What’s up everyone?
This is Jeff from the Overwatch team.
We have a very special feature to talk to you about today.
The mindset we were in when we created this
feature was that we needed to give you more
ways to craft your own gameplay experience.
As you all know, Overwatch is a team based game
and that’s what makes the game really fun is
playing, winning, sometimes losing with other people.
But also, sometimes those teammates can cause
frustration, and at times if can feel like
your helpless with no control over the situation.
And that’s the problem we’re trying to rectify.
So, we had a feature planned for Season 10,
but we have some really amazing engineers
and they were able to get it done sooner,
so we want to introduce to you as soon as possible.
This feature is called “Avoid As Teammate,”
and let me describe how it works a little bit.
So, you’ll play a match with somebody and
anywhere that you can normally access that
player in the interface.
Whether you’re playing on PC and you can see
them in the chat, or if you’re playing
on PC or console everybody has access to the
social menu, and wherever you can access
a player, one of the new options that you’ll
have to set on that player is “Avoid As Teammate.”
Now let me describe what it does, you can
have up to two teammates avoided at any one time.
And I’ll explain that number a little more in detail
and why we came to that number,
but you can have two teammates avoided.
When you select someone to be avoided,
they will be avoided for seven days in terms of
the game putting them on your team before
it makes a match.
Now, sometimes you will still see that other person
on the other team, but they shouldn’t
be set to be your teammate for seven days.
At the end of seven days, they drop off that list.
Now, you can re-add them to that list
if you want, but you’ll only have two slots.
So, you’ll have to be a little bit mindful
of how you manage that list.
Also, in the social menu when you've
avoided somebody, there's now a separate section that
shows the avoided players that are there.
So, if you ever want to un-avoid somebody
that's there, that's perfectly possible as well.
Now, to give you a little bit of explanation
of why we're doing this, there's a lot of
ocassions that happen in the game where you're
frustrated with a teammate, but it's not necessarily
a reportable offence.
So, perhaps somebody on the team is completely
disagreeing with the heroes that you're picking
and they keep saying in chat, whether it be voice chat
or text chat, "Hey, I really want you to switch
from Hero A on to Hero B, why aren't you playing them instead?".
You're starting to get really frustrated and
the person is not harassing you, they're not
saying anything overly negative, but you just
don't want to be grouped with them again.
That's a great example of a chance to use "Avoid As Teammate."
Another example is when you actually do report
somebody, maybe they are harassing you or
they are using inappropriate chat.
If you want immediate action of not being matched
with this person in the next match,
not only can you report them
but then you can also avoid them as a teammate
for that instant action and give you
control over your experience.
Now, there are some side effects of this system
that everybody needs to be aware of.
One is that, there is the potential that this will
cause longer queue times for finding a match.
Now, it's highly unlikely, especially at the
middle skill tiers, that we'll see any sort
of lengthening of the queue times.
But, it is possible, especially at levels like
Grand Master in smaller regions in off-hours,
that using the avoid as teammate function
is going to cause longer queue times for everybody.
This is something that we'll be keeping
a very close eye on.
That is why everybody is limited to only
such a few number of players.
We have systems in place to monitor this.
If we feel like we can open it up to more
players, we certainly will.
The other thing that we're going to keep a really
close eye on is match fairness as well,
to make sure the match maker is still making
great matches and that avoid as teammate is
not causing any issues there.
Now there is one other extreme case that I
wanted to make you aware of because some of
our players are inevitably going to run into it.
That is, if you are a player that is being
avoided as teammate by many other players,
you're going to get a warning when you log in
that says, "Hey, a lot of people have avoided
you as a teammate."
When this happens to you, you just need to
realize that for that week you need to be
concerned with: one, you should be thinking about why
are so many people avoiding you as a teammate,
but the second thing is that
you're going to run into longer queue times,
because they system doesn't have a hard time
finding you a match,
it has a hard time finding you a team.
If you're in this situation,
the best thing for you to do
is to just form your own group and then find a match.
You should find a match in regular time at that point.
But, the system when you've got a high number
of avoid as teammates against you, the system
is going to have a very difficult time finding
you other teammates beyond your team.
This will only happen to a very small percentage
of our players and we believe that the behavior
will correct over time when players realize
that they are doing things that other players
aren't crazy about.
So, we think this one will fix itself very quickly.
As with all of our systems,
we're paying very close attention.
We hope that enjoy having more control
over your experience in Overwatch
and we're going to continue to bring
features to you that let you craft
experiences exactly how you
want it to be.
Thanks so much.