Overwatch No Longer Allows Users To Avoid Toxic Players

In order to help players avoid toxic players, Blizzard introduced a feature called “Avoid this player” to its games. Interestingly enough, the company has now decided to roll back this feature after noticing that most players abused it.

The feature allowed players to right click on a player’s name and mark him so that the system would avoid matching them together in future battles. It was intended as a way for players to avoid abusive and toxic players, but most players simply used it to avoid playing against skilled opponents.

In a post on Blizzard’s Battle.net forum, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan explained that “One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him.”

The development team looked into the incident and found that the player was being avoided only because of his high skills. “The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match. The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had ‘opened up’ to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level.”

Having no way to avoid this behavior, Kaplan and his team decided to disable the “Avoid this player” feature for good.