in a Twitter thread yesterday and revealed the developers rolled out fixes during Valentine’s Day, which will be covered in the next blog post.
“Earlier today we started rolling out fixes for an issue where players from a much lower skill tier would get pulled into higher skill games,” Keller said yesterday. “We’ll continue to monitor and make additional changes if needed. For context, we made several changes to matchmaking in Season 3. We’ll cover these and their impact (generally, really positive) in the next blog update. A byproduct of these changes was pulling gold players into GM lobbies. That’s what these fixes are targeted at.”
These fixes Keller talked about came after a number of changes the developing team implemented to the game in Season Three. For example, players now gain a rank update after five wins or 15 losses, instead of gaining a rank update after seven wins or 20 losses.
If you, however, keep running into poor Overwatch 2 ranked matches because of unbalanced matchmaking, you should check out Loverwatch, the non-canon dating simulator set in Overwatch 2’s universe, while the developers try to fix the issues.
