Or at the very least, it needs to be removed until it’s reworked.
There was nothing wrong with stat stalking before matches or checking the SR of someone in QP just to find out you are playing against a GM.
We can’t even check the stats of enemies or allies to prepare team comps. Now Heroes are going to be taken from the shy member of our team just for them to play something we didn’t know they couldn’t play, and something we would have known they couldn’t play if we could see that they were a Mercy main.
The feature is completely unnecessary. The true solution is for people to brush off insults from random strangers about their stats, or something even better could include implementing features that punish players for stat flaming instead of implementing user choice private profiles. You might ask, “Why should people change when the game can change instead?” and I ask, “Why should that poor shy-guy I mentioned above change because the game did?” It goes both ways, I’m going to ignore and flag trolly statements like this. The bottom line is that this feature is going to do more harm than good.
At the very least, make the private feature more friendly to the relevant game-mode and hide all the stats that aren’t relevant to the current match. Just let us see the stats that are relevant to the game-mode that is being played. If it’s QP, let us see their QP stats, if it’s Season 77 competitive, let us see their season 77 competitive stats.
Another solution is to treat viewing career profiles like the privilege of texting or speaking in-game. Make all profiles public again and remove the option to private them. Add a reporting option for stat-flaming/bullying/whatever and if a player is reported for this enough, they will lose their ability to view career profiles for a while. Just like the refined toxicity reporting features alleviated much of the game’s toxicity, from my perspective at least, when players realize that they can get banned from viewing career profiles, many will cease to stat flame. This would change the culture of the player base just like the refined reporting system did. I believe that turning the culture of the player base away from stat flaming with the reporting functions is a solution far greater than private profiles because it will alleviate even more toxicity in the future. Everyone will benefit from a positive and gradual change in culture.
If the goal of this feature was to help alleviate toxicity, it’s going to end up making it worse.
Sushi Edit: Reading this a day later, I realize that some things could be worded better. Please read this and understand that my intentions are not to attack any particular group in any way, but only to express dislike and concern regarding this new feature. Some text has been ninja edited as a result.
Highlighted Comments Regarding Private Profiles
that doesn’t even sound like something remotely normal.