Won an Overwatch match but an enemy rage quit? No worries, your skill rank adjustment won't nose dive
Overwatch competitive play has been adjusted to prevent major disappointment when a foe undermines your victory.
Overwatch's competitive mode is still finding its feet as Blizzard works out how best to assess player performance and ability.
It's a long way from perfect, but here's one recent change for the better: until recently, if a member of the enemy team rage quit in a match your team won, you'd take a pretty severe penalty to your Skill Rating adjustment. As of Friday last week, that's no longer the case.
This makes a great deal of sense. Although there's no denying it's easier to win when the enemy has fewer players, it was really disappointing to get to the end of a hard-fought Overwatch match and only get a tiny boost just because some troll on the other side quit out at the very last moment.
Blizzard actually made this change to Overwatch on Thursday but you might not have noticed the effects immediately; according to the Overwatch forum (via PCGamesN), there was a bug in the update which wasn't ironed out until Friday.
Blizzard has confirmed the system is now working as intended, but since some Overwatch players still feel they're not getting their due, the developer gave an update on skill rating adjustments.
"Things like your team’s probability of success, your individual performance, and win/loss streaks can all affect how your Skill Rating is adjusted at the end of a match," an Overwatch community manager wrote.
"These factors are there for a reason (to help make Skill Rating as accurate as possible), but we know that it’s not always clear right now why your Skill Rating is adjusted the way it is. That's a concern for us, because we not only want Skill Rating to be accurate, but also for it to make sense. The fact that it doesn't is good feedback for us, and seeing how we can make Skill Rating feel better is definitely something we’ll be keeping in mind as we look at ways to improve Competitive Play for future seasons."
Transparency on skill rating adjustment would go a long way to taking the frustration out of competitive Overwatch; it's really disheartening to rack up a ton of medals but get little credit for it.