Overwatch’s Reporting and Penalty System Gets More Improvements

Bliz­zard announced more improve­ments to its penal­ty sys­tem, as “Play nice; play fair”, is a core val­ue for the com­pa­ny. In an attempt to keep Over­watch a great envi­ron­ment to play, they will be mak­ing addi­tion­al improve­ments over the next sev­er­al months based on play­er feedback.

Bliz­zard stat­ed that, “effec­tive imme­di­ate­ly, we will be issu­ing increased penal­ties to play­ers in response to ver­i­fied reports of bad behav­ior.” This means any­thing from abu­sive chat, harass­ment, in-game spam, match inac­tiv­i­ty (being inten­tion­al­ly AFK), and grief­ing. So if you see any­one exhibit­ing these behav­iors, don’t hes­i­tate to report them. Play­ers in vio­la­tion will be silenced, sus­pend­ed, or even banned from the game.

As Bliz­zard keeps mak­ing improve­ments, over the next sev­er­al months addi­tions like 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, will be made.

Play­ers on the PlaySta­tion 4 and Xbox One, unfor­tu­nate­ly, will have to wait to get this report­ing sys­tem. Bliz­zard says that as, “con­sole play­ers our­selves, we know it’s been frus­trat­ing to not have this func­tion­al­i­ty on your plat­form. We are active­ly work­ing on the fea­ture and have many ele­ments of under­go­ing inter­nal test­ing right now.”

Source: Blizzard