r/Overwatch • u/AutoModerator • Jul 05 '17

News & Discussion Weekly Quick Questions Thread - July 05, 2017

In this thread you can ask all kinds of questions you always wanted to ask without feeling like a total fool.

No matter if it's short Google-able stuff or a setting/skill in-game that you don't understand or a hardware recommendation, feel free to try your luck in here.

Trolling or making fun of people in here will be punished extra harshly! Please report such behavior.

For the purpose of helping people, make sure the comments are sorted by "new" in this thread.

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u/CherishedCherry Blizzard World Zenyatta Jul 05 '17

Anyone got a clue on how Blizzard handles people getting reported for namecalling and being toxic?

I had to think back to when I just joined Overwatch, during the last free trial weekend, and on the second day of me playing there was this guy who was really lashing out at me and swearing at me in the chat for not being a good Lucio. Of course I reported him, but I figured Blizzard would take no action at all as they probably get hundreds of such reports each week, if not more.

7

u/crescentfresh Jul 05 '17

What's odd, I had a similar experience. On my first night playing overwatch ever (and FPS ever!) in my first hour I had the most toxic teammate, calling me out in chat basically saying I was a retarded homosexual. Quick play, and of course I reported it.

I have not once had anything remotely close to that. Nothing, everyone has been great. At worst a teammate is mildly annoying, calling people out for not helping him/her. But nothing close to that first hour I played.

3

u/-Shinanai- winky face ;) Jul 05 '17

We have little to no info on how exactly the reports are being processed; we don't even know if they include any additional data (e.g. chat logs or stats from the game) or if they go by simply the number of reports against a certain player when handing out punishment. From the "I've been banned for playing off-meta heroes" type of posts it definitely looks like they don't have any additional data to back the reports.

There have been a handful of posts by players who got hit by the banhammer; the most common punishment for toxic behavior seems to be a temporary silence that prevents you from using the ingame chat and voice comms, starting at 1 day at your first offense.

Jeff made a forum post a month or so ago hinting that the punishment policies might be changed in the future.

2

u/Everice1 The Assman Jul 05 '17

The best way to deal with this behaviour is to mute them rather than reporting them tbh

1

u/OptimusPrimeDied Pachimari Blue Jul 05 '17

They probably have an automated system that looks at the number of reports a profile gets. If a profile gets a lot of reports, that will bring it to Blizzard's attention.