'Overwatch' News: Blizzard Improves Reporting and Penalty System in New Update
"Overwatch" is finally cracking down hard on leavers, feeders and trolls as promised. Starting this week, an improved in-game reporting and penalty system will begin imposing harsher penalties for unruly players in-game.
According to Blizzard Entertainment community manager Lylirra, the new system will be doled out to verified reports of bad behavior. This includes abusive chat, harassment, in-game spam, match inactivity (being intentionally AFK) and griefing.
Players found guilty of such behavior with receive penalties appropriate to their offense. These range from being silenced, suspended or banned effective immediately.
Sadly for console players, incorporating a similar system will require Blizzard to work with a secondary party — Sony and Microsoft — and therefore requires more work. The developer promised that they are actively working on the system available to PCs and will be implementing them into Xbox One and PlayStation 4 systems as soon as possible.
Future updates will also add a number of features to the system such as scaling competitive season bans and a notification system that alerts players if their reports resulted in a penalty. Functionality will also be added to penalize abuse of the in-game reporting feature.
"Overwatch" already imposes heavy penalties for players caught cheating or trolling at higher levels of play. Even top players are not immune to being banned if they receive a high number of reports. This is a last-ditch effort though after the player has ignored repeated warnings regarding their actions in-game.
Cheating can also get players in trouble outside of the game with laws increasingly treating such actions as punishable via intellectual property laws. Fines and possible jail time just aren't worth it for a few limited-edition skins.
With eSports now a reality for "Overwatch," using cheats are a sure-fire way to wreck any professional aspirations. And face it, nobody wants a toxic cheating troll ruining a perfectly good match.
