One topic in Blizzard’s hero shooter Overwatch keeps overshadowing all other discussions around the game: the toxic community. On the official forums and on Reddit, more and more players are demanding that a stop be put to all those who only insult, “quit” games early, or generally behave like the biggest trolls. Blizzard has repeatedly said that the problem is on their radar and that they are taking care of it.

Recently, for example, the reporting function has also been active on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Now game director Jeff Kaplan has spoken out in a new “Developer Update” video and spoken clear words. Disruptive players are a serious problem and more and more resources are being put into curbing the problem.

Other games, such as Heroes of the Storm, ensure that toxic players can only compete against other toxic players after a while until they behave again. For Overwatch, however, that’s not enough. Here, Blizzard wants to enforce a much tougher view:

“If you’re a bad person playing Overwatch, we don’t want to create a place where you can play Overwatch against other bad people. We don’t want you in Overwatch at all.” – That does sound a lot like the perma-bans that were called for.

Toxic players cost Overwatch new features

At Blizzard, moreover, they are quite sad that they have to spend so much time and resources on punishing the bad players. Meanwhile, the development of such systems even ensures that other planned features are postponed further into the future. For example, a match history and a replay function were supposed to be worked on a long time ago, but the developers responsible for this now have to deal with toxic players.

In addition, they have now started a small test run and sent e-mails to 20,000 players, informing them that their reports have resulted in penalties. It also wanted to boost players’ confidence in the reporting system and stated: of the 480,000 players sanctioned, 340,000 are the result of reports made by other players. So something is definitely being done.

At the end, Kaplan clearly reiterates that Overwatch is meant to be fun for all players. But that’s only possible if the community also takes a critical look inward. If you have a nasty remark on your lips, you should hold it back – and instead see if you can’t say something positive or just keep quiet.

He had already discussed more about Blizzard’s plans for dealing with toxic players in the forum – such as harsher penalties.