After two successful competitive seasons, Overwatch has become an essential reference in video games thanks to the efforts of its creator, Blizzard Entertainment. Recently, One Korean player with the battle tag IzA got his way into the top ten after losing more than 200 games and winning just 6 in the past season.
This happened because of a glitch reported in the Kotaku Forums. This glitch affects the Skill Rating (SR) system used within the game.
The SR system got a recent update in which the points used to measure a player’s skill were changed from their initial scale from 1 up to 100 into a new one that goes from 1 to 5000. It seems that IzA’s score was not changed with this new system as it was too low for the algorithm to work properly using his winning ratio.
The situation came into the spotlight as IzA’s most played heroes, Reinhardt, Mei, and D.Va. are considered by the community to be not competitive. These players started to discuss IzA’s profile on the Kotaku forums and managed to discover the missed function of the algorithm.
This had an immediate result locating them in various top positions in the competitive leaderboard of the game.
Some players have reported that after lowering their winning ratio to 6 percent, they have received in the end screen 5,000 skill rating points after losing a match. This trend has caught Blizzard’s attention as many players have created reports about others intentionally losing team games to use the glitch causing them not to enjoy their game time correctly.
This is the second time that Overwatch’s leaderboard suffers a glitch
During the first competitive season held last year in Overwatch, a similar glitch was exploited by the American player Bacontotem. Hr managed to get a high position in the leaderboard after losing 80 consecutive games.
During that first season, Blizzard fixed the issue with a patch explaining the reason behind the malfunction in the SR system nor the algorithm behind it. So far, Blizzard Entertainment has made no official declarations, and no patch has been implemented in the game to fix this issue.
Specialized gamer journalists believe that a new piece seems unlikely, and the issue will not be taken care of anytime soon. This is because the 3rd competitive season approaches in a few months and Blizzard should be working in the big pre-season patch at the moment.
Source: Game Rant