It has been a busy day for Jeff Kaplan on Overwatch’s forums today. He has already took to the forums once today to let us know that changes are coming to the game’s Mystery Heroes game mode.
If you a Competitive player, you may run into the issue where players leave your game and leave you at a disadvantage, usually an automatic loss. A player has suggested players who leave games regularly should be marked with something to label them as a constant quitter. Kaplan, Overwatch’s game director, hears our feedback but suggests that a much harsher penalty could be coming to those players who leaving their Competitive Play games often. Here is what he said:
We’ll definitely take the idea into consideration. Our philosophy has been that we would rather not have leavers playing the game at all (especially in Competitive Play). We keep increasing the penalty for leaving and will continue to do so. We’re in the process of implementing a new policy which would take into account how many Competitive Seasons you have been banned from and at a certain point, prevent you from playing Competitive ever again.
This new policy could quite possibly ban players from playing in Competitive Play completely if they become repeat offenders. Of course, this won’t fix the problem of people creating “Smurf” accounts that players use to act like they are low level players. This is definitely a step in the right direction and hopefully it will encourage players to stick around for the whole match or at least keep away the undesirables from the Competitive Play mode.
Another user suggested reviewing and banning throwers and Kaplan had a response to that as well.
Definitely. We had a lengthy meeting about this yesterday. We’ve been doing a lot of research on the problem for months now. We think we have some good solutions. We still need players to help us by reporting people. We do both manual and auto detection on our end, but player reports are the most immediate indicator that point us in the right direction. We also discussed the need for more feedback for the person doing the reporting so it doesn’t feel like your report is going into the void.
Kaplan encourages players to keep reporting players as it helps them detect these players quicker. We don’t know how quickly any of these changes will be implemented but it is encouraging to see Blizzard is listening to the players. We don’t think we’ve seen a community that listens to its players as much as we’ve seen Overwatch do.
Today starts the Double XP event for Overwatch as the first Anniversary Event wraps up. Double XP means more loots boxes which means more legendary skins. This is a good weekend for Overwatch players as the event spans across Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
