How Squad Kills My Desire to Play Squad

I've been playing dozens of hours of Overwatch in the past few weeks, which has allowed me to see more clearly the single biggest issue Squad has that directly contributes to my own dissatisfaction with the game.

I'm not criticizing lightly. I've got hundreds of hours in Squad and dozens of friends that play squad. Many of them feel disinterested in the game right now, so I know I'm not alone in my frustration. Perhaps not all of them would identify this as the weak spot, but for me this is it:

• It all comes down to data

Squad does data terribly. Overwatch, by contrast, does an amazing job informing players of how they are doing in the game. At the end of a round of Squad I only know whether people I shot did not get picked up again and how many times I died. Since the allocation of points for building, capturing points, and defending/occupying points are elusive and mysterious, we can't even be sure what's going on with those numbers. Are you a medic? Well, you don't get to know how many players you saved from death. Nor the amount of healing you did. Or how many kills the players you saved contributed to afterward. Are you a squad leader? How many kills did players who spawned at your FOB provide at the cost of how many deaths? How long did the FOB last? Throw a grenade? Wouldn't you like to know what it did? Why measure "score" for objectives when "time controlling objective" or "time contesting objective" would be infinitely more useful. Did I fire my weapon accurately? How much damage did I do to the opposing team's players? And so on.

All of this isn't meaningless or insignificant--it's a critical element of gameplay. Recognizing the contributions of the team and being able to accurately assess your strengths and weaknesses is the foundation of better teamwork. How do I know if my medic did a good job? How could I tell if my work as a sniper was successful? Vague hints are not enough. Impressions are not enough. The game knows I hit someone and they got picked by up by their medic. All three parties deserve clear recognition by the game for their work. The game can easily record how long I spent in a capture zone. That it does none of these things suggests either they are too-low on the pipeline to receive attention yet or, worse, considered not in the interests of realism or the game's roadmap.

Badges, medals, better data, more information--these might help solve the intense sense of disappointment I now get when I finish a round in Squad.

And while there are many variables to weigh in judging a performance, why obscure them? Why make me wonder how and why and when I was doing my job well? Why leave us to bicker about who was the weak link or review our own insufficient video captures for crumbs of information that eluded us live? Help us help ourselves!

I know realism is important to many. That's fine during the game, but after a round ends? Then we should be getting the fire-hose of information and things should be MUCH more like Overwatch in its flow of information AND its ability to commend players on both sides for their hard work. I want to pore over my statistics and know which maps I do better on, which roles I am improving in, and which players I play with I should team up with more often.

Without these things, at the end of every round of Squad I'll feel yet another lingering sensation that I spent 30-40-50 minutes playing a game only to be giving a pittance of a reward at the end that is barely even a crumb for my hunger to know more about how the round went beyond simple KDR.