'Overwatch' Pro Gets Creative to Block Racist Messages

A professional Overwatch player was met with a barrage of racist comments during a recent stream but was able to find a creative solution to block them from appearing. Jong-ryeol "Saebyeolbe" Park, a well-known Tracer player and a member of the New York Excelsior team, was streaming for his viewers when a user abused the game's notification system to send back-to-back messages in a way that would make them pop up on the player's stream. Neither Twitch moderation nor the game's language filter could stop the messages due to the medium used, but Park's face could.

This clip that's seen below (as spotted by Kotaku) shows Park's stream when the incident occurred. The player in question who sent the messages to Park appears to have used some kind of exploit to get around Blizzard's name filter and spammed the pro with friend requests which caused the offensive "name" to be shown at the top of the screen. The messages continued for just over 20 seconds while the viewers watching Park pointed it out in the chat and asked the streamer to block the offender or turn off the notifications.

Park was in a game, of course, and as some pointed out, couldn't take care of the issue immediately. Instead of letting the other person continue their spamming though, Park countered the messages by moving his feed that showed his face up to the area where the notifications were appearing. After successfully blocking the messages, he laughed and said "Don't care about that" before telling his viewers to just watch his face instead.

Those kinds of situations aren't unheard of in online games and aren't at all limited to Overwatch, but it's likely the pro was targeted because the other person knew Park would have a decent amount of people watching the stream. Toxicity has been frequent topic of conversation between Blizzard and Overwatch's players, and the developer said that toxicity in the game is down around 40 percent compared to when the game initially launched.

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