Hi, you’re measuring skill wrong.
What are skills in Overwatch? Skills in hockey are like, stick control, movement (skating), positioning, where you’re predicting your teammates will be. Skills in chess are like, the defensive fortress, the psychology of it, knowing what your opponents know and what they expect. Here, I’ll get AI to do a more technical job of it before I school you on what OW skill is, without being good at Overwatch by the way (lots of metrics that you haven’t developed, simple as averaging out the sort of high-performance player playstyles, factor analysis kind of thing, where you check for literal skills, rather than call damage and winning skills… “I’m trying to get better at winning”, that’s not very specific, you know?)
1. Perceptual skills — how you take in the world
Scanning, tracking movement, noticing subtle cues. In hockey it’s peripheral vision and reading a player’s hips. In chess it’s scanning the board and instantly seeing that a rook is undefended.
2. Pattern skills — how you chunk reality
This is the biggest one. Experts don’t see individual pieces or players, they see configurations. A hockey defenseman sees “2-on-1 with weak-side trailer” not “two guys skating.” A chess master sees “isolated queen’s pawn with a bad bishop” not 32 pieces. They’ve stored tens of thousands of these chunks.
3. Cognitive / Calculation skills — how you simulate the future
Running the what-ifs. In chess it’s explicit: if I go here, he goes there, 5 moves deep. In hockey it’s implicit and much faster: if I pinch here, the winger covers, the goalie has to slide.
4. Decision / Strategic skills — how you choose what to play for
Not the best move in the moment, but the best plan. When to trade, when to be patient, when to take risk. Pawn structure vs. counter-attack in chess is the same logic as dump-and-chase vs. carry-in in hockey.
5. Execution / Technical skills — how cleanly you do it
This is where the games split hard. In chess execution is almost free — you move the piece. In hockey execution is half the game — your hands have to actually do what your brain decided, at full speed, while someone hits you.
6. Regulatory / Meta skills — how you manage yourself
Attention control, time management, emotional control after a mistake, stamina. Not tilting in chess after a blunder is the same skill as not taking a dumb penalty in hockey after you get scored on.
7. Social / Team skills — how you affect others
In chess it’s mostly psychological pressure — making moves that are hard to meet. In hockey it’s communication, selling a fake, setting a teammate up.
Okay, so back to humanity. In the game of Overwatch, you have like, coordinates, right? And facing angles. And you have accuracy of tracking. And you have dodging of enemy attacks. And you have predictions of enemy positions. Think of all the things you can break down into “the player’s movement patterns across many games were like this”, “the enemy movement patterns were like this”, “the teammates movement patterns were like this”, and just group them according to similarity.
Then see the ones that work and the ones that don’t. That’s your current “skill” metric, it’s “did they died? Did they winned?” and yeah, you can have actual skills, that the developers track, and like, feedback after games, or after a chunk of games, where it’s like “the next level up of players tend to do this, where you did this”, and asplains in like, averaged sort of games, maybe character-specific, how the players who were in games that played out like those ones were doing Specific Things Differently.
This requires knowing like “maybe player’s mouse control and tracking isn’t the easiest thing to train’“, or “many players are aiming like this, and many players are moving like this, relative to the map and each other at this skill level”, and you could have "“map pools”, where players of sort of lower skill levels (say less teamwork or enemy awareness/prediction) get to like, play on maps that have been specifically designed to teach about grouping? Yeah?
Or you could develop maps where like, high-tier players have a hard time, playing their standard way, and they have to adapt to a playstyle that might actually favour sort of different (yes favour) playstyles than have traditionally been successful in Overwatch, because you’d be tracking sort of running averages of playstyle aspects (which you could refer to as skills, validity there and everything), and like, these playstyle aspects, you can actually demonstrate them in archetypal replays, like, “this path, these enemy positions, what are these players watching out for?” “these healers, these healing styles (aggressive? are the healers chasing to finish kills? are they punished? are they punishing their teammates who aren’t doing the same? and) OOH! you could have like, advice thingys, where, say healers are getting called out for like, running out and confirming a kill, it could be like “the right call”, and you could have these moments at the end of the game where it’s like, no that actually is a way that players of these higher skill tiers do it, and if players are “playing like” players of lower skill tiers, in like, measurable aspect, but they’re still winning… hmmm….. interesting. If they’re got good skills in certain aspects, then the in-game coaching could be like “this is making a big difference for your average enemy”, and kablam! You’re defining skills as things you’ve actually, you know, understood, measured, averaged, normalized, categorized, described, illustrated, congoogliated, witchabantasorling farthing! sorry, what were we talking about?
oh yeah, so like, just having like “absolute positions” and “relative positions”, of all the heroes in games, then seeing what’s winning and what’s losing, and Then getting more specific about like “in which cases did these positions work, and what differentiated what worked and what didn’t?” then it’s like, when these guys were healers it was like this, when a tank came in it was blah, when another dps showed up, this player was already low health, and the enemy could have finished him, but his dps partner literally ran in front of her, in the line of sight, distracting the enemy so they could make a getaway! or, the enemy switched to the other guy, (the positional battle here gets pretty difficult computationally. I can’t describe it. you can like, get a language model to get familiar with these things, and yeah, define some variables, it’ll be like, define the absolutes first, right? the primitives, get it understanding like, “position is like this”, and then the more complex stuff, it can do an analysis to be like “these factors are making a difference here”, blah. I could go on.
I’m unemployed you know! Broke as a fart.