Blizzard Outlines Plan to Overhaul Overwatch Player-Reporting System

Blizzard is talking about its plans to overhaul the player-reporting system that is being used in Overwatch for reporting bad behaviour. Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan has agreed that the reporting system has room for improvement and has outlined Blizzard’s short, medium, and long term goals for the overhaul and noted that improving the system is a top priority for the developer right now. The first phase of the overhaul will see Blizzard suspending more accounts.

Kaplan wrote in a blog post, “In the short term we are re-evaluating every punishment and are in the process of converting silences over to suspensions. We’re also increasing the length of suspensions. Pretty soon, we hope for silences to go away all together and only have suspensions and bans for punishments (with a few exceptions like forced BattleTag changes for naming violations).”

Blizzard also wants to implement an email system that will notify users who report other users when Blizzard has taken action against the person they reported. The medium term goals include the complete banning of competitive offenders reports Gamespot. Kaplan clarified writing, “If you’ve been banned for more than X seasons, we will ban you from ever playing competitive again.”

Kaplan promises that in Overwatch competitive season 6, Blizzard will be more aggressive on players using boosting/throwing to get an advantage. The long term goal with Overwatch is to actively encourage and reward good behaviour in the game. He didn’t elaborate on how Blizzard wants to pull that off.