One of the things that’s made Overwatch stand out is its Play of the Game clip at the end of a round; right now there’s an ongoing meme that inserts a totally random clip as the ‘play’ which I love personally. But it does make the comment that at times, the PoTG does need a little work. The play is often a long string of enemy kills in a row and if a Torbjorn player got the best kill string through his turret while dead… well, watching a dead body for a minute while those kills pop up onscreen isn’t exactly thrilling viewing.
Another complaint is that because of the way it seems to favour the long kill strings, the PoTG often goes to offensive characters as opposed to maybe a Support who did something cool and turned the match around for their team. Blizzard are listening however and are trying to improve the formula used to determine these plays.
Lead software engineer Rowan Hamilton explained this in a Gamespot interview saying: “From a technical standpoint, it’s a really hard problem to have a computer figure out what is cool. They’re not very smart. They take some numbers in, they put some numbers out. It’s hard to figure out what is cool there. We constantly look at Play of the Game, and we’ve got a whole bunch of data on Play of the Games are actually happening out there in the wild, and we can kind of see patterns about this character getting a lot of PoTG for these killstreaks, they’re getting a lot of damage, or they’re getting a Play of the Game for that.
“We also have a lot of cool systems internally where we can play with the algorithm that determines Play of the Game and play the same game back again, and be like, “Okay if I tweak these numbers, what’s going to be the Play of the Game that gets picked this time?” So it might’ve been Widowmaker getting three snipes, but I change the weighting on some other aspect that we take as important, and it could all of a sudden its Mercy resurrecting everyone on the point two second before the match ended. It’s going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it.”
In the interview he does say that some improvements have already been made, so that the algorithm takes into account the difficulty of shots made, using the speed of the player and the distance to calculate the ‘coolness’ of the shot. More changes are to come soon, so hopefully we’ll slowly begin to see a slide towards an equal showing of all characters for PoTG.
After all, I’ve seen some really cool ones from the lesser shown characters including one Lucio wall-running shot that managed to leave three enemy players down. That sort of play deserves more recognition really.
