Season one of Overwatch featured the controversial ‘Sudden Death’ mode.
Sudden death was basically a flip-coin tiebreaker. In the case of a tie, the game would randomly assign one of the two competing teams to attack, and the other to defend, for one final attack.
Unfortunately, players were disgruntled by this mode, as depending on where they were playing and what option they got, one team would oftentimes have a clear advantage over the other.
Ranking systems improved altogether in the game's second season.
The Sudden Death system had been meant to give both sides equal chances, however as it turned out, that wasn’t how it happened. Therefore, Blizzard decided to eliminate sudden death from the game altogether - thus, allowing for ties to take place.
Sudden death wasn’t the only change - more changes were made to the ranking system, including the ‘skill tiers’ which placed players on different levels of skill, which go as such:
A way of settling close games was implemented which basically resembles going overtime - namely, each team can use all of the time it has left over in order to rack up more points. Pretty convenient.
An overview of the changes that Season 2 brought
So why is there talk of returning Sudden Death?
Even the new system cannot completely prevent ties. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if Blizzard hadn’t made it so that if any competitive play match ends in a draw, neither one of the opposing teams receives any points.
As it turns out, several players have been complaining on the official blog of getting several ties in a row. Blizzard insists that such cases are extremely rare, and they are still doing their best to help the game avoid any draws.
However some players are still disgruntled, arguing that at the very least, if teams would still be awarded points even in a draw, there would be no need to return sudden death. Players’ opinions seem to be divided on this idea, too, however, and for the moment the problem doesn’t seem to be a big one.
However if over the following months this escalates, is it possible that blizzard will consider actually returning the Sudden Death mode? All we can do at the moment is wait and see how things proceed and hope that Blizzard finds an efficient way of solving things once and for all.
Interested in Overwatch? Why not check out some more of our articles on this game:
1.Overwatch vs. Battleborn: 5 Differences That Make Them Unique
2.11 Best Overwatch Heroes You Should Master
3.Overwatch: 10 Interesting Facts About This Awesome FPS
