In a recent interview, game director Jeff Kaplin sat down to talk about Overwatch’s Competitive Play mode and how it gives players the wrong message in terms of where they stand based on their performance in this mode.
Speaking with Kotaku, Kaplin comments on how the game’s current percentile-based system was a mistake. Currently this system scales from 1 to 100, and he compares it to a school’s grading scale. He feels that this systems conveys the message that anything lower than 80 percent is not a good place to be in terms of performance, but in reality, Kaplin also mentions that when you take a closer look, players who are in the 60 percent range are considered some of the best players in the game.
Kaplin feels that when you stop looking at the game’s skill rating from an emotional stand point and instead look at it based on how their player base is distributed across the ranks, everything is where it’s supposed to be. He feels that him and his team needs to find ways to make players feel better about where they stand in the game’s ranking system.
This is not the first time that Blizzard has commented on how players feel about their performance in the ranked systems for their games. In an article on the Hearthstone official website, Blizzard breaks down percentages of where the top Hearthstone players sit on their Ranked Play ladder. According to the article, the top 25% percent of their player base sits somewhere between rank 15 and Legend.
In both Overwatch and Hearthstone, even if you feel that your performance in ranked mode isn’t all that great, you’re doing better than you think.