overwatch Devs on Player Behaviour and New Social Systems

[Starym 3,779]

 

Today we have two of the main Overwatch devs talking about player experience and behavior in the game and how they can make it better. Jeff Kaplan talked directly to the Korean community on the 3 new social systems planned that will tackle bad player behavior and try to minimize its impact and give players more control over their in-game social experience.

There's also a minor mistake above that the OW community team pointed out and corrected:

Quote

We found a minor mistake from Jeff at [5:25]. Jeff incorrectly says: “A third system that will come either in the late summer or early fall of NEXT year”. This should be, “a third system that will come either in the late summer or early fall of THIS year.”

We then have Scott Mercer going over much the same topic over on the Overwatch forums, focusing more on what's already been implemented and how the game has already improved, as well as talking in detail about reporting players and how important that aspect is:

Scott Mercer (source)

Hello, everyone! Today I want to discuss many changes and improvements we’re making to create a friendlier place to play Overwatch and provide you with more control over your game experience. The Overwatch development team has formed a “strike team” to coordinate and execute all these efforts alongside our customer service teams, community team, and several other departments across Blizzard.

The core tool we rely on to identify bad behavior is the player report system. Recently we changed the in-game player reporting categories by removing the “Poor Teamwork” category and changing “Griefing” to “Gameplay Sabotage”. We made those changes to make it easier to correctly choose a report category that matches the bad behavior being reported.

Accurate in-game reports of bad behavior are the best way for you to help us improve community behavior, and we want to make sure that process is easy and clear for everyone. We also monitor our Overwatch social accounts for reports of players behaving badly, and we follow up on these reports with investigations and appropriate penalties.

I’ve seen many comments from players who think that their reports are meaningless, but we want to stress that they are actually very helpful and incredibly important to improving the Overwatch community. The in-game thank you messages we recently added let you know that the time you spend making a report is indeed making a positive contribution. Just this last week, we corrected an issue that prevented many players from receiving these messages, so players should now start seeing even more feedback about their reports. To further improve these systems, we’re doing a lot of exciting work to develop “machine learning” systems to assist in accurately identifying abusive chat and gameplay sabotage. These technologies will work together with player reports, empowering the community to quickly bring attention to bad behavior so that the appropriate steps can be taken to discourage or prevent future bad behavior from ruining others’ experiences playing Overwatch. These same systems will also protect players from false reports.

That being said, we recognize that anyone can have a bad day, and they might not even realize they are using abusive chat or acting negatively to their fellow players. To help players realize that other players have taken notice of their actions, we recently added in-game warnings to let them know they’re acting in a way that’s unacceptable to the Overwatch community.

Recently we provided another active tool to give you more control of your Overwatch experience: the ability to mark players as people who you don’t want to play with as a teammate. Our initial deployment of the feature only allows you to avoid two players, but we want to increase that limit over time as we become more confident that it doesn’t negatively affect matchmaking.

We’ve also made some changes to how we penalize repeat offenders for abusive chat. Repeat offenders used to be penalized with a silence, restricted from communicating with other players in the game, with each subsequent infraction incurring a longer silence duration. We’ve changed this so repeat offenders can now be suspended, and therefore unable to play Overwatch, for longer and longer durations. If someone continues to use abusive chat even after being warned, silenced, and suspended enough times, they’ve proven they do not want to be a positive member of the Overwatch community and will be permanently banned from playing Overwatch.

Going forward, we’re also really excited about some new social features we’ll make available in the summer. We’ll talk about those more when they’re closer to being ready for testing on the PTR, but they should give players even more ways to control their gameplay experience online. Thanks, everyone!

[Yridaa 490]

The whole thing (And not limited to Overwatch!) is that match-based games like these in a pvp setup usually come with rewards for finishing games, and penalties when not (Competitive mode only on the latter).

 

If you encounter a toxic player, you can't just be like "I'll just leave and join a different server". If you'd encounter a toxic player only once an hour on average or something, that might still be feasible. But do know that in Korea, there's things like Temporary Accounts - a system made by consumers and internet cafe's where you can play on an account for the price of a cup of coffee (Or sometimes, buying a cup of coffee allows you to play on a temporary account).

 

This means that there's almost no penalty/consequence involved for toxic behavior; the account gets banned, you go to another internet cafe or something like that.

 

In old school games, such as Unreal or Quake, there was no such thing as a reward system or player queue or anything like that. You could join a game as fast as you can move your mouse and click buttons.

[Syktris 36]

We need guild/clan system and a LF Group system as well, it is not always that my friends are online and solo queue on this game is almost always a terrible experience.

I know that I'm asking much from this, but report system must be more than an automatic system, they need to check and give harsher penalties to players that only are there to ruin other people's game. 

They also need some more incentive to win QP Matches. I know that we have this on arcade, but sometimes we want to do some QP and there's no way to enjoy because no one cares to what they're doing. 

[Hypersonic 113]

Do something with the terrible Matchmaking because that is the main reason for why so many people get toxic. Really frustrating if you get into game with 5 main dps and half of the team need to fill up roles and after that you lose the match, because nobody knows what is going on.

Plus allow us to block infinite people and not only 2. There is million of players so can't be problem if you even block 100-200 people. I dont understand why so limited this option,

 

Edited May 4, 2018 by Hypersonic

[Brauchief 6]

instead of having queues and being forced to spend time and money policing the playerbase.  they should switch to arcades server browsers only, stop trying to assign ranks in-game and let third-party leagues flourish.  they just need to allow clans with enough signatures to have a permanent server in the clan arcade.

[Yridaa 490]

43 minutes ago, Hypersonic said:

Really frustrating if you get into game with 5 main dps and half of the team need to fill up roles and after that you lose the match, because nobody knows what is going on.

Everyone played Reinhardt and then realized that your teammates don't actually use the shield for cover and then decide that it's better to just play a DPS so you don't have to depend on teamwork to win.

[Syktris 36]

52 minutes ago, Hypersonic said:

Really frustrating if you get into game with 5 main dps and half of the team need to fill up roles and after that you lose the match, because nobody knows what is going on.

Or when you get 5 one trick in the same team and they are all start to throw because x or y guy took his character. 

[FanOfValeera 253]

22 minutes ago, Yridaa said:

it's better to just play a DPS so you don't have to depend on teamwork to win

This is wrongest (probably this is not a word) thing I've heard about OW to be honest. I am not saying thats your form of thinking, its just whoever thinks this is very wrong.

[Brauchief 6]

33 minutes ago, FanOfValeera said:

This is wrongest (probably this is not a word) thing I've heard about OW to be honest. I am not saying thats your form of thinking, its just whoever thinks this is very wrong.

its actually half-true.  its the only way to solo queue to gold and arguably, plat.

[Syktris 36]

48 minutes ago, FanOfValeera said:

This is wrongest (probably this is not a word) thing I've heard about OW to be honest. I am not saying thats your form of thinking, its just whoever thinks this is very wrong.

 

14 minutes ago, Brauchief said:

its actually half-true.  its the only way to solo queue to gold and arguably, plat.

Or go Moira, she can carry games if your teammates aren't that bad. That's what I did when I as on silver and got in high plat. 

[variance 0]

23 hours ago, Hypersonic said:

Plus allow us to block infinite people and not only 2. There is million of players so can't be problem if you even block 100-200 people. I dont understand why so limited this option,

 

This is actually very untrue, if every player blocked 1-200 other players the permutations of possible group combinations is massively restricted and the amount of computation required to make those matches goes up significantly. Without actually doing the math, its admittedly a bit complicated, I would estimate even 25 blocked players would have a noticeable effect on matchmaking speed as well as a significant load increase to matchmaking servers. There is probably already a noticeable increase in computation load on their servers with even 2 blocked players.

[Valks 2,373]

On 04/05/2018 at 9:40 PM, Brauchief said:

its actually half-true.  its the only way to solo queue to gold and arguably, plat.

This only applies if you can play the character. One-tricking McCree when you can't aim isn't going to get you into gold or plat - and, if you're looking to climb into gold or plat, it's unlikely that you are going to be good enough at a DPS character to solo carry your team. Hence why so many DPS-mains lose when they refuse to swap and then blame others for the loss. Yeah, Hanzo can solo carry a team, but only when it's someone that is far beyond the SR level they are currently playing in (a GM DPS-main playing in Silver, for example). If you're that much higher ranked anyway, then you can carry with almost any role, especially now that Moira exists for support.

[Brauchief 6]

5 hours ago, Blainie said:

This only applies if you can play the character. One-tricking McCree when you can't aim isn't going to get you into gold or plat - and, if you're looking to climb into gold or plat, it's unlikely that you are going to be good enough at a DPS character to solo carry your team. Hence why so many DPS-mains lose when they refuse to swap and then blame others for the loss. Yeah, Hanzo can solo carry a team, but only when it's someone that is far beyond the SR level they are currently playing in (a GM DPS-main playing in Silver, for example). If you're that much higher ranked anyway, then you can carry with almost any role, especially now that Moira exists for support.

spoken like someone who hasnt solo queued from bronze to gold.

the only way to carry a team is with DPS.  following good strategy with bad players = loss.  the emphasis is on SOLO queue

Edited May 7, 2018 by Brauchief

[Valks 2,373]

26 minutes ago, Brauchief said:

the only way to carry a team is with DPS.  following good strategy with bad players = loss.  the emphasis is on SOLO queue

This just isn't true. At all.

Tanks: Zarya, Winston, Orisa.

Supports: Ana, Moira and Zenyatta.

In both of these roles, you can extremely easily carry as any of these characters. Zenyatta can two shot every hero McCree can and at a far longer range. His ultimate, with proper aim, builds incredibly fast and can save your sub-par teammates from dying to the ults they feed. 

Winston? Amazing harass, can clear backlines constantly. Does it matter if your teammates are bad if the enemies have no supports or DPS?

Zarya? Feed charge from bad teammates/enemies, constant gravitons. Another easy carry.

To think that you can only carry with DPS is just flat out wrong. If you are good enough to carry as DPS, you can do it as another role comfortably. 

[Brauchief 6]

39 minutes ago, Blainie said:

This just isn't true. At all.

Tanks: Zarya, Winston, Orisa.

Supports: Ana, Moira and Zenyatta.

In both of these roles, you can extremely easily carry as any of these characters. Zenyatta can two shot every hero McCree can and at a far longer range. His ultimate, with proper aim, builds incredibly fast and can save your sub-par teammates from dying to the ults they feed. 

Winston? Amazing harass, can clear backlines constantly. Does it matter if your teammates are bad if the enemies have no supports or DPS?

Zarya? Feed charge from bad teammates/enemies, constant gravitons. Another easy carry.

To think that you can only carry with DPS is just flat out wrong. If you are good enough to carry as DPS, you can do it as another role comfortably. 

You are using heroes as DPS.  If you have the skill to beat them with winston, why aren't you taking a DPS and doing it faster? trying to showoff by handicapping yourself?

 

[Valks 2,373]

55 minutes ago, Brauchief said:

You are using heroes as DPS.  If you have the skill to beat them with winston, why aren't you taking a DPS and doing it faster? trying to showoff by handicapping yourself?

Your initial point was, you can only carry a team as a DPS. I am saying, this is not true.

Of course you can do it as Genji if you are a Genji god, but the likelihood of that being true is close to zero if you are solo queueing in Silver, would you not say? I highly doubt the next Wraxu-Hanzo God is currently in Silver. Maybe he is, I don't know, but I really doubt it.

The likelihood of you being able to carry a game in solo queue as a DPS at that level drops massively simply because most of the DPS characters require very good aim to do so effectively. 

Nonetheless, to say that carrying is impossible as another role is just ridiculous. I have had games in Top 500 where the game has hinged completely on the play of an enemy tank or support. A Zarya that has Graviton and massively high energy constantly can completely turn the tide of a game and make it completely one sided, regardless of how good the enemy DPS are. The same goes for a Zenyatta who snipes your Pharah out of the sky, has Transcendence for all of your team's combos and constantly beats your Genji/Tracer on the backline with Discord and a headshot. A Winston that makes it so your team never, ever has healers, trapping them in spawn and forcing your spawns to delay.

Like I said, you can carry with much more than just a DPS.

EDIT: If you can carry as a tank or support in Top 500, you can definitely do it in Silver. There are just as many rude, incapable and impossible to work with people in GM than everywhere else.

[Brauchief 6]

4 hours ago, Blainie said:

Your initial point was, you can only carry a team as a DPS. I am saying, this is not true.

Of course you can do it as Genji if you are a Genji god, but the likelihood of that being true is close to zero if you are solo queueing in Silver, would you not say? I highly doubt the next Wraxu-Hanzo God is currently in Silver. Maybe he is, I don't know, but I really doubt it.

The likelihood of you being able to carry a game in solo queue as a DPS at that level drops massively simply because most of the DPS characters require very good aim to do so effectively. 

Nonetheless, to say that carrying is impossible as another role is just ridiculous. I have had games in Top 500 where the game has hinged completely on the play of an enemy tank or support. A Zarya that has Graviton and massively high energy constantly can completely turn the tide of a game and make it completely one sided, regardless of how good the enemy DPS are. The same goes for a Zenyatta who snipes your Pharah out of the sky, has Transcendence for all of your team's combos and constantly beats your Genji/Tracer on the backline with Discord and a headshot. A Winston that makes it so your team never, ever has healers, trapping them in spawn and forcing your spawns to delay.

Like I said, you can carry with much more than just a DPS.

EDIT: If you can carry as a tank or support in Top 500, you can definitely do it in Silver. There are just as many rude, incapable and impossible to work with people in GM than everywhere else.

fair enough, there are other roles you can take but in the end you are still forgoing the hero's role and kit to just damage the enemy because your team's damage isn't.  still makes more sense to just take the heroes whose kits are meant for that. the skills you mention take longer to develop and require more tactical thinking than the skills of using the dps hero with placement and being able to aim. there's a big difference between managing and timing energy build-up and manipulating the enemy to clump so you can ult as zarya rather than just grabbing a 76 and standing behind the barrier tank that no one is utilizing while a pharmercy pounds them. in the end, you need to do damage to solo queue up from low tiers to overcome the mistakes of your teammates more than overcome the play of your enemy.