There are a couple of distinct features about Overwatch that fans of this game really love. One such feature is a unique highlight featuring an awesome play after each match, called Play of the Game. However, it’s far from perfect…
For those who didn’t know or don’t own Overwatch, Play of the Game is a particular highlight selected by the game’s algorithm to show of the best 20-second-long gameplay from the perspective of a certain player. Normally these plays tend to feature moments where players quickly accumulate tons of damage or pump out some insane healing. In other words, it’s all about the numbers.
Prior to that, it was just about the kills, but after some tweaks made by Blizzard a few years ago, healers could also be featured, e.g. if they healed a lot of damage in a short period of time. To be fair, this fix wasn’t ideal since now it favors healers instead of other heroes that do damage since healing numbers are always higher than damage… Some players in the Overwatch community started to take issue with it.
Recently, in the Overwatch forums user under the name of Roguebantha put together a thread compiling all of the complaints about how the POTG algorithm. In his post he wrote:
Every time I come to the forum, I see at least one of these bug reports near the top of the list.
“Healers (and Moira’s specifically) are getting too many POTG’s.”
Not once have I seen a dev respond. No “This isn’t a bug we’re experimenting”, or no “This is a bug and it’ll be fixed”, nothing. NADA. Zilch. Zero. Blizzard has been dead silent.
They say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so I’m hoping this post demonstrates to Blizzard just how squeaky this wheel is.
However, this time Blizzard reacted. One of the developers of Overwatch, Matt White, said that the team is aware of the issue and is currently testing a fix that should land with 1.47 Overwatch update (the same update should also introduce the latest hero to the roster Echo).
However, it’s too early to say whether this fix will tweak the algorithm in the right way, or just change its focus on some other numbers. Of course, a lot of the community would love to see some big brain plays featured in the Play of the Game highlight but we doubt that it’s possible… Maybe someday. With each new update, we’re getting there.