Blizzard Entertainment has partnered with IBM to use artificial intelligence (AI) to find the best Overwatch players in the world. Both companies have signed a multi-year partnership to use AI-based solutions and perspectives to analyze players and rank the most qualified players in the Esports Overwatch League tournament.
IBM has formed a six-member team for this project, which began in September 2020. This Area 631 team features IBM’s brightest minds with IBM, Watson and AutoAI cloud backgrounds. IBM in a blog post explained that the game collects over 360 player performance statistics during each stage of action.
Overwatch is a first-person shooter (FPS) game in which two teams fight. Each team has six players with two members assigned a role each. There are three main roles for a team in Overwatch and these include damage, tanks and support. The main task here is that players have dozens of characters to choose from for each role.
“These are statistics on the performance of the role of a tank, support and damage of a character, which are largely focused on total aggregation and determination of performance rates that are based on the total time of the action stage (ie total healing, total healing, healing per second and healing every 2 seconds), ”IBM said in a blog post.
High-level architecture for OWL power rankings (IBM)
In total, there are 1.8 million data points in a match, 18 million data points each week of the regular season and 410 million data points per season. This is the raw data that was provided to the IBM team for further analysis to determine the most qualified players. IBM will begin publishing its results for the 2021 Overwatch League season in the coming weeks.
It has already produced results for the Overwatch League 2020 season which took place last September. Those interested can check the current global ranking of Overwatch through this link.