The Overwatch 2 dev team reveal why they have chosen to hide matchmaking stats and information from players, with the game-makers believing it to help stop more issues arising in the community.
In a recent Overwatch 2 dev stream, the Blizzard team sat down to discuss the brand new One Punch Man crossover as well as provide updates on how and when matchmaking changes will be coming into the game. When discussing the latter, the devs spoke passionately about why they have decided to omit certain stats and information from Overwatch 2 players in regard to matchmaking and lobbies.
“We don’t want players to necessarily hone in on precisely what those values are because a lot of times they’ll make judgments about the match before they’ve even played it and that can be really negative,” began Lead Meta Designer Scott Mercer.
“Because again, we’re not going to put you in a super horrible match. Morgan was talking earlier about it earlier, it sounds horrible but you win 45% of the time. It’s still worth going in and trying your hardest.”
Mercer then added, “it’s something that, especially over time and we’re making all these matchmaking changes and we’re trying to do all these tunings it’s something that we might put back in the future but for now we’re gonna put in baby steps which is, what is the particular rank of this match?”
Overwatch 2 devs on why they don’t want to give players all the information
Senior software engineer Morgan Maddren then jumped in to explain how, if players go into a game expecting to lose, there is a chance they won’t give it their all.
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“We’ve been talking about it a lot because we want to show players more about matches. We want to show how good these matches are but it’s hard because it’s finding ways…for example those charts I was showing earlier, it’s hard when they’re only on screen for a couple seconds because part of understanding some of that information can be difficult and also like Scott was saying we don’t want to create a situation where somebody is going to not try their hardest.”
Furthermore, Maddren then compared the way the Overwatch 2 team is approaching matchmaking information with other popular games.
“It’s interesting because in Starcraft for example they used to show, your team are favorite to win, the enemy is favorite to win and you know that kind of works in a 1v1 game where you can be like, okay I might lose this match, but in a team match where it’s your team that’s not favorite to win then it’s like why, are my teammates bad.”
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