Competitive Overwatch players call for return of SR decay

Players grinding Overwatch’s Competitive Mode are fed up with the lack of SR decay leading to people who haven’t played in a long time to come back and be instantly placed where they left off.

Ever since Role Queue was added to Overwatch, forcing the game to be played under a 2-2-2 team composition system, SR decay was removed. SR decay would cause a player’s skill rating to gradually decrease if they hadn’t played a game in a while.

While this was only a factor in Diamond ranks and above, it helped keep the game fair and made it so players who were out of the loop had to prove they still belonged in higher ranks.

However, with the removal of SR decay, some players find themselves “ruining games” by being placed at a rank that is too high for them given where they currently are skill-wise.

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Such is the case with Cloud 9 streamer Jamison ‘PVPX’ Moore who came back to Overwatch after five seasons to play on his main account and still found himself in Top 500. This caused viewers in his chat to wonder why he wasn’t on a smurf account while his team was getting rolled on Dorado.

“All my accounts are Top 50,” he replied. “It doesn’t help. Should I make a new account and then ruin lower SR peoples’ games? Literally, all of my DPS accounts are Top 500.”

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While the Twitch streamer didn’t even want to be in the lobby, he still found himself flamed by his teammates, who accused him of being “useless.”

A clip of the incident was posted on the Competitive Overwatch subreddit where players actively called for SR decay and an MMR reset for players who have been away for too long.

“I feel like if you don’t play for a while there should be some kind of decay, maybe 100 SR per season with a cap at 500 SR,” jonas691 wrote.

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Even PVPX himself replied with his own solution to the problem: “The game should have seasonal decay but it doesn’t need to be drastic. Something like 100 SR per season you don’t play with a cap of 1000 SR loss would probably sufficient enough to prevent situations like this from happening.”

He added that with how the meta shifts and new heroes are released, someone’s skill level can drastically change depending on the state of the game.

“I’m a strong advocate for soft MMR resets after multiple seasons or drastic game changes but it doesn’t seem like that will ever happen,” he wrote.

Hopefully, Blizzard decides to implement some form of SR decay or reset and help balance out lobbies, especially when players agree their SR is too high even for them.