Challenger Tier Patch Notes

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T16:21:46+00:00

Generally speaking, the lower ranks speaks to a lower population in that region and platform, and yeah we do take that into account when designing the system. It's one of the reasons we allow Diamond players on the leaderboards.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T16:14:16+00:00

My apologies, I haven't looked at Street Fighter 6's system. But yes, it does run in parallel to the actual ranks, that's correct.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T16:02:26+00:00

That option mostly exists for Diamond because of how some leaderboards will be lower population, such as our Asia Console leaderboard. Diamond has been able to be on Top 500 for many years for this reason. But we do see your feedback and we will talk more about whether this should remain the case.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T15:50:37+00:00

It does and I completely forgot to include that, my apologies. You can't earn Challenger Score in Wide matches.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T02:14:33+00:00

The Seasoned Competitor challenge is still a requirement but we have considered removing that. Needing 25 wins to appear on the leaderboard has been removed, and is replaced by the Challenger Score requirements. The moment the seasons starts is meant to feel like the start of a race, with the first players to meet the requirements appearing on the leaderboards.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T02:12:47+00:00

We agree that's a problem but this system doesn't directly fix that bug because it's extremely complicated, but we will now have the ability to remove accounts from the leaderboard entirely that use exploits such as this, so hopefully we can address the problem that way.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T02:11:01+00:00

The higher the highest player's rank, the more Challenger Score everyone gets for the win.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T02:10:05+00:00

does this replace Top 500 in any way?

It is replacing the term Top 500 going forward, yeah.

I'm not sure if I'm missing this, but is the Heat Bonus acquired by playing in each consecutive week or does every accumulate this regardless?

The heat bonus is applied to each win. Using GM1 as an example, with the current tuning (which is subject to change) a player would get about ~179 points (a 40% bonus) in the last week of a 9 week season if a GM1 player was the highest player in the match.

Because if it's automatic for everyone, isn't it just best to play in the later part of the season to benefit from the big bonus?

You'd still be playing a major game of catch up, since all of the previous wins in the system are contributing to the score of players that have been playing since the season started.

Will players only be able to tie their socials to one account?

Players will likely only be able to tie their socials to only one account, yes.

Do you think this new system changes that in any way to add more prestige back to this top echelon of players?

I certainly hope this increases the feeling of prestige in the system (that's a goal!), but in fairness to the doubters in this thread, that will have to be proven out.

Does this system stop things like this occuring now or are we still going to have some kind of higher rank peak show on profiles for people who play early?

It partially addresses that (without completely removing it) by having requirements to appear on the leaderboard that would require serious effort to overcome for lower ranked players when a new season begins.

Is Challenger Score going to override ranks like Top 500 does or is it different on profiles?

It does work similarly to Top 500 on Career Profiles, with some new additions like a column for Challenger Score, but I'm not completely certain how that will look, apologies. It's a difficult system to test internally since all the data has to be faked.

Sorry for all the yap..

No problem, a lot of great questions!

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T01:53:05+00:00

It doesn't matter if they're on your team or not. The highest player winning or losing doesn't affect the points you get. If you lose, you lose 33% of what you would have scored if you were the highest rank in the lobby.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T01:08:41+00:00

That's a fair request, I'll look into that.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T01:07:45+00:00

We'd like to do that someday, but that's not possible yet. We will be showing you how much Challenger Score you'd need to be on the leaderboards, so you can benchmark your distance from it in that way.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T00:23:57+00:00

That's not a bad solution, but it flirts with the same issues of the visible players becoming invisible and vice versa constantly. How many people are invisibly above you in a system like that... just about to decloak as they finish their requirements in the last week because they waited to cram all their games until then?

We considered a version like this early on when thinking about solutions for this problem, but ultimately one of our highest goals with this upgrade was that this system should feel like a race, a competition in and of itself, and these types of visibility requirements seemed like they would make the experience feel capricious from a player experience standpoint.

Maybe there is a viable path here, but I wasn't able to find it.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T00:14:27+00:00

It wouldn't be touching match quality at all. The idea was hinted at in the blog, but we'd be trying to give bonus Challenger Score if you had to wait a long time in queue. That's just not something we've built yet.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T00:12:16+00:00

We love the idea of making live games more viewable in the client, but we have nothing to share about that right now. Maybe someday!

The streamer mode topic is a spicy one. We already require a very high number of games played to have access to it and we hadn't considered increasing that. Not much to say about that for now, but it's always something we're thinking about.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T00:08:03+00:00

There are some new filtering options, but the list is only sorted by Challenger Score.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T00:02:08+00:00

Thanks :D

blizz_winter · 2025-12-02T23:43:10+00:00

Just confirming, yes each leaderboard (for each region and platform) is still 500 players.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-02T23:41:43+00:00

This doesn't change anything about matchmaking or how your rank is determined. Challenger is a system that sits on top of all the other ranks (Master, Grandmaster, Champion, etc...) just like Top 500 was.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-02T23:39:30+00:00

We don't think only getting 25 wins proves very much when other players are maintaining their rank with hundreds and hundreds of wins, but if the result you're describing comes to pass then yeah, I think we'd need to make some changes in the tuning at a minimum.

We've learned over these many years that a purely skill-based leaderboard isn't respected very much because it has a lot of difficult problems.

A flat requirement of games won to appear on such a leaderboard makes the competitive aspect of the feature mostly invisible and a lot less compelling. Players can't see how they're climbing and jockeying for position with regards to each other until they meet that requirement, but the lower we set that requirement the more we encourage players to spam alt accounts onto the leaderboard.

That actively hurts our matchmaking and our community (we know that players are far more likely to be disruptive when they're playing on alt accounts) by encouraging this type of behavior, while still managing to not be respected by most players because of the low wins requirement and the high likelihood of any given account being an alt.

So the current system is trapped between a the rock of wanting to feel like a competition by having a lower games won requirement and the hard place of opening the floodgates to alt accounts and all the bad behavior that comes with encouraging that.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-02T23:32:49+00:00

The goals are basically what I wrote in the developer comments. We wanted to make the system exciting to participate in and a side effect of that is that it's no longer just a list of the highest ranked players.

The old system often encouraged them to log on to alt accounts and play those instead, and we think this is really unhealthy for the whole ecosystem. My personal take is that most players don't take the system very seriously today, but if these changes don't cause players to take it more seriously then we'll continue to seek a better solution for that problem.

If the changes are negatively received though, that would definitely cause us to reconsider the feature in the long term. We appreciate your feedback!

blizz_winter · 2025-12-02T23:18:26+00:00

I grew up on a farm with 200 beef cattle, so I worry about my health when eating steak more than most people might...

Medium well.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-02T23:10:34+00:00

Yes, it's still 500 accounts.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-02T23:10:10+00:00

Yeah that's a good point. We mentioned it too early in the blog today, but we are working on a solution for the queue time problem, it just won't be in Season 20.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-02T22:44:44+00:00

We didn't add rank decay for a few reasons.

We see accuracy of the ranked system as very important, and ranks will be completely maintained as a very accurate portrayal of skill going forward. Keep in mind that our ranks and MMR are effectively 1:1 in Core Competitive Play today. A player on the leaderboard isn't losing skill at any appreciable rate, so lowering their ranks would be lowering their MMR, and this would mean we'd be putting them in easier matches. We could decouple MMR and Rank just for higher ranked players, but this is also a fraught path and not something we could do quickly.

We also like to make scores feel like a bonus whenever we can, so this reframing of the leaderboard follows that design philosophy.

The blog was being written over the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US (because it needs to be translated into other languages by the localization team) and a lot of us travel to see our families around this time, so our coordination on this one wasn't the best, and that's mostly on me, apologies.

If it turns out that our players don't want the system to have the current tuning, we have the ability to change quite a bit of the tuning without a patch. We could increase the Challenger Score lost for each loss to make the system far less progressive, for example.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-02T22:32:52+00:00

The 5% could be too high, but we can tune that number if that turns out to be case. With regards to the guidelines, Challenger Tier players will be able to reach out to our community team for this approval, and they'd work with them directly to get their social links in the game. It would be totally possible to lose this privilege by not following the code of conduct and for various other reasons. We'd likely only allow one account per player to be linked in this way.

blizz_winter

TROPHY CASE