Overwatch Increasing Penalties For Bad Behavior

[rgMekanic]

In a forum post today, Overwatch community manager Lylirra announces improvements to the reporting and penalty system. Effective immediately they will be "we will be issuing increased penalties to players in response to verified reports of bad behavior."

This is a great step. Having played and quit playing Overwatch twice due to griefing and general BS in the gameplay, I'm very happy to hear that Blizzard will be stepping up their efforts to combat people intentionally ruining the fun and competitive nature of the game, while making sure that the report system isn't abused.

Over the next several months, we have plans to make additional improvements based on your feedback, including scaling competitive season bans, a notification system that will alert you when a player you’ve reported is actioned, and functionality that will allow us to more aggressively penalize players who attempt to abuse the in-game reporting tool.

 

[lilbabycat]

You're a fool if you think it will actually improve anything for the average player.

Some guy that trash talks (ie: completely normal internet behavior that is for some reason taboo to modern online games)? Yeah, MAYBE you'll have less of him. But smurfs will still smurf in comp. Kids will still pretend to be retarded in casual. Griefers will still avoid bans and likely bait others into newly-ban-worthy behavior (just as they always have before). And hackers...hackers always gonna hack.

 

[bizzmeister]

Jesus Christ, I'm just here sick and tired of this 1700-1800 point black hole I'm stuck in, in comp. Solo queue can drive you up a wall.


Anyone wanna team up? Lol.

 

[doz]

They need to ban players for throwing quietly..... I get accused of throwing because I play Torb all the time, even though I have a 58% winrate with 12 hours play this season and am about 3100 currently. Then when you ask them to switch because they are doing fuck all, they immediately throw a fucking bitch fit.

The OW community has become horrible. Seasons 1 and 2 were pretty good, 3 was ok, 4 was bad, and this is horrible.

 

[nysmo]

I play comp exclusively and have been high masters since season 1 with about 1300 hrs total game time. I actually opened a support ticket once to see how many reports I had against me, they said over 500. This was to be expected because I always main off-meta heroes for the challenge and to keep the games from getting stale. Season 1 was all bastion, season 2 symmetra, season 3 sombra, season 4 orisa, and this season I actually decided to just master McCree for the hell of it. I'll quickly be shifting to Doomfist as soon as he comes out.

So I asked them what the general theme of my reports is, and they said mostly throwing, going afk, running laps, etc. I have never once been banned from the game, although I have been chat banned a few times (which I actually prefer anyway since it encourages me to just mute all chat and enjoy my game). Obviously no one can throw their way to high masters for 1300 hours so this has always probably been why I was never banned. The reports are dismissed since it's obvious they are nothing more than petty players mad they lost a match because I played attack symmetra on a payload map that didnt work out.

The report function has been so heavily abused that blizzard recently had to define what you can and cant report for, basically an explanation for all the idiots out there that "NO, you cannot report because someone played Torb against your wishes" kinda thing. Hopefully whatever they amp up doesnt intrude on actual players such as myself. Would be interesting to see all the crybabies get themselves banned or something from filing so many frivolous reports.