Tag: Grief

Blizzard Again Promises Tough Punishment For Overwatch Trolls


If you could formulate a plan to effectively punish, and get rid of, toxic players in your community, you might just become the richest person in the gaming industry. Until then, we’ll need to sit back and watch as developers continue to commit to punishing toxic community members and hope that everything works out for the best.

For Blizzard, the ongoing discussion of toxicity has come back up after director Jeff Kaplan posted on the official forums regarding an account that had miraculously accrued more than two thousand complaints, been silenced for more than a year’s worth of time, and has been suspended three times.

"That account has a total of 2247 complaints filed against it — making it one of the worst offending accounts we’ve seen. The account has also been silenced for a total of 9216 hours. There are 3 gameplay suspensions on the account as well as 7 silences against this account (these are for abusive chat and/or spam). There is also a manual GM account suspension for "massive griefing" levied."

Blizzard’s plans to alleviate grief include removing silencing altogether and utilizing suspensions/bans more. For competitive, Kaplan stated that the company is in the process of handing out bans/suspensions for players who boosted in Season 5 of competitive mode, also adding that players will be permanently banned from competitive if they are found to be abusing it repeatedly.

"We will do this as it is our responsibility but we’d like to spend more time rewarding good players rather than having to focus on poor sportsmanship and unacceptable bad behavior so much. Like it or not, this is an "us, the OW community problem" and not just an "OW team problem". For better or for worse, we’re in this together."

Long term plans involve promoting positive behavior. Toxic behavior is a problem that MMO Fallout has reported endlessly on, with various developers flexing their muscles and threatening harsher punishments and longer bans. For developers, especially those with large competitive communities, the fight against toxicity is a constant uphill battle.

[NM] Friday The 13th Cans Team Killing Because Its Community Can’t Behave Itself


Gun Media is removing team killing from Friday the 13th because its community can’t play the game responsibly, the developer announced on Reddit today. In Friday the 13th, one player takes the role of Jason Voorhees while seven others take the roles of camp counselors and try to escape or fight Jason. Or they can act like children and murder each other, which is exactly what happened and happened so often that Gun Media saw fit to take the feature out altogether.

So the biggest thing we’ve heard from our community with the game are issues pertaining to rampant team-killing that has unfortunately been abused by players on all platforms. While the mechanic’s intent is designed to promote life-or-death experiences into each and every game you play, the reality has turned into more of a Battle Royale scenario to a point our team feels a change needs to be made.

So from now on you can’t kill your teammates, well mostly. To prevent people from abusing this by standing in front of the car, it will be possible to kill teammates by running them over. Bear traps will also still do damage or kill but will not cause experience loss.

(Source: Reddit)

Overwatch Promises More Bans For Bad Behavior


Blizzard wants you to know that they are completely committed to dealing with toxic behavior in Overwatch. Effective immediately, offending players will begin receiving harsher punishments for cheating, griefing, trolling, spam, and match disruption (intentional AFK). Exactly how strict Blizzard’s punishments will be will need to be seen.

We know that making Overwatch a truly welcoming environment is an ongoing process, and this is only the first step. 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.

Overwatch has had ongoing problems with toxicity, a concept not at all unfamiliar with heavily competitive titles.

(Source: Overwatch)