If you do something amazing in Overwatch, chances are it will be featured as the "Play of the Game" once the match is completed. What's considered "amazing" is relative however, and until now the game has had a tendency to focus on actions that resulted in big damage. Meanwhile less obvious triumphs have been largely ignored, and support characters are rarely seen strutting their stuff after a good match.
That being said, Blizzard are now looking into ways to change this behaviour, ensuring that the Play of the Game mechanic rewards more players based on more criteria, and so hopefully we can stop watching replays of people throwing down turrets in bottlenecks.
Rowan Hamilton from Blizzard explains: "From a technical standpoint, it's a really hard problem to have a computer figure out what is cool. They're not very smart", he told Gamespot.
"We constantly look at Play of the Game, and we've got a whole bunch of data on Play of the Games are actually happening out there in the wild, and we can kind of see patterns about this character getting a lot of PoTG for these killstreaks, they're getting a lot of damage, or they're getting a Play of the Game for that.
So it might've been Widowmaker getting three snipes, but I change the weighting on some other aspect that we take as important, and it could all of a sudden be Mercy resurrecting everyone on the point two second before the match ended. It's going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it.
We've added some stuff recently, such as determining how hard a shot was to hit based on how fast the target was moving, how far away the target was moving. So a snipe of someone half a screen away who was just chilling out and waiting to be headshot won't be weighted as heavily as a Tracer zipping across, barely in sight that you manage to pick off."
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