Overwatch's Controversial Tie Break Rule Changing Again

As part of a recent update, developer Blizzard changed how Overwatch ties are resolved in competitive Assault games. After "a tremendous amount of feedback," the developer has decided to tweak the system again.

Before the patch, draws were decided by racing to capture a tie-breaker point. The update changed that to a progress-based system: "If neither team successfully captures the objective, a winner can be determined based on which team captured the largest portion," Blizzard said at the time.

This created a problem, however. As Blizzard explains in a new blog post, it meant that teams only needed to reach 1% capture to potentially win a match.

"If Team A is on Hanamura defense and prevents Team B from ever gaining any capture progress, then when Team A is on offense they only need to reach 1% capture progress to win the game," writes principal designer Scott Mercer. "This means Team B needs to always have someone contesting on the capture point, or they risk losing."

To prevent this, the system will soon change slightly, meaning you'll now need to reach at least 33% capture to win a tiebreak. So if Team A gains 10%, then Team B captures 20% in the next round, the match will end in a stalemate as neither team reached 33% capture. Conversely, if Team A reaches 90% on offense before Team B attacks to gain 40%, Team A wins as they had more progress than their opponent and a minimum of 33%.

Blizzard admits the tweak will result in more ties than the old arrangement, but feels "the additional clarity of the victory moment and ability for the defense to react to the offense are worth it." The change will arrive in a future patch.

Overwatch was recently updated with a new expansion, called Uprising. The update added a bunch of new skins, items, and a PvE mode. You can watch us play the game and unlock boxes in our Overwatch Uprising livestream right here. In addition, a patch was released on PC to fix a PvE exploit and fix a load of bugs--take a look at the full patch notes here.

Game director Jeff Kaplan recently said Overwatch could come to Nintendo Switch down the road, though it would be "difficult" if it did happen. He's also stated the game could get a map editor one day.

"We are extremely open-minded about releasing a map editor for Overwatch someday," he said. "But because Overwatch was made with a brand new engine, this is not a small task or one which can happen any time soon."

For more on Overwatch, you should definitely check out our own interview with Kaplan. He discusses an abandoned idea for a cat-with-a-jetpack hero, patching out Genji, bad Google images, Fast and the Furious, and more.