Overwatch‘s Competitive Play mode still has a ways to go before it’s beloved by all and game director Jeff Kaplan feels that one of the bigger challenges is skill rating system. This awards players ratings ranging from 1 to 100. As you’d imagine, a player with a 54 skill rating may not exactly think he’s all that great.
Speaking to Kotaku, Kaplan noted that, “We realized a mistake I think we made was picking the percentile based system. Ours goes 1 through 100. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in North America and anything less than an 80 was not good. I didn’t want to get that in school if it was less than an 80. I really wanted scores in the 90’s and if I was in the 60’s, I maybe wasn’t even passing.
“Whereas in our system, now that the dust as settled, I’ve realized actually a player with a 60 skill rating is a super badass in our system.”
The skill rating system will be working as intended once “some bugs and some issues with leavers” have been dealt with but Kaplan said that, “Once we really look at our skill rating non-emotionally and we look at the distribution curve of where players are at, it’s exactly how we modeled it to be. It’s this beautiful bell curve.”
He noted that professional players like Surefour dominate the Competitive Play scene, just as they do in real life competitions. “Those guys are sitting at the top of our system so in that regard, I think our system actually did a really great job of identifying who the great players were and it wasn’t just based on time investment.
“I’m not TviQ so I’m not going to have an 86 skill rating so make me feel good about my skill rating. That’s what we’re working on now, making players feel better about where they’re at.”
So relax if you’re stuck in the mid-50s since you may be a lot better than you give yourself credit for.
