The Overwatch Competitive Play Season 7 has officially come to an end on December 28th. The new season will start after 3 days on December 31st at 4:00 P.M. 

The standards for SR gains and losses, the Competitive Points rewarded according to player skill tiers, and the rewards for the Top 500 players will remain the same for Season 8, although there will be a change made to the SR variance for teams and SR adjustment for players above the Diamond tier.

First, there has been a change made to the matchmaking, which will limit the range of the highest SR and the lowest SR when players are matched in a team. For example, players with over 4500 SR were often teamed up with players of lower SR due to not having many players with similar SR; Overwatch aims to reduce the occurrence of such issues.

Next would be the removal of personal performance SR adjustments for players above Diamond tier. Personal performance has been considered one of the factors influencing the SR gains and losses apart from the wins and losses of the match. This was meant to reward players who tried hard to play while punishing those who did not participate.

However, it has led to several controversies within the community and has caused some players to only care for personal performance and become indifferent to whether they win or lose; some performances were not accurate representations for certain heroes or roles. This is why the old personal performance adjustment will be removed and the SR adjustment will go as follows:

• If you have a higher than 50% chance to win a match, you gain less for a win and lose more for a defeat. Conversely, if you were an underdog in a match then you gain more SR when you win and lose less SR when defeated.

• New players experience both higher gains and higher losses than players who have completed a lot of matches.

• You gain less SR for a win than you lose for a defeat as you more closely approach the system’s mathematical upper limit 5000 SR. (So at very high SRs you do need a greater than 50% win rate to keep your SR stable.)

The exact date of when Season 8 ends has not been announced yet, although it is expected to end around the end of February, assuming it remains same as the last season. More details on the new change to Overwatch Competitive Play Season 8 can be read here.