When it comes to online games, winning matches usually results in a promotion to a higher league – but somehow the opposite happened for an Overwatch 2 player after their twenty-first consecutive win. With the removal of levels in Overwatch 2, the only tangible source of account progression left is obtaining hero skins and cosmetics, as well as progressing through the Ranks in Competitive Mode.
The Ranks in Overwatch 2 come in two flavors: Role Queue and Open Queue. Open Queue functions similarly to the original Overwatch rankings at launch, in that it lets the players queue as any role and receive a universal Rank. By contrast, Role Queue separates the rankings for each individual player into three roles, and the party compositions are restricted to one tank hero, two damage heroes, and two support heroes. To receive their rank at the start of each competitive season, players must either win seven matches or lose twenty – whichever comes first. This cycle follows them throughout the season, and players can get reevaluated for a new Rank each time they hit the threshold.
This happened to Hoex666 who went down from Master 5 to Diamond 3 after suffering ten consecutive losses, which was to be expected, but after following it up with a twenty-one-game winning streak, the player inexplicably got demoted from Diamond 3 to Diamond 4. Hoex666 shared their confusion on the Overwatch subreddit, where people agreed that the lack of information on how wins and losses affect one's placement in Overwatch 2 makes it seem broken and arbitrary compared to the previous system.
One important thing to note is that Overwatch 2 does not specifically look at team performance or wins when accounting for Rank promotion or demotion, but rather at individual performance. It takes the stats of the ranked player and matches them against other players of the same hero, meaning that even a loss can benefit someone's placement into a higher Rank. While this system sounds fair and just on paper, Overwatch 2 players seem less enthused about it in practice. The key argument being that if a good player is on a bad team, they will obviously have worse stats than if they're matched with players of similar skill levels.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this development is that one can't rightfully know if Hoex666 has experienced a bug with the game's Rank system, or if it's working as intended. At the very least, it's obvious that player engagement within this new system is lower compared to the skill ratings of the original Overwatch game. No matter how fair a system might try to be, it never feels good to win over a dozen games in a row, and be punished for it.
Overwatch 2 is now available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
