Overwatch developer Blizzard has today explained the reasons behind players not receiving a medal for having the fewest number of deaths in a game.
The end-of-match awards screen will be a familiar sight to regular players of the popular hero shooter; it’s the place where users can measure their individual performance in what is a predominantly team-based game.
Medals are currently awarded each game for players with the most eliminations, objective kills, amount of damage done, amount of healing done, and highest objective time – but not for having the fewest amount of deaths, despite the statistic being present on-screen.
When pressed on the issue on the Blizzard forums, Overwatch’s game director Jeff Kaplan explained that beta versions of the game awarded medals for deaths, but the development team ultimately decided to remove this feature for a number of reasons. He said: “We used to give a medal for fewest deaths. We ran into a few issues with doing it. The first was confusion. Players were consistently confused as to whether the medal was for most or fewest deaths. I believe this problem was easily solvable.
“The second issue had to do with weird behaviors that some players felt compelled to do based on their desire to receive the medal. The medal was okay if it just served as a reflection of what players were already doing. But doing weird things (like hiding back at the spawn room) to get the medal drove too much bad behavior so we removed it.”
It looks likely, therefore, that users will have to settle for an elusive maximum of five gold medals for the foreseeable future.
