With the Operation Bloodhound update (2015-05-26) Profile Ranks have been added to the game. If you look at a player's in-game profile, it will display their current rank. Profile Ranks are similar to Character Levels in a RPG, and the maximum rank is 40. In order to rank up you have to collect XP. You always need 5000 XP to reach the next rank. (195,000 XP in total from 1 to 40.) An in-game profile looks like this:









Each rank has a unique icon. Each rank also has a name, but they're not necessarily unique. Here is a full overview of all 40 ranks:

When you reach rank 40 (Global General), you can reset your Profile Rank back to 1. In exchange, you'll permanently get a Service Medal, which is an inspectable display item similar in fashion to the Operation Medals. You can see the inspect animation of the original 2015 Service Medal in the YouTube video.



Important! You should click the "Get Service Medal" button as soon as possible after you reach Level 40. Any additional XP that you collect will be lost else.

There are many different Service Medals, and they're grouped into years and ranks. If you click on the "Get Service Medal" button, you'll always gain the next rank of the medal of the current year.

The regular way to earn XP is to play the game. Depending on the game mode and how the game is playing out, you will earn different amounts. You can only earn XP while playing on official Valve servers. If you play on 3rd party servers or Offline with Bots you won't earn any XP. In Competitive matchmaking, the amount of XP depends on the amount of rounds that your team wins. In every other game mode, the amount of XP depends on your personal score on the scoreboard. You will only earn XP at the end of the match. If you leave the server before the end of the match, you won't earn any XP.

Refer to the following table to see how the game modes differ from each other in terms of XP gain:


Please note: The actual amount of XP that you earn is affected by the Weekly Bonus or by Reductions. Refer to the next section for more information about that.

In order to encourage playing regularly, you'll gain Bonus XP at the start of each week. If you play a lot, your Bonus XP gain will lower and later on vanish altogether. If you play even more, your XP will be Restricted until the beginning of the next week. If your goal is a high rank, you should make sure to play every week at least until you only gain Restricted XP. This table details the different steps:


Please note: These values are estimations.

Operation Bloodhound missions allowed players to collect additional XP during the Operation. At the moment (2017-02-05), there are no additional missions that players can complete to gain additional XP.

Another way to gain XP is being an Overwatch Investigator and submitting accurate verdicts in your cases. After several of your cases have been resolved, you will receive an XP reward based on the overall accuracy of your recent verdicts, scaled by your Overwatch Investigator score.

You can then collect your reward by completing matches and earning XP in any official game mode.

Thanks to some people from the Steam Community, there are translations to this guide, maybe also in your native language. Check them out if you're interested:

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If you want to contribute a translation into a language not yet listed, please leave a comment on my Steam profile and tell me about it. If you want to improve a translation, please contact the translator.

While most of this guide is original research by myself and other community members, there is also some official information about Profile Ranks from Valve themselves out there. Here's the list so you can check it out:

• Operation Bloodhound Announcement Page: Features a short introduction to Profile Ranks and also answers some questions in FAQ-style.
  
• "Overwatch Out Of Beta" Blog Post: Announces the 2015 Service Medal and Overwatch XP rewards.
  
• Overwatch FAQ: A worthy read for everyone participating in the Overwatch also answers one question about XP rewards.