Private profiles were needed but

General Discussion
1

IMHO Private Profiles were needed and I’ve already argued why fully open profiles were horrible - so if you’re here to argue that, see my other post first.

Although, I still think a fully open profile isn’t ideal… what I’ve been seeing is a desire for team members to know a little bit about their team mates. I’ve tried doing this in chat by asking “what type of tanks do you play?”, for example, but get mixed results.

I think the solution to this can be two fold:

  1. A Dashboard of Hero use in ALL MODES with a high level view of usage (this lets you get your experience in any game mode). I’m not talking about showing number of hours and/or requiring a ton of them here. For example, less than 1 hour of hero use would mark the hero as “New” or “Novice” for you. If you’ve used the hero 1 to 10 hours, it would list you as “Some Experience”, and more than 10 hours would list you as “Experienced”. That’s it… I’ve seen people with 100+ hours on a hero and it doesn’t mean squat… after 10 hours (or some other number Jeff can decide on) it’s enough to say you know the mechanics of the hero and should not be harassed when playing him/her.
  2. A second element of your dashboard should be where you list your preferred roles and heros. This is something the player would be able to change freely and not be tied your usage “level”. There could be some kind of icon or badge even to make it easier to identify… so you can list yourself as a preferring specific roles or here - e.g. a tank player who prefers Roadhog, Rein, and Winston AND a DPS player who prefers Widow and Hanzo.

The above should all be on a single simple screen per player so we can get to know our fellow players before a match starts and develop comps. Even more ideal would be a specific “team profile” screen that shows the overlap of all of these things for the six people on the team. You could see for the two tanks assigned one prefers Rein and the other Winston… or they both prefer Rein… so they should talk it out…

This is far different from the previous profiles which had numbers… no numbers here at all. Numbers invite comparison for someone to say “I have more hours than you” or “My K/D ratio is better than yours”… that is what caused the problems before. The above would be just enough to get an insight/intro to another player without causing too much drama and allow team comps to be developed more easily.

What do you all think?

2

Can you explain the dashboard?

3

If I were to mock it up it would just list a section on “Player Preferences” and “Player Experience” with badges and icons to show a high level view of that player… not detailed numbers.

4

In that case, no. If someone has off meta heroes anywhere in “Experienced”, uh oh. Someone’s gonna rage.

5

I doubt it. Any off meta hero would show up along side many others as “Experienced”… remember this is not a high bar. Only if you one trick is it an issue - and one tricking will come out either way.

6

The problem isn’t the entire profile. The problems are the ‘time played per hero’ and ‘winrate per hero’ statistics. It pidgeonholes players into specific roles/heroes even if they have no will to play said role/hero. The solution would be a partially hidden profile. Allow people to see your comp rank, level, total time played (ie not hero specific), etc. Basically all information that potential group members can’t use to ‘force’ someone to play a hero, but can use to roughly gauge the skill of a player.

I know plenty of people who have loads of time on Zen or Rein, but are also good on some DPS heroes. But because in the past they were ‘forced’ into the tank/heal role, their time played-statistic kept increasing and only exacerbating the issue. Remove those statistics, and only those, and the biggest problem with profiles is solved (or at least lessened to a good degree).

1 Like
7

I think we are in complete agreement here. A partial profile is exactly what I am arguing for here. The Dashboard I mentioned is just one way to accomplish this. I like your idea of also including Rank perhaps; especially since you would need to group this way anyway for Comp.