Overwatch 2's director promises to "restore confidence" in its new ranking system and give more love to 6v6

As Blizzard gears up for the first new Overwatch 2 season of 2026, game director Aaron Keller takes a moment to dig into some of the biggest community talking points right now. At the top of his list are discussions about misplaced challenger ranks, event rewards, and Blizzard’s intent to support the continued popularity of Open Queue. Also included are adjustments to the recently reworked aim assist system, which Keller says the team “would have rolled out a lot differently” given a second chance.

In December, the Overwatch 2 team rolled out a new overhaul to player ranks called the Challenger Tier. This was specifically designed to make ranked play more competitive and dynamic, rather than encouraging “leaderboard camping” based on a great first-week run. Unfortunately, its initial implementation didn’t do a good job of taking your current rank into account, rewarding sheer quantity of matches played too heavily against other factors. A crossplay bug also saw Diamond-ranked players flying up the leaderboards, although that’s now been resolved and they should be returning to their rightful spots.

“We’re doing a big tuning pass next season to favor your rank more than the system currently does,” Keller explains. “Our goal is for the leaderboard to be more directly organized by rank next season, with extremely committed players still sometimes able to outscore those that haven’t played as much.” He adds that Blizzard wants the multiplayer game to feel “truly competitive,” and says, “hopefully these changes will restore confidence in those goals.”

If you’re not into the core modes, or just like to take a break from the sweaty grind, 6v6 Open Queue is a great option. Bumped up from five-player teams in 2025, Keller reveals it’s become the second most-popular way to play Overwatch, and he says it’s very much on the team’s minds. In fact, he even takes a moment to directly address player speculation that Blizzard was deliberately keeping the format on the back-burner.

“In a recent livestream, I made a remark that caused some of the community to think that we’re intentionally withholding support from these queues,” he notes. “This isn’t true […] and we’re currently talking about what it would look like to put more support into these modes this year.” Before doing so, however, Blizzard is collecting data on what players like and dislike most about 6v6 Open Queue.

“We’ve had Open Queue in the game for some time, but 6v6 became its standard team size in early 2025,” he recaps. “A year later, this mode is roughly as popular now as it was before the change to 6v6 was made. The easiest example to illustrate why this is a tricky situation to solve is that some Open Queue players jump in for fast queue times while some 6v6 players are looking for more balanced team compositions.”

Keller touches on the recent winter event and its new progression system, where cookies earned through challenges could be exchanged for specific rewards. However, its implementation left a little to be desired, causing confusion among players as to how to progress. “Many of you thought that the only way to earn cookies was through the event modes,” Keller remarks, “[and] those of you who realized you could earn cookies through challenges thought we tied too many of the rewards directly to event modes.”

While most of the rewards could be gained by completing daily challenges, Keller admits this wasn’t made clear enough: “We’ll be sure to make this easier to understand if we run this type of event again in the future.” On the latter point about feeling tied to event modes, Blizzard’s in agreement with the sentiment, and will take it into account moving forwards. “We don’t think it’s healthy to force players into modes that you’d rather not play just for rewards.”

Blizzard also overhauled Overwatch 2’s controller aim assist in December, introducing an additional set of advanced options to tweak specific behaviors while also changing the default settings. The way modern matchmaking pools work mean this typically doesn’t affect PC players, but it saw a lot of backlash on the console side due to the way it affected the core feel of aiming and shooting.

“As game director, one of my top priorities is to protect the player experience,” Keller writes, “and changing the feel of aiming – the most important control in the game – isn’t protecting that experience. We’ve had a lot of discussion around this internally, and we still like this new system, but if we could go back in time, we would have rolled it out a lot differently.” While that’s not possible, the team has reverted some defaults and will be implementing a toggle next season to switch back to the ‘legacy’ style if you prefer it.

Keller doesn’t have any other details to share on exactly what that upcoming season entails, but he does tease that we can “expect more on that soon.” He wraps up by saying that Blizzard “is so, so excited to share all the huge things we have planned to make this year a truly memorable one.”