When Overwatch rolled out earlier this year, online gamers were intrigued by its emphasis on teamwork. The game’s avid community has been enthusiastically repping Overwatch‘s adaptable features and complex storylines, but of course, no game can live in such an utopia for long. At first, everything seemed fine and dandy, but then the trolls attacked. Now, the odds have turned out of Overwatch‘s favor, and Blizzard wants to stop all the toxicity before it spreads.
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Kotaku’s Nathan Grayson spoke with Overwatch Director Jeff Kaplan about the influx of gamer trolls on their game’s servers. “It’s a big concern for us,” he said, acknowledging the rising level of animosity on Overwatch‘s competitive mode. “I think, for the most part, the Overwatch community has been fantastic. But [toxicity] is not just in Competitive Play. I think as the game ages a little bit, people’s dark sides tend to come out a little bit more and definitely when you put the competitive stakes in there, it raises a little bit.”
For a new game, Overwatch‘s competitive mode works fairly well. However, several issues continue to plague players as their teams go head-to-head. For instance, the game’s competitive mode is dictated by something called a Skill Rating, an individual marker of a player’s gaming skill in competitive mode. However, that personalized rating is heavily influenced by their team’s overall performance, so teaming up with lower leveled players in general can really bomb a player’s competitive chances. This rating system was no doubt set up to promote Overwatch‘s teamwork shtick, but right now, the game’s competition mode just comes off as chaotic because it has the tendency to match teams with similar Skill Ratings but different overall levels. So, both teams could have the exact same Skill Rating, but one team might be packed with Level 100 players while the other team averages players who’re at Level 20.
Yeah, I think we all know how that’s going to end. It won’t be pretty.
Blizzard has promised they’ll be addressing the game’s competitive issues in its second season, and they’re also guaranteeing players that they’ll crack down on the community’s growing toxicity. As gamers grow increasingly unsatisfied with Overwatch‘s competitive mode, they’re taking out their frustration with some, uh, very inappropriate words.
Grayson confirmed Blizzard’s intentions, saying, “For example, there’s the report function, the way that works. Since Competitive has been live, we’ve been doing some under the hood tuning and tweaking on that feature to be more aggressive about handling toxic behavior. I wish there was more that was visible to players in a way that wouldn’t allow for other negative players to exploit it.”
Now, only time will tell if Blizzard is actually able to starve trolls of their sustenance and drive them away from its crowded servers once and for all.
