It would make more sense if the medals were used between both teams in the match, then you would know how your own performance was compared to your opposition in the same role.
I’d love to know if the opposition healer had more healing than me during the match.
The medals have always seemed redundant though and just cause inter team arguments.
The real problem with medals is that it compares players to their teammates, and since everyone plays different roles and heroes, comparing to other players is not an effective way to determine who is performing better in the match. This is why I personally don’t agree with the medal system as it currently stands, nor do I support the idea of a “scoreboard” like so many have suggested (which they tried to do in beta and decided to remove it). Your idea of also encompassing both teams would more than likely create more distraction by having players type in match text chat trying to find out who has golds.
I much rather see hero statistical feedback where each player is compared to their average performance and/or the overall community averages for that hero. In otherwords, something like what the Pursuit overlay software did before it got banned.
I could agree with your last 2 sentences.
Or since blizzard is bent on forcing roles down our throats, it could just be role based. As it stands, it’s literally THE most toxic way that it could possibly be.
They should be based on everyone playing your hero at your rank, getting adjusted every week or 2. So you know what you need to work on to improve. Bronze means your underperforming, silver your average, gold you are doing greatperforming, and also you should be able to see if you are really out performing there, or your only one kill from being silver elims. If I have gold elims, then I know I’m doing good there, what else do I need to improve on. Or bronze deaths, “I need to stop feeding”.
Honestly the medals should compare you to your career average for that hero
I would love to see something like that.
It would really show players, without a shadow of a doubt where they sit in relation to other players at that rank and give them clear areas to improve in.
I honestly think OW should just remove any stats that tell you how you are “performing” in comparison to others in the match. It clearly just encourages this blame game of “I have gold damage, our hanzo doesn’t, so he’s bad” kinda thing.
It should be left for the end of match screen, so people who care can look at it, and those that don’t can just leave.
Or you know, just remove the system entirely because overwatch is mostly subjective, so looking at statistics isn’t always a good way of determining impact.
I kind of don’t like that because you could be getting false positives like “I’m doing statistically great on average under these parameters,” but in the actual confines of the match I don’t know how I’m doing. All these stats just smell like a smokescreen and limit looking at your own gameplay and what you need to do to actually win a match. Maybe you can afford more deaths if it nets you more kills, maybe you’re playing too passively, and stuff like that that can’t really be captured effectively with stats. I’d honestly just rather have a scoreboard to focus in on the stats at the moment that matter in that particular match than a flyby overview that I could do later.
You make a decent point, however the reason why I support the idea of personal stat tracking is because how well Pursuit worked before it was banned. I myself used Pursuit (at the time I did not judge it to be in violation of the Blizzard CoC and it was endorsed by OWL teams) and found it really helpful to identify general practices that I was lacking on as it was a great way to review my matches.
Now for those who don’t know there was a short time in 2018 when third-parties was developing video recording overlay software which would be able to read the stats from Overwatch gameplay and build an analytics profile of your performance over time. Some did this fairly (Pursuit), some approached it to where it clearly violated Blizzard’s Code of Conduct (Visor), in the long run to make sure there is no “grey area” regarding the use of third-party software, Blizzard officially banned all kinds of stat tracking overlay software in 2018.
Don’t get me wrong, stats are not everything, and in the heat of the match, you have to make the decisions you think will help you win each teamfight. Everyone is always going to make mistakes. However in my general experience, the key to winning a team fight is not necessarily to get eliminations at all costs, but to outsurvive the opponents. This is why scoreboards and medal systems are so darn inaccurate to the state of the individual match itself.
As mentioned before the game during early Beta had a scoreboard. However, it was not very intuitive and the dev team removed it.
I myself for the heck of it built a custom game with a scoreboard system. It worked decently, but I think it proved that having a scoreboard of any kind is just too much of an excuse to flame opponents rather than track if you are performing well or not.
From the Blizzard scoreboard alone it very much looks like an ego feed and like the Zen dominated the match and the Pharah on the other team did poorly and doesn’t give you any real information. I saw your scoreboard as well before when you posted it and I liked it. I just would be primarily interested in a scoreboard that told me how I compare to the 11 other players in a match, but even then it’s not the primary thing that I’m going off of to evaluate my gameplay and what I need to do differently. Stats only take you so far and there’s a certain art and intuition that goes into it I feel where you have to evaluate things differently based on opponent hero choices and playstyle and what they’re good at.
I’m honestly not that perturbed at the current medal system as imperfect as it is because I don’t rely on it and it gives me a cursory glance at how things are going and what may be the foundation of the problem, but a complete scoreboard would make that easier if I could dive a little deeper into what everyone in the match is doing and identify problem teammates and opponents and what I might need to do to make up for them or handle them.