With Season 10 arriving in less than a week, a brand-new Overwatch 2 Developer Update is here. Called "Defense Matrix", it centers around player experience across both ranked and unranked game modes. This concerns everything from team-ups to disruptive behavior and the consequences of being a nuisance during gameplay.
The nearly 10-minute-long Overwatch 2 Developer Update video had much to divulge, so let's tackle the first few major aspects, namely further Competitive changes in the form of wide group introduction and player penalties. Here's everything fans need to know.
Overwatch 2 Developer Update Defense Matrix introduces competitive wide group changes
First, what is a Competitive wide group? From Season 10 onwards, developer Blizzard Entertainment is introducing a new ranked matchmaking element where players can group up with their friends regardless of their competitive rank in Overwatch 2.
In other words, a Bronze-ranked player can team up with their Platinum friends with no grouping or matchmaking restrictions. Under the hood, however, this does introduce some drawbacks to take note of. For one, wide groups can only face off against other wide groups. So if there is a Bronze Support and a Platinum Tank on a team, the opposing team will have a similar player ranking configuration.
As a side-effect, this will likely increase queue times for wide group matchups, but that is one sacrifice to make for playing with higher or lower-ranked friends. Furthermore, players on a team with a high-rank gap will not see a shift in their rank. In other words, if players want to climb the ranks to Top 500, then solo play is the way to go unless they play with teammates of similar rank.
All player leaver penalty changes introduced in Overwatch 2 Developer Update Defense Matrix
It is common to see someone from a team leave mid-match in both unranked and ranked play. Since Overwatch 2 is a 5v5 hero shooter, even a single player's departure can heavily skew the match in the opponent's favor. The new Leaver Penalty changes aim to tackle this problem in Season 10.
The older penalties for leaving four and six unranked matches out of 20 are here to stay. However, players can expect to see a milder five-minute temporary play ban for leaving two to three of those 20 matches. Those dropping half or more of the 20 matches, meanwhile, can expect to get banned for a whole 48 hours.
On the competitive side, 10 of 20 match dropouts will earn a seasonal competitive ban; in short, they cannot queue for ranked matches for the whole season. Given how Blizzard has introduced the new Jade weapons in Overwatch 2 as a reward for earning competitive points, this will be a big blow.
Overwatch 2 Season 10 arrives on April 16, 2024, for PC, PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch platforms. Be sure to check out the previous Developer Update to know more.
