Scoreboard: OMG Medals and 'On fire' is useless!

General Discussion
1

So I just read the Developer Blog for OW2 PvP, and I must say I’m confused.

I’m confused with one particular aspect.

Medals and ‘On Fire’ features of the game are useless, and I’m confused as to why they thought it was necessary.

Here is a snippet of the blog, and the reason I made this post.

The original idea with the Medal system was to give positive reinforcement for personal performance and let players know individually how they were contributing to the team; but, as time went on, we realized that the information provided by medals led to varying interpretations by players. The team saw players incorrectly interpreting actual team performance based on the relative rankings provided by Medals. This was especially true early on in games when the statistical amounts were small. These observations led to the decision to remove the Medal and Fire systems and completely rework the Scoreboard screen and present more accurate information to players.

Let’s break this paragraph down.

  • The original idea with the Medal system was to give positive reinforcement for personal performance and let players know individually how they were contributing to the team

So a team of 6 against a team of 6 (i.e. 12 players), and yet only 4/12 gets any ‘positive reinforcement’ or how they contributed.

The medal system was there for 4/12 players in any given game.

Does anyone else think this is dumb? Why on earth did they add this to Overwatch?

I imagine this is Bobby Kotick’s fault though. Here’s the dev/Bobby convo:

Bobby: Hey we should add some feedback after a match so players can see if they performed well.

Jeff: Great idea! We can do a personalized scoreboard so each player knows there strengths and weaknesses.

Bobby: Hold on hold on, I meant a system to reward only 4 players with feedback on 1 statistic.

Jeff: Oh…

  • as time went on, we realized that the information provided by medals led to varying interpretations by players.

Yeah, surprise surprise. Almost as if players immediately knew that medals were completely useless. And what information? The info provided by the medals can only be interpreted as ‘Useless’.

‘Oh look, Soldier hit 60% of his helix!’ Useless…

‘Damn Rein landed fat shatters!’ Useless…

  • The team saw players incorrectly interpreting actual team performance based on the relative rankings provided by Medals.

We can’t ‘incorrectly interpret’ something. Interpretation is up to the interpreter (i.e. the players) there is no such thing as ‘incorrectly interpreting’ because it’s subjective. What one person interprets is different from another, but does that make them both incorrect?

  • This was especially true early on in games when the statistical amounts were small.

Medals and ‘On fire’ were completely useless, and yet it was added anyways. That’s why I’m confused. Why add a feature that doesn’t actually provide players anything meaningful?

I’d like to blame Bobby for everything wrong with Overwatch, but sometimes I don’t know.

2

On fire is not useless. It shows who is currently a threat. All of the other stats are much more meaningless. Your hanzo kills means nothing if nobody even touches the payload.

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3

The on fire portrait looks cool

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4

If I see a widow on fire I know to be even more cautious in open spaces. If I see a Doomfist on fire (usually me) I would watch my surroundings like crazy to prevent being combo killed in 1.5 secs etc.

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5

These stats are just a “I’m better than you” argument waiting to happen every competitive game lol. and we already had that with Gold medals, now it’s gonna be worse lol

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6

IDK about Medals, but the On Fire thing lets me know if I’m putting in adequate effort. Now, with a scoreboard, it might be antiquated, but I don’t thing “On Fire” is completely useless

7

Not necessarily true. There are 3 tiers of medal and 5 categories. Some of which are impossible for specific heroes to get. The only way a dps got 5 gold medals, for instance, is by having a self heal. That was more back in the day, before role lock, as now you will only get that medal as a dps if BOTH support are refusing to heal.

The real issue is how hero dependent it was. The amount of people who harassed me for not having a damage medal as Widow when I was hard carrying, or worse… The people blaming me when I DID have gold damage was staggering. And that is why it was removed. Positive reinforcement became a conduit for toxicity.

8

Things are added because they are fun. Why are there post-game cards to vote on? It is useless. Why are there skins in the game? They are useless.

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9

Yeah I really hope they bring this kind of back. Liked to see people on fire.

10

Yes, because it’s 3/6 times 2. And the medals are spread between roles.

Stop bashing on information systems. They’re better the more you get off from them and even the little is great

11

Ya, the problem is we only see individual instanced performances, most of which revolve around 11 other people. They can be highly circumstancial, and above all more often than not you probably won’t see those players again, unless you’re in GM/high M where you likely see a lot more of the same people. For you, personally, it can mean something if you observe things over time, but any kind of deduction from it in the moment is not really going to paint a clear, meaningful picture about the other players.

Sure, you can still deduce some things, particularly for people who are consistently observant, but for the most part it won’t mean anything without that and putting together the circumstances around you. They need to be properly interpertated and I don’t think a lot of people are capable of that.

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12

yeah and also there are times where we won a game so good and I only did 6k healing as Moira, then the other team support got a card for 12k healing bcs their team took so much more damage etc.

Stats really don’t tell the full story.

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13

Right? I tend to feel more critical when I have to have higher healing. If I’m at 2k a minute but like .5 for damage I look at my team with judgemental eyes

14

The medal/fire system don’t really confuse me. What confuses me is why they think giving more accurate info will really change the outcome. The medals can still be inferred:

“I have gold X” == “I have most X”

I also do not believe for even the slightest moment that players below the rank of GM/Top500 will be able to take any information on the scoreboard and come to an accurate conclusion in real time. The game is so much more nuanced than a bunch of numbers which rarely have any reflection on personal or team performance.

This information is, at best, some nice stuff to look at post-match.

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15

…except it was for everyone. Because if you DIDN’T have a medal, you knew your teammates were performing better than you. If you’re playing DPS, and you don’t even have bronze damage, you are getting feedback.

What “reward?” And aren’t there 6 different statistics? With 3 medals for each? I’m confused by your “interpretation,” of how the system worked.

And I’m not saying it’s a good system, but that’s PROBABLY WHY THEY ARE GETTING RID OF IT. You’re a little late to be complaining about how bad it is, lol.

ooooooh, are you talking about the cards at the end of the game? That’s not what they are referring to in the quote…

Well, you incorrectly interpreted their quote, LOL.

But what they mean by this is that you can draw wrong conclusions. Like a tank can think because they have the most damage, their DPS are doing really poorly, and they are doing really well, even though it’s not their job to DPS. It’s to protect the DPS players so they can stay alive and get damage.

They were most likely added to give players an extra “feel good” moment while playing. Being “on fire” makes you feel like you accomplished something, and now everyone can see. The same reason old school games used to have things like “multi kill” “MONSTER STREAK!” Yeah, useless “information,” but that’s not why it’s there.

haha this is definitely true. In lower ranked games, players have trouble even just watching the kill feed. You think they’re gonna sit there and analyze numbers?

I will say though, being able to see that one enemy on the other team is doing more damage (or healing etc) than another, makes it easier to know who to focus down first. Especially for players that may otherwise not so easily pick up on things like this.

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16

Rank has very little to do with observational skills and intelligence. There are plenty of top players that still scapegoat at random or analyze the game in the most simplistic way possible.

The fact of the matter is that the only people calling others out aren’t doing it because of statistical analysis. They are doing it because they are toxic and need to project their insecurities away from themselves.

If a support is dying too much, someone who actually uses this information is not going to yell at the support to swap, they are going to try and peel better.

You do not need to be top 500 to make a basic change to your gameplay in light of new information.

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17

The medal system was private and design to ego boost the individual, and people would lie about it flaming each other, completely useless.

The fire system is actually good, because it points out the highest threat on the enemy team, and is the best indicator for newer players to focus on taking down. Experience coordinated team knows who is the highest skill player or cheater on the enemy team and focus on killing them first before the rest of the team, thus the fire system is not useful here.

The score is public to both team, there is no falsehood here. If there is anything I like to add is that they need to add objective time to the scoreboard to show which player with low stats are contributing a lot by staying on payload or pushing the robot.

The amount of time people left them alone for enemy to backcap is not funny or no one pushing the robot while spawn camping the enemy during OW2 beta is not funny.

18

I’m generalizing for sure, but the point I was trying to make is that if you understand the way that the game works, you kind of realize how useless these stats are, and if you dont understand the way this game works, then you’re unlikely to draw any useful information from it because you’ll be misinterpretting what it means.

A player who is good enough to recognize that supports deaths may translate to them needing better peel is unlikely a low ranking player. They also dont need a death counter to know that.

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19

IMO the scoreboard is a lot better because you can see how wide the gap is. With gold medals you just think “hey look I’m so good my team must be trash”. With the scoreboard, what I usually find is that everyone’s within around 10% of eachother.

So even if I have gold damage, everyone can see that I’m only 500 ahead of the other guy, and there’s less toxicity.

Unless someone really is way, way behind - but people can tell that even without a scoreboard.

20

You would be surprised.

Mostly just in lower ranks, but, I used to play a lot of pharah, and anytime there were two hitscans, it was instant “pharah switch.” Even if I was killing 2-3 people every engagement, players just struggled to understand that I was dominating, and the mcree on our team had 0 kills. It would’ve been nice, for instances like that at least, to be able to say “look at the scoreboard.” Of course, muting and ignoring worked just fine too, but, still :stuck_out_tongue: