Blizzard has detailed the updates coming to Overwatch 2’s Competitive Play in next week’s season 12 launch, including another rank reset, some changes, and new additions to the existing formula.
In a new Director’s Take blog on Aug. 16, OW2 senior systems designer Gavin Winter reconfirmed that changes to the “Avoid as Teammate” feature will go live in season 12, now featuring 15 slots. Three of those slots are for players who can be “pinned” and permanently avoided, while the other 12 will be “recent” avoid slots that time out after a week.
“For most of our players, these Recent avoid slots function the same as our previous avoid slots—effectively always preventing these players from being placed in your match,” Winter said. “It is important to note that it’s still possible to get players in Recent avoid slots in your matches, though. This can happen when you’re at very high Rank or if you’re in lower-population regions during off hours.”
Winter said that as queue times inevitably increase, the game will “begin ignoring players at the bottom of the recent list,” but you’ll be able to reset the duration of each player individually to send them back up to the top.
The other big change in season 12 is a move to Wave Respawn, as opposed to Group Respawn, which OW2 has been using over the past few seasons. Waves sound complicated and will most likely take some getting used to for the most detail-oriented players. They’ll be used in both Quick Play and Competitive Play modes.
Wave respawning means that whenever the first hero on a team dies, they begin a “wave” for their team, and any hero that dies within six seconds of a wave will join it and respawn at the same time as the first hero.
Subsequently, Winter said “the respawn time of heroes joining the wave can be as long as 12 seconds if they died at the same time as the first hero or as short as six seconds if they just catch the end of the wave.”
This is because the default respawn time will be increasing from 10 to 12 seconds (13 to 14 seconds in overtime) to compensate for the new wave spawn mechanic, but there are other factors. In addition, if no one else dies within the first six seconds of a wave, the respawn time for that hero drops back to 10.
Season 12 will also introduce a new feature called Drives, which are timed events where players can win a Signature, which is a cosmetic frame for your BattleTag in-game, as illustrated in the example image above.
During these Drives, the first of which will take place during a weekend near the end of season 12, players increase their Drive Score by winning Competitive matches. As Drive Score increases, different Signatures can be unlocked at various thresholds.
Along with a soft rank reset to begin the season like in season nine, which will decay every player’s rank closer to the average rank, the Flashpoint mode is also being tweaked by adding a speed boost to all spawn exits to get teams back into the fight faster.
All of these changes and more will be available when season 12 of OW2 goes live on Tuesday, Aug. 20.
