Happy New Year, everyone!!

It's the first Director's Take of 2026 and we can't wait to show you everything that's coming this year, starting with next season! Expect more on that soon. For this blog, though, I'd like to go over a few items from Season 20. In addition to the release of our newest gladiatorial hero, Vendetta, this season also saw the release of a new Winter event, a new Challenger system that replaced our Top 500 leaderboards, and a new aim assist system on console. There has been quite a bit of discussion and feedback over each one of these and that's what I'd like to go over today.

Challenge Accepted

Let's start with the Challenger system. Previously, the Top 500 leaderboards acted as a list of the highest skilled players by rank. Over the past few years, there has been frequent community feedback about Top 500, so we looked to design a new system. This system would show the best and most committed players in a region while limiting leaderboard camping, which we know has been a pain point for the Overwatch community.

The Challenger system tracks a Challenger Score for any player in Diamond rank and above. As you win matches, you accumulate more points and those with highest Challenger Scores go on the leaderboards. Higher-rank players earn more points for every win. However, we saw several problems with the system on release:

• Our initial tuning didn't take a player's rank into account enough and rewarded play time too heavily.
• Giving every player in a match a score based on the highest-ranked player in that match limited our ability to tune the system.
• Because of a Cross Play bug, many Diamond players were able to place much higher on the leaderboards than we intended.
• The tuning for the Heat Bonus is too hidden from players.
• Players felt that the "Top 500" leaderboards had more prestige as a name than the Challenger Leaderboard did.

We've since fixed that bug and Diamond players are now dropping down on the leaderboards. In addition, we're doing a big tuning pass next season to favor your rank more than the system currently does. Our goal is for the leaderboard to be more directly organized by rank next season, with extremely committed players still sometimes able to outscore those that haven't played as much. We still want Top 500 to feel like a race, but we heard your feedback and we'd like rank to count for a lot more than it did this season.

A goal for next season is for the top of the leaderboards to be exclusively Champion players, and there are a few details to go over here. Champion players have longer queue times than players of other ranks; since play time will still have some effect on a player's total score, we're factoring those longer queue times into the Challenger Score that Champion players get for winning. Also, the number of points awarded for a win increases as the season goes on because of the Heat Bonus. Matches later in the season are more important for a player's final score than those early in the season. Currently, this mechanic is too hidden and we're exploring ways to better highlight it. Finally, we agree that the moniker of Top 500 does have a certain amount of prestige to it. The system will keep the Challenger name, but we'll rename the leaderboards to Top 500.

We'd like you to view this system as truly competitive and for players at the top to be recognized as the best. Hopefully these changes will restore confidence in those goals.

Recalibrating Aim

Let's move on to the new aim assist system on console. Over time we've seen a lot of positive impressions, but there has also been a negative reaction from many console players for a few reasons:

• When the system was first implemented, it changed the feel of the game for many players.
• There was no way for you to go back to the previous system if you preferred that one.
• There's a perception that this update has shifted the meta in unhealthy ways for console players.

Let's get this out of the way first: we introduced this system incorrectly. As Game Director, one of my top priorities is to protect the player experience and changing the feel of aiming-the most important control in the game - isn't protecting that experience. We've had a lot of discussion around this internally, and we still like this new system, but if we could go back in time, we would have rolled it out a lot differently.

Since we can't go back in time, here's what we're doing instead: we've already reverted some of the changes that modified a player's default aim settings. In the discussions we're tracking, we see that many players now prefer the new system, but there are still quite a few that miss the old one. This is a matter of personal preference and aim feel is incredibly important to the player experience, so next season we're implementing the ability for you to optionally select the old system if you prefer it. Think of it as a legacy mode for aiming!

Cookie Economics

Moving on! Let's chat about the Winter Event. We implemented a new system where players earned cookies through challenges and exchanged them for rewards during the event. Two main pieces of feedback caught our attention:

• Many of you thought that the only way to earn cookies was through the event modes.
• Those of you who realized you could earn cookies through challenges thought we tied too many of the rewards directly to event modes.

You could earn most of your festive rewards through standard Daily Challenges, but this wasn't readily apparent when looking at the Winter Event reward page. We'll be sure to make this easier to understand if we run this type of event again in the future! And we agree with the second piece of feedback: at the end of the day, we want you to engage with Overwatch and our seasonal offerings in whatever way is most fun for you. We don't think it's healthy to force players into modes that you'd rather not play just for rewards.

Open Queue And You

Last up, Open Queue and 6v6! In a recent livestream, I made a remark that caused some of the community to think that we're intentionally withholding support from these queues. This isn't true. Open Queue is the second most popular way to play Overwatch and we're currently talking about what it would look like to put more support into these modes this year.

However, before we can move in any particular direction, it's important to analyze why players are interacting with these queues. This mode is Open Queue and it's 6v6. We've had Open Queue in the game for some time, but 6v6 became its standard team size in early 2025. Interestingly, this mode is roughly as popular now as it was before the change to 6v6 was made. The easiest example to illustrate why this is a tricky situation to solve is that some Open Queue players jump in for fast queue times while some 6v6 players are looking for more balanced team compositions. Implementing features for either one could hurt the other. While we don't have a lot of concrete evidence to support either of these directions at the moment, we'll be collecting data and experimenting to find the best solution in the near future.

2026 is going to be a massive year for Overwatch. The team is so, so excited to share all the huge things we have planned to make this year a truly memorable one. Thanks for giving your feedback and as always, let's make a great game.