Overwatch 2 has announced a slew of huge competitive improvements arriving in Season 10 with more avoid slots for bad teammates and a complete removal of grouping restrictions.
Bronze players will finally be able to play with their GM friends again thanks to a huge new Overwatch 2 update arriving on April 16.
Season 10 of Overwatch 2 is coming later this month and the devs have quite a lot of new features in store to make the ranked experience a lot better for everyone.
Starting in Season 10, players of all ranks will be able to queue together with the addition of “Wide Groups.”
“Any groups with Diamond or lower ranked players that are more than five Skill Divisions apart are a Wide Group. Any groups with Masters players that are more than three Skill Divisions apart are also Wide Groups. Finally, any groups that have a Grand Masters or Champion Player are also Wide Groups regardless of how many Skill Divisions apart they are,” Blizzard explained.
Wide Groups will have longer queue times to account for finding an evenly-matched team to put players up against, but the devs believe this will do a lot to combat smurfs who otherwise would have made a new account to play with lower-ranked friends.
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Group up! The latest Developer Update video has arrived ✨Join Senior Systems Designer Gavin Winter and Senior Research Scientist Natasha Miller as they break down some of the Competitive and reporting system changes coming to #Overwatch2 💪 pic.twitter.com/5t8J8Ev1nn
— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) April 10, 2024
The devs are also making changes to account for possible boosting, noting that depending on the skill gap, lower-ranked players won’t gain a ton of skill progression each time they win.
This isn’t the only long-requested feature arriving in Season 10. Overwatch 2 is also upping the amount of avoid slots from three to ten, but it comes with a bit of a caveat.
While you can pin three players to always avoid as a teammate, you can now add seven more and prioritize them based on how much you don’t want to play with someone. However, as Senior Systems Designer Gavin Winter explained, for high-ranked players, if they can’t find a balance match, it will ignore avoided players on the bottom of the list.
There are a ton of other changes coming as well, such as more severe leaver penalties, and a way for players to hide their Battletag during a match to avoid harassment.
Be sure to check out all these features for yourself once Season 10 arrives on April 16 alongside the new DPS hero, Venture.