Here's How Overwatch Competitive Play Will Work

Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch's game director, has outlined how the game's competitive play mode will work when it is released.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Kaplan confirmed competitive play will be coming this month, but there is no firm release date yet. In Competitive Mode, players will go up and down ranks based on whether you win or lose, similar to Hearthstone's current system. Plus, it'll be season based, so your rank will reset every few months.

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Blizzard listened to feedback for its plans for the original ranked system, and found that player perception was off. The intitial system was progression based, with Heroic Rank being the highest ranking you could achieve. The game would show "a stack ranking of top players who hit that rank," said Kaplan.
"There was a misunderstanding among our playerbase that everyone was going to get to heroic rank, which is not true, just like it's not true that everybody will get to legendary in Hearthstone."
The original plan was to have different tiers of ranking, however once you reached one, you would never drop out of it. Kaplan promises the new system will be more skill-based, and you will be able to go down ranking levels if you lose.
Another change from the original system will be the length of ranked seasons. Instead of one month-long seasons, they will now most likely be "about three months and they will match the real-world seasons. They'll probably actually last about two and a half months and then we'll do like a week or two off."
There will be a "dynamic queue" system for competitive play, meaning you'll be able to queue with as many party members as you want. Blizzard will be announcing more competitive mode details over the coming weeks.
Kaplan also went on to address concerns over Overwatch's server tick rate. He refutes claims that the server tick rate is too low. "...the server does tick at 60Hz, it's the client update rate that is lower."
"One of the things that players are upset about is that if they get shot, where they perceive they were behind a wall, that this is a problem with server tick rate. Certainly there are contributions that could happen with both the server and the client update rates that could cause something like that to happen, but usually, in most cases, you're talking about latency."