What is it about? Ever since the release of Overwatch in 2016, the Overwatch community has had the image of being toxic. There are always players who act insultingly or even turn against their own team.

Blizzard itself has been fighting against the toxic behavior in Overwatch for quite a while and has now announced further steps to improve the atmosphere in the team shooter.

Changes for a better gaming experience

To push through efforts to improve the player experience, the Overwatch development team has formed a “Strike Team.” This is to coordinate and execute the changes along with the customer service teams, the community team, and various other departments at Blizzard.

Blizzard continues to rely on reporting: The main tool for the team to identify bad behavior is the player reporting system. Recently, the “Bad Teamwork” report category was removed and “Griefing” was changed to “Gameplay Sabotage”. This is to make it easier to report bad behavior.

For some time now, players who report toxic users have been receiving in-game thank you messages. These are intended to let them know that the reports they write actually have a positive impact on the game. In order to further improve the cooperation between players, an AI is also supposed to help in the future.

Artificial intelligence to find flamers

“Machine Learning” Systems Review Chats: To identify abusive chat and gameplay sabotage, “machine learning” systems will be used along with player reports. This involves an artificial intelligence that learns from examples and can thus identify a pattern. For example, the system can scan a chat history and identify insults.

Since anyone can have a bad day, warnings have recently been added to Overwatch that let players know they are behaving unacceptably.

Players can avoid teammates: For a short time, players have been able to mark other users with whom they do not want to play together in a team. An option to avoid other players has long been requested by Overwatch players.

Currently, it is only possible to avoid up to two players. However, this limit will be raised over time if the developers are sure that the new feature will not have a negative impact on matchmaking.

Insults lead to ban: Lastly, a change has been made to how repeated flaming is punished. Previously, repeated insults were punished with a minute of silence. This restricted communication with other players in the game and each additional rule violation resulted in a longer silence period.

Now, if someone continues to use abusive conversations even after being warned, silenced, and suspended enough times, they will be permanently banned from the game. Such players would have proven that no want to be a positive member of the Overwatch community.

This is what the players think: The changes have been received positively for the most part. However, in the Overwatch subreddit, players are worried that the AI, which will be used along with player reports, will not be able to distinguish between sarcasm and jokes and real insults.

What do you think about the upcoming changes? Is Blizzard on the right track or is the company still not cracking down hard enough on toxic behavior?