Blizzard vs Overwatch Trolls

Since the beginning of time.... or at least since the beginning of competitive online gaming, toxic players have ruined the fun for many of us. Abusive language makes, what is supposed to be a fun way of spending an afternoon a miserable and depressing experience. 

Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan points out in his recent dev update, that monitoring and policing that kind of behavior impacts the entire game industry as developers have to spend a huge amount of resources to eliminate such behavior instead of deriving them towards making more content.

While Overwatch team is more than eager to deliver more fascinating content, maps, skins, game modes, and animated shorts, Kaplan states: 

We're spending a tremendous amount of time and resources punishing people and trying to make people behave better... The bad behavior is not just ruining the experience for one another, but it's actually making the game progress in terms of development at a much slower rate.

Some people point out that Blizzard is not banning anyone for abusive language because they don't want to lose customers, and all of this is based on a fact that trolls are persistent. The truth is that it's not Blizzard being greedy, the players are simply so terrible. Kaplan stated that the same team that developed player reporting system was responsible for match history and replays which had to be delayed due to urgency of dealing with high level of toxicity among the players.

Thanks to the new tools over 70% of 480,000 disciplinary bans were directly caused by the new reporting system.

In Kaplan's new video we hear that Overwatch developers are taking more strict and direct action against the toxic players as anything they have done so far seems not to work and they are forced to spend more and more resources to keep it at bay, and it has to stop, therefore the promise of continued disciplinary actions against such people. They won't be creating "a special place" for such people in Overwatch (matchmaking only with other players tagged as toxic), they don't want to have such people in their game at all.

But we have to remember that no company in the world can just "patch out" the idiots from the game, it's up to us, the community to make online gaming fun again, it's not that hard to just.... be nice.