Tag: Jeff Kaplan

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.

Overwatch “Avoid This Player” Removed Due To Abuse


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Blizzard has announced the removal of Overwatch’s “avoid this player” feature after, perhaps unsurprisingly, the function was abused to avoid playing against highly skilled players. Meant to allow players an opportunity to avoid toxic players, Jeff Kaplan explained on the forums that the function was abused to avoid professional-tier players.

One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy – they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match.

On the other hand, players can still make use of the ‘prefer this player’ feature. Widowmaker is the sniper class of Overwatch, allowing skilled shots to take out enemies from far away. Blizzard recently nerfed Widowmaker’s abilities in order to better balance out her abilities.

(Source: Blizzard)

Check Out Overwatch’s Golden Guns


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In his previous talk, Jeff Kaplan announced that competitive mode would bring golden gun skins as a reward for players, with the most skilled among the player base getting their hands on the (presumably) beautiful weapons much sooner than the rest. According to screenshots revealed on the Korean public test server, those guns may be coming sooner than thought.

These guns have not been confirmed by Blizzard, so they may just be high quality fakes. The odds of that seem unlikely.

(Source: Forum)