Overwatch Competitive Season 18 delayed due to serious matchmaking bug

Season 18 of Overwatch ranked was supposed to be the official launch of role queue going forward as the two-week beta season ended, but a matchmaking bug has crashed the party. 

UPDATE: In a forum post, Overwatch developer Bill Warnecke has announced that the role queue beta season is being extended while they work on a fix for this bug. He expects Season 18 to go live – properly this time – early next week. The original story is below.

While the Overwatch League play-in tournament was taking place, Season 18 went live with catastrophic results. Despite promising there wouldn’t be an MMR reset, Grandmaster players began to be matched up with golds during placement matches. 

What’s worse is after completing the five role-specific placement games, extremely talented and even professional players were put in ranks way below their actual skill. 

For example, San Francisco off-tank Hyo-bin ‘ChoiHyoBin’ Choi placed at 2310 – which is mid-gold.

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In a follow-up Tweet, the pro posted a screen grab of his new SR after winning a single game: 2312. 

“Wait after i win i get 2 sr. this is some bug for sure,” he said.

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Over on the official forums, many users were asking about the supposed MMR reset and eventually the newest season of competitive play was disabled.

“Hey everyone, we’re looking into a bug with competitive matchmaking. We’ve temporarily disabled competitive play while we dig into the issue,” Developer Bill Warnecke wrote.

On August 26, developer Scott Mercer said the team has no plans to implement an SR reset despite many wanting to see it attempted.  

“We’ve actually tried in a few seasons doing something that amounts to a partial SR reset across seasons, but the results were pretty horrible. When you queue for a match with an SR that doesn’t accurately reflect your skill, the quality of the match drops tremendously,” he wrote. “Therefore, we try to quickly change your SR as a new player to more accurately determine your SR, and we can’t ever really consider implementing a full SR reset.” 

“Match quality would be harmed for months until everybody played a lot of games and the matchmaker could properly identify everyone’s skill again.”

It is possible that the bug could be caused due to a problem with a planned fix to speed up queue times for DPS players, though there are no confirmed reports that this is the problem.

As of this posting, competitive play is still disabled, but players can still jump into quick play, arcade and other game modes until it’s fixed.