How exactly Overwatch determines the greatest team player of them all.
Not that you care, of course! Oh no, you’re not looking to get the spotlight for yourself, you just want to make sure one of your teammates – rather than an opponent – is getting their rightful moment to shine in the spotlight, aren’t you?
We believe you. Anyway, Blizzard’s Play of the Game feature has undergone a fair bit of tweaking since the early days of the first beta, although you don’t have to play too many games to see some pretty broken examples slipping through the net regardless. In fairness though, it can’t be easy pulling something as objective as this from hard numbers, and then making it look pretty in the playback.
What actually determines who gets a Play of the Game though, and what can you do to increase your chances – sorry, your teammates chances – of bagging the greatest accolade the game has to offer? Our brief guide will give you all the answers, although generally speaking it can be boiled do to the pretty simple advice: “Do the job your Hero is meant to do and do it better than anyone else.”
Beyond that there are actually four different categories of combat performance that will help increase your likelihood of bagging a Play of the Game for yourself. Whoever scores the highest in any one of these categories takes home the glory.
Here’s how all four of them work.
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High Score
This is the first hidden rating that lies behind determining Play of the Game, and is probably the simplest for the system to parse. The numbers here are derived from massive multikills and very fast killstreaks. The better your performance in both categories, the higher your High Score appraisal is likely to be.
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Lifesaver
You’ll earn Lifesaver points for performing a specific action that helps preserve the life of one of your teammates. Think of things like burst or AOE healing that brings players back from the brink of death, or killing an enemy Hero who’s immobilised one of your teammates. Do your bit so save a buddy’s life and you’ll pick up Lifesaver points nice and quickly.
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Sharpshooter
Think of precision kills when it comes to your Sharpshooter rating. This is where snipers get their chance to bag the big points, with things like distance, speed of the target, headshot hilarity, and target height all taken into account. All of these get totted up to determine exactly how sharp a Sharpshooter you really are.
Shutdown
You’ll pick up Shutdown points if you’ve exhibited some real finesse on the battlefield. Think of sniping down a healer who’s about to drop a game-changing Ultimate, for example. The system determining the Play of the Game will actually throw around a few numbers to work out what your awesome intervention actually prevented, and reward you accordingly.
