Winter Wonderland Patch Hopes to Win the Fight Against Toxic Overwatch Players
While the newest Overwatch update called Winter Wonderland 2017 is all about holiday-themed goodness, several and important changes have also been made to its player reporting system.
According to the recent patch notes:
“Players being reported will receive an in-game message letting them know that they have been reported, along with a warning concerning continued negative behavior. Ongoing misconduct will result in silence, suspension, or a permanent ban, depending on the severity of the infraction (in severe cases, players may receive their punishment before receiving the initial in-game message).
Players who report someone for poor behavior, resulting in a disciplinary action, will now be notified with an in-game message when the issue has been resolved. We take every report seriously, along with your feedback. Thank you for your patience as we continue to fine tune these systems.”
These changes shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan responded to concerned fan threads about the toxicity in the Overwatch community in August. There he revealed that his team was working on new ways to report negative and ongoing behaviour.
Kaplan also spoke in an interview with PCGamesN last weekend about the importance of putting an end to constant negative player behaviour:
“There’s not going to be a moment where we stop working on it,” said Kaplan. “It’s just a matter of what’s happening now and what are our current priorities. As I’ve stated before toxicity is our top priority to combat.”
You can read more about what the Winter Wonderland 2017 patch adds to Overwatch here. The patch is out today on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
Let us know what you think of the new changes in our comment section below.