Blizzard has made changes to the official Overwatch Season 18 start date, affecting the current Role Queue beta and competitive period.
Gamers on PS4, Xbox One and PC, have found out today that the start of Season 18 has now been delayed past its original timing, which was scheduled to begin today.
The dev team behind the popular team shooter have made several changes to the Role Queue beta since it first went live in August.
It was announced earlier this week that Competitive Play would be the only mode to receive the Role Queue update on time.
Blizzard confirmed that Role Queue would be a huge change for Overwatch and had decided to split up the launch, rather than having it go live across all modes on September 1.
This would have started with Season 18 of Competitive Overwatch, as the current Seasonal event is a special Role Queue beta.
This change would have seen Quick Play changes go live on Tuesday, September 3, along with Quick Play Classic Mode for Arcade.
“As you may have read previously, we’ve been planning to enable Role Queue for Competitive Play and Quick Play simultaneously,” a message from Blizzard reads.
“However, Role Queue is a huge change to Overwatch gameplay and we want to ensure a smooth launch for both Competitive and Quick Play. To this end, we’ve decided to separate the launch times and delay Role Queue for Quick Play until September 3rd at 11:00 PST.
“This will allow us to fully support and respond to any issues that may arise for both Competitive Play and Quick Play.”
However, since this was shared by Blizzard, another scheduling change has been made, postponing the start of Overwatch Season 18 and the launch of Role Queue.
No new date has been given for when the big update will roll out, with Blizzard just sharing that it may take a few more days for everything to happen.
“Hey everyone, when Season 18 went live matchmaking values from prior seasons weren’t being respected. We’re extending the Role Queue Beta Season while we work on a fix for this bug, we expect to be ready for Season 18 early next week,” the latest update from Blizzard explains.
“A side effect of extending the beta season, the competitive card will say the season is ending in less than a minute.”
More news is expected to be shared by Blizzard when the revised schedule has been worked out.
Once Role Queue is in the game, players will be required to complete five placement matches in a selected role to obtain their seasonal skill rating for that role at the start of each Competitive Season.
If a player would like to earn their seasonal SR for all three roles, they will need to complete 15 placement matches in total—five each per role.
As player skill rating between roles can vary widely with Role Queue, matchmaking will be calculated using the SR of players’ selected roles. We believe this change will help players feel freer to choose different roles while also creating matches that are fairer and more fun.
The new Overwatch update is seen as a positive move by the development team and has already had a big impact on the Overwatch League.
“In Quick Play, the Role Queue system will allow us to determine each player’s matchmaking rating (MMR) on a per-role basis,” a message from Blizzard adds.
“This enables us to matchmake Quick Play games based on the MMR for each player’s chosen role. In addition to giving players more freedom to play the roles they want, we believe this will also result in games that are fairer, more appropriately matched, and ultimately more fun overall.”