We are several months into the Overwatch 2 community being unhappy with the state of matchmaking in the game. Many are still experiencing horribly unbalanced matches, with lower-ranked players getting matched with people who are multiple skill classes ahead of them. Luckily, it sounds like you should expect some news on this front sooner rather than later.
Related: The Overwatch 2 community is debating whether reaching Grandmaster in Ranked still matters
We initially dove into this topic over a month ago, but while Season 3 is an overall much better experience than Season 2, the matchmaking, especially in Competitive, hasn’t improved much, if at all. Just about any day that you check the Overwatch forums and Twitter discussions, you will see plenty of complaints, but the rise of matchmaking issues seems to be just about as high as ever, with some completely swearing off playing the ranked mode until it is fixed, while also noting how Quick Play isn’t much better. Instances like this thread discussion, where everyone can relate to most of their matches being one-sided games, are bad for Overwatch 2. Even people on the winning side are not having a good time.
As noted above, the big problem is the wild discrepancy in ranked levels that are being pulled together. Last week, Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller tweeted that they started implementing changes to address these issues, with more information coming in an as-of-now unreleased development blog post. Given how the conversation all weekend has been about how poor the experience was, the “fixes,” unfortunately, did not do enough.
Overwatch 2 lives and thrives on the competitiveness of its matches. Blizzard has fallen victim in the past to waiting too long to address significant hero balance issues, and they seem to be falling into the same pitfall here. While we appreciate much of their work on making Season 3 a vast improvement for the game, we think matchmaking should be their first priority right now. There’s no future in a live service game where even winning isn’t fun because the game is so unbelievably unfair to play.
