While Play of the Game is generally speaking really cool, highlighting someone popping off in a fight, this is not always the case. Many of us laughed or facepalmed at a potg that was nothing much. The most ridiculous one I’ve seen was presumably some bug a few years back - Hanzo going out of the spawn at the beginning of the match. That’s it! Some games simply don’t have a potg.
So here’s my suggestion.
In addition to to capturing PLAY of the game, there could also be captured a PLAYER of the game (or perhaps some other wording). And the way it would work it would track some hero specific mechanics and then play a video montage e.g. a second long or so clips back to back of the mechanic being used.
It doesn’t necessarily end with a kill, could be a shutdown of an ult. Few examples:
- Ana landing a lot of sleeps in a match; or many big nades
- Mei blocking ults with her wall; or if there are many solo kills after a hero was walled off for big damage and no heals
- Genji deflecting ults a bunch of times
- Orisa landing many spears
- Hog landing many hook and kill combos
- Reaper tping behind to get a solo kill many times
- Lucio getting many boops out of the map, but not in a single successtion (it’s current Play of the game potential), but many over the course of a game
- Soldier getting many kills with Helix
- Tracer sticking many pulse bombs to targets
- Mercy getting a lot of sneaky resses
etc.
Perhaps not every hero has such a potential and some might be better than others, but the biggest points of this is not to replace the current Play of the Game, but to work in addition with it. This not only would fix some of the weak, forced Play of the Games but would also highlight some players that might have done a lot for the team over the course of the match, that might not be as visible, cause it doesn’t necessarily lead to many kills or even any at all as with Ana sleeps example. Some of the mechanics already have direct tracked stats, so I imagine it shouldn’t be too costly to develop this neither.