Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan is ready to tackle what he describes as "the rising tide of toxicity or bad behavior in the game" with some much-needed improvements to reporting systems, as well as Blizzard's general strategy around maintaining a positive community.
In a developer update and forum post, Kaplan detailed some of the short, medium, and long term plans the Overwatch team has for combating in-game toxicity (such as adding the report function to console), as well as why it's such a huge priority.
Watch the Overwatch Developer Update below.
Short term goals, according to Kaplan, include "re-evaluating every punishment," launching an email notification system that will let players know when action has been taken against someone they reported, and banning accounts guilty of boosting in Season 5. The team is currently in the process of converting silences into suspensions in the hope of eventually phasing silences out as a punishment altogether in favor of suspensions (which will be extended) and bans.
Abusive players will be banned from Competitive quicker and more often.
Punishment for bad behavior in-game is about to get a lot more severe, according to the medium term goals Kaplan has laid out. Repeat offenders in Competitive could be banned from playing Competitive ever again if they've been banned from enough seasons. Not only will they be banned more often for toxicity — especially abusive players will also "strike out" much sooner. Players who try to boost or throw games will also face harsh punishment thanks to a series of systems designed to detect behaviors related to Skill Rating manipulation.
Kaplan's plan for battling toxicity in the Overwatch community isn't focused solely on punishing bad players, though — he also wants to prioritize rewarding people for playing nice.
"Overwatch should be an inclusive game space," says Kaplan.
"It really bums us out to spend so much time punishing people for being bad sports," Kaplan writes on the official Overwatch forum. "We like making cool, fun game systems — that's what we do for a living."
The post doesn't outline any details regarding how the Overwatch team will "encourage positive behavior and reward good players," but Kaplan promises more updates soon.
“Overwatch should be an inclusive game space," Kaplan states. "It’s an inclusive aspirational universe and the gameplay experience should match what Overwatch is trying to achieve."
According to Kaplan, toxicity in the Overwatch community does more than hurt the experience of players game to game, but also the progress of Overwatch's actual development.
"We need to take a step back and realize we’re all here to have fun."
"We love creating these cool content and features for you guys — we want to make new maps, we want to make new heroes, we want to make animated shorts. That’s where our passion is," Kaplan explains. "But we’ve been put into this weird position where we’re spending a tremendous amount of time and resources punishing people and trying to make people behave better. I wish we could take the time we put into putting reporting on console and have put that towards a match history system or a replay system instead. It was the exact same people that had to work on both who got rerouted to work on the other."
In the end, Kaplan says that the Overwatch team accepts responsibility for improving the behavior of the Overwatch community, but hopes the community itself will step up and do their part.
"I’m not trying to lay a major guilt trip on everyone here, but I do think we need to take a step back and realize we’re all here to have fun," says Kaplan. "We want Overwatch to be a really great place and each of us can play a very important part in that."
Chloi Rad is an Associate Editor for IGN. Follow her on Twitter at @_chloi.
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