One of the world's premier Widowmaker players had to endure inordinate amounts of time in the queue before finding a match because hundreds of players were giving him the silent treatment. That all changes with hero shooter Overwatch's latest update.
That Widowmaker player's story is hardly unique, but Overwatch developer and publisher Blizzard has come to terms that the game's "Avoid this Player" feature has failed miserably due to abuse.
After the player complained, Blizzard began looking into the abuse of Avoid this Player, according to Jeff Kaplan, game director of Overwatch. Avoid this Player was meant to help players block people who are more interested in griefing other gamers instead of PTFO (Playing the Freakin' Objective).
"We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he's a nice guy — they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior)," Kaplan says. "The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match."
And by the time the player would finally secure access to a match, the matchmaking system would often open up to players of lower skill levels.
That meant a bunch of initiates had to have their early Overwatch experiences wrecked by one of the game's top players, or that player would have to try not to be too good.
So on Tuesday, June 21, Blizzard released a PC patch that disables Avoid this Player. A future update will strike the feature's user interface option from the game.
"The system was designed with the best intent," Kaplan says. "But the results were pretty disastrous."
While disabling Avoid this Player was the objective of this update, Blizzard also threw a few bug fixes into the package.
There's a fix that resolves an issue that causes Reaper's Shadow Step to teleport him to random locations around some of the maps. The update also contains a fix that addresses a bug that would occasionally cause projectiles to target Reinhardt during "High Bandwidth" custom games, instead of striking his Barrier Field.
Blizzard also rolled out fixes for several issues that had been causing the game client to crash sometimes.
Avoid this Player wasn't the only thing on Kaplan's mind, and that story about the Widowmaker player was part of a massive forum post on matchmaking. You can go here to find out more about Overwatch's matchmaking scheme.
