Overview
- Valve rolled out the new ranked queue at the end of July, making the formal competitive mode live and playable now with the first season running through October 7.
- Players must earn access by getting 60 Standard wins overall and unlocking at least three heroes for ranked by winning 15 games with each hero.
- The ladder uses 11 named ranks with six subranks each and an eight-game calibration that cannot place players higher than Oracle VI during calibration.
- A major matchmaking rewrite preserves hero-first queuing, adds a pre-game hero-swap phase and tighter party limits (solo or duo only with rank spread caps) to protect match balance.
- Valve warns the initial launch will be unstable because the ranked pool is thin, so expect longer queues, variable match quality, short-term bug fixes and future tuning of season length and eligibility rules.