Overwatch: Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan on fighting in-game toxicity

Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan has agreed that Overwatch‘s reporting system is failing, and that the developer has a renewed focus on getting it right.

“The reporting and punishment system is currently one of our prime focuses,” Kaplan wrote on the game’s forums, ahead of a Developer Update regarding the issue.

“In the short term we are re-evaluating every punishment and are in the process of converting silences over to suspensions,” Kaplan continued. “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). Also in the short term, we’ve been testing an email notification system to let you know when someone you’ve reported has been actioned.”

Kaplan said the emails won’t go into tremendous detail, but you’ll at least be notified that your reporting wasn’t in vain.

Moreover, those who’ve repeatedly been banned from Competitive play will find themselves with a lifetime ban in Competitive.

“In the long term, we really want to work on systems that encourage positive behavior and reward good players,” Kaplan concluded. “It really bums us out to spend so much time punishing people for being bad sports.

“We will do this as it is our responsibility but we’d like to spend more time rewarding good players rather than having to focus on poor sportsmanship and unacceptable bad behavior so much.”

In the Developer Update, above, Kaplan said that so much time and effort is being used to fight in-game toxicity that actual game updates are falling behind.

Overwatch is currently available on Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4.