Reflecting on the shooter’s first week on the market, Blizzard Lead Software Engineer Rowan Hamilton has not only outlined how Overwatch‘s Play of the Game mechanic functions, but he’s also vowed to improve it.
During an interview with GameSpot, Hamilton revealed how an in-game algorithm is used to determine the Play of the Game; although it tends to champion those heroes that dish out the most damage (Torbjörn), as opposed to, say, the Support class characters who aren’t likely to rack up a kill count.
Offering an overview of the feature, the Blizzard designer conceded that it’s a difficult problem to pin down, stating, “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. It’s going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it.
What do you make of Overwatch‘s Play of the Game mechanic?
[Source: GameSpot]
