Overwatch 2 head Aaron Keller attempts to clear the air surrounding competitive matchmaking drama

The Overwatch 2 season three mid-cycle patch this week looked to address some concerns that players have expressed regarding matchmaking on the competitive ladder.

Matchmaking has been a popular conversation piece in the game for a long time. But in a post to the game’s blog today, OW2 game director Aaron Keller aimed to put players who feel like the new patch maybe hasn’t immediately resulted in a higher match quality on the ladder at ease.

Showing off data and graphs that might confuse some players initially, Keller dove into some nuances of matchmaking before effectively telling players to be patient for the next couple of weeks as the developers take advantage of the midseason patch’s changes to fine-tune competitive mode matchmaking.

“In the patch we released on Tuesday, we implemented the first of a series of systemic changes (more are coming in Season 4) that give us back the flexibility to tune these modes separately and gives us new ways to tune the system,” he said. “Competitive can once again have its own set of parameters for how wide the skill gap can be that are separate from our other modes. This week we will be tuning these values to tighten the skill gap in Competitive as much as possible while keeping an eye on queue times for that mode.”

Along with making it so that comp matchmaking can be tweaked by itself, Keller added that devs can use changes from the patch to also tweak the ways that matchmaking works for parties. 

“We’re now able to get similar parties together in a way that minimizes role delta, which has  resulted in significantly lower party queue times,” he said. “It also concentrates wide parties together, which has made a dent in our player MMR delta.”

Related: Overwatch 2 season 3 midseason balance patch: Winners and losers

Following the midseason patch on March 7, many players raised questions about what was going to happen with matchmaking, and a couple of devs from Blizzard even addressed the situation during a livestreamed developer chat on both Twitch and YouTube.

Though Keller’s post probably didn’t provide all the closure that every player would want, it’s a clear attempt by the developer to make it known that they hear the feedback and are working on it.