The Overwatch League has finally launched a public stats system that will allow fans to see how players are performing and which heroes are used the most.
The new stats hub gives fans access to the same tools used during broadcasts and by professional teams, allowing viewers to dive into exactly how well their favorite players and teams are playing in different scenarios.
The system doesn’t just offer basic numbers like eliminations and deaths, but also allows users to go into great detail specifying exactly what they want to know – for instance, how well does a particular team perform in team-fights while using a particular hero? Which player had the most eliminations against Season 2 champions San Francisco Shock? These details can also be directly contrasted against other teams and players
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As well as tracking stats for the upcoming season, the system will also have historic data from the first two years, meaning those who wish to look back on how the meta has evolved, or how a player performed in a different team in years past, will be able to find out.
It’s not only fans of the Overwatch League who may find some benefit in the stats hub, however. Those who are looking for an edge in their own competitive matches may be interested in seeing which heroes are used most often and how well they perform on certain maps to get a better sense of the meta from the best players in the world.
A lack of open statistics was one of the major criticisms of the Overwatch League when it launched, with fans unable to see for themselves how each player was performing. This left most viewers having to evaluate teams and players on the eye-test alone, unable to develop or confirm theories based on hard numbers.
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These frustrations followed on from broader criticism of Overwatch’s limited in-game statistics. Unlike most competitive titles, the game offers no scoreboard of any kind, with Blizzard arguing that being able to see numbers like kill-death ratio for all players during a match only allows for those underperforming to be singled out.
While it seems unlikely that Blizzard’s philosophy on statistics in the broader game will change at this point, fans of the OWL will at least have a whole new area in which they can develop their understanding of the game.
