Overwatch Algorithms Are Being Tweaked to Combat Toxicity, According to Blizzard

Blizzard has been very transparent in the past about declaring war on toxicity in gaming and they've made many steps to improve the online play experience. Though toxicity has gone significantly down, that doesn't meant the team is without a few missteps here and there and because of that, the work must go on.

Blizzard Vice President and lead designer for the beloved FPS Overwatch recently sat down with Kotaku to discuss their new plan for the good fight. Now that content creation has begun to slow down a little bit with the rapid fire new heroes, comics, and animated shorts, the team can once again put a major focus on the community itself. One of those tweaks they are looking into is the overall algorithm.

"We've been experimenting with machine learning," Kaplan told the site. "We've been trying to teach our games what toxic language is, which is kinda fun. The thinking there is you don't have to wait for a report to determine that something's toxic. Our goal is to get it so you don't have to wait for a report to happen."

With the primary focus, because of its straightforward nature, being on language, the quest to continue cleaning up harassment and overall abhorrent behavior has made positive headway. But it's not all about F bombs and name calling, they are also wanting to target deliberate troll behavior.

"That's the next step," said Kaplan. "Like, do you know when the Mei ice wall went up in the spawn room that somebody was being a jerk?" It's not fool proof, machines themselves often time misread data, but it is a start.

They are also wanting to bring a positive focus to the "good people" in the gaming community, "We can start looking toward the future and talking about things like, what's the positive version of reporting?" he added. "Reporting is saying 'Hey, Adrian was really bad and I want to punish him for that,' but what's the version where I can say 'That Adrian guy was an awesome teammate and I'm so glad I had him'?"

"We're punishing the bad people, so how do we get people to start thinking about being better citizens within our ecosystem?"

It's a valiant cause and one we look forward to see progress on. For now, Overwatch is available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.