Overwatch 2 Season 11 matchmaking update

Season 11: Super Mega Ultrawatch arrives soon. Ahead of its release date, Overwatch 2 senior engineer Morgan Maddren shared some Overwatch 2 Season 11 matchmaking changes and addressed some community feedback on the wide and narrow queues.

According to Maddren, Season 10 featured a new system that separated wide and narrow groups. The narrow pool resulted in better match quality. He then gave an example to emphasize this, referring to Season 9 and how three out of four of ranked matches back then had players within 2.5 divisions from each other. However, the worst case was about 10 divisions wide. This was reduced to six divisions in Season 10's narrow pool.

"For wide groups, we expected that queue times would be long, but we've heard that you're feeling the pain that two-stack queue times are too long," he continued. "This is because we need to match every two stack with a three stack in the queue."

Thankfully, in Overwatch 2 Season 11, the threshold of what's considered a narrow two stack will be increased. This would result in improved queue times for two stacks.

"For groups of three and five stacks, we're seeing an average of around two to three minute queues, which we're very happy about," Maddren added.

As for groups with high MMR, Maddren acknowledged the long queue times. "We're making adjustments to the rules for narrow groups at the top ranks to try to improve this," he said. "We also continue to make adjustments to how the matchmaker handles the wide pool. We're still learning which factors of match quality are most important for these very wide matches and finding where we can most effectively relax match quality to improve queue times."

The team will continue to improve wide groups while working on some new tech for the Overwatch 2 matchmaker.

That's all for now. The Overwatch 2 Season 11 release date is June 20. Stick around on esports.gg for more news and updates.