Overwatch 2 Stadium’s matchmaking and builds are about to vastly improve

Now that Overwatch 2 Stadium has been here for a few weeks, Blizzard is outlining its plans for the immensely popular game mode’s future. The team has been listening to community feedback since the round-based alternative launched, and is already outlining the changes coming in Season 17 and beyond that’ll overhaul the experience. You can expect matchmaking improvements, more changes to stop Freja from dominating, new build features, and an unranked mode. Stadium’s here for the long haul, and I for one can’t wait to see how Blizzard keeps iterating on it.

On Friday May 30, Blizzard published a new Weekly Recall blog called ‘Tuning Up Stadium.’ As you’d expect, it focuses on how the newest Overwatch 2 mode is being improved, which very quickly became the most popular choice above the likes of Quickplay and Competitive. Blizzard clearly wants to keep supporting Stadium in the FPS game, and that means there’s going to be a lot of fine tuning in the near future.

To start, Blizzard outlines how it’s going to improve matchmaking. “To help folks settle into their matchmaking rating (MMR), we shipped Stadium with an internal modifier that helps calibrate the MMR for new players. The problem is that it was being applied to all Stadium players, not just new players, which caused matches to be wider than initially expected. We’ll be patching this out on June 3 alongside a standard balance patch. We expect matches in Stadium to even out over the next few weeks.”

Blizzard also admits that Freja has been quite frustrating to play against in Stadium, owing to one of her powers making matches completely unfair, so has a solution on the way. Starting in Season 17, a new anti-air item will be added to Stadium that should help you counter her.

The team also says it recently “clipped her wings” to make her easier to play against. On Wednesday May 28, Blizzard increased Freja’s Quick Dash cooldown from four to 4.5 seconds, and upped her Updraft cooldown from ten to 12 seconds. Her Take Aim ability was also nerfed, as its slow momentum time was reduced from 1.5 to one second, and its released speed went from 1.35 to 1.5 seconds. So if you’ve been playing as Freja recently, that’s why she’s not quite the menace she once was.

Builds are an incredibly important part of Stadium, and that’s why Blizzard is introducing the new Forge feature with Season 17. You can save builds in the Stadium Practice Range and access them during any match from the Armory, while you can also share these creations with absolutely anyone. This means you’ll easily be able to see what everyone else is using for your favorite hero, while crafting your own experimental builds and sharing them with the world.

That’s not all, though, as Blizzard says it’s also going to include more example builds for each hero. The team will suggest early and late game strategies to help newer players, too, making it easier to just jump in and play if you’re not a seasoned build crafter.

As for what else you can expect, Blizzard has an unranked Stadium mode heading our way soon. This version of the game will be best-of-five instead of seven, and you’ll get more cash so you can use even more strategies at a faster pace. Blizzard is aware that giving players are more casual option means it’ll have more leavers, but the team has a solution. Unranked Stadium will get a backfill feature, and it’ll work similarly to Quickplay but give new players a stack of cash equal to the progression of the game so they can jump in at the same level as everyone else.

“As the MMR curve evens out, we’ll be enacting more restrictions on grouping in Stadium in a future update,” Blizzard writes in closing. “This will be very similar to the system we have in place for Overwatch’s core Competitive Mode, where there are limitations on who you’ll play with (and against) based on skill divisions. High-ranked players and those dealing with long queues should see improvements.”

Make sure you check in on the best Overwatch 2 Stadium DPS builds and Overwatch 2 Stadium tank builds as well, to give you your best chance across the rounds.

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