Has Blizzard ever given a reason for why the list is capped at 3 people, and it only lasts 1 week? Was just musing this question today. It seems like a very arbitrary set of limitations if you ask me.
To avoid extending queue times any further than they already are. There aren’t as many players these days.
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I think it’s also to do with high elo players like GM; their queue times have never been the best, even before RQ and avoiding. Imagine avoiding 3 more, the MM will just break so that teams actually get a match. But that’d be adding masters into t500 games.
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Yeah… that would be pretty bad. Its frustrating to have only three sometimes, but it would be worse overall if we had more. The lesser of two evils, I suppose.
It’s solemnly because of GM ranks DPS players. If players would avoid 5 one-trick DPS there, these players would have queue times between 20-60 minutes. The luckier they would get riding the positive side of variance and getting the better side of handicapped matchmaking the higher they would get, but also their queue times would now be even worse, not to mention if they avoided each other and couldn’t be on the opposite teams even. The triangular avoids in the top 1% of the game make queue times for the more avoided players in that triangle a lot longer
To anyone else it wouldn’t even matter if there were 10 avoid slots for each player. They can still literally be in the opposite teams and even if triangular avoids happen, there’s literally games at their MMR/SR range being made at least every half a minute and placing one player in another game would just break that triangle and allow the other 2 to face each other in the opposite teams. Queue times would only considerably be effected by minutes for those who would be on a constant throwing streak and/or be so toxic that players wouldn’t wanna play with them
To me personally players should be allowed to choose not to play with certain players. If playing with someone means that they’re not going to enjoy the game and would just tilt having them on the team, it would be better if they could just avoid them. Nobody avoids winning players and well performing players anyways and even if they do, they’re only shooting themselves in the leg. It’s literally how social consequences of throwing should manifest in the game since gameplay sabotage is not a thing players get suspended for anyways so there’s no systematic punishment for it
Though do note that the ones being avoided will have effect from this.
The system isn’t supervised or whatever, so players could just purely do it out of preference.
People who are bad don’t fall lower into the ladder… instead they are greeted with longer queue times.
Apart from that queue times would affect all players, even the ones that haven’t avoided people.
At least as far i can think of it.
Anyhow not like what i’m going to say is much worth anymore after Wyoming is going to post here.
Originally there was no limit, but at some point one player complained about having excessive queue times. As it turned out, he had been avoided by about 800 people (Kephrii, as I recall), so the feature was removed. They added it back, but with a 2 player limit (later increased to 3) and a time limit to avoid high-rank players getting insane queue times.
Let’s pull up the original developer post that discusses the feature.
When they expanded it to three, here is what Scott Mercer had to say:
In reality, avoiding another player has an exponential impact on the matchmaker than you may think. The game literally has to take the time to figure out separate teams for both you and the other player and this problem multiplies (not simply adds) when you avoid a second and a third player. The seven day limit is in consideration to keep the matchmaker as open as possible. Tell me, can you specifically remember the name of a team mate you got angry with from say two months ago? How do you know they haven’t since shown up in your own games? the Avoid as Teammate tool is intended as a short-term player management tool to handle your current play session experience. If there was indefinite holds and unlimited slots to avoid teammates, we would eventually break the matchmaker.
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Wait, this was added back in season 12?
I feel old now.
Wanna feel older?
(Ended after season 1)
(Removed in June 2017)
(removed in August 2017)
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Is that supposed to be like that?
I don’t remember sudden death being like that
Oh the link loaded, just the placeholder on the site rn though.
I could’ve sworn that the Reaper lifesteal rework came after the rez change ಠ_ŕ˛
Refresh it, I think I fixed it
There was always a limit.
First one doesn’t show up for me after refreshing, probably a cookie thing or something.
Also those previous capture points, aren’t those the ones they have shown in the OW2 video recently?
There was? Well, the reason it was removed was the same anyway. A couple of players got excessive queue times due to being avoided by too many players for one-tricking.
There was never an avoid a team mate. I think you’re talking about the thing that you could avoid enemies. Something like that.
Heh I was linking to a Wiki site, they often have hotlinking protective measures. Switched the image.
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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/blizzard-removes-ability-to-avoid-this-player-in-overwatch
"For example, we recently realized that “Avoid this player” was wreaking havoc on matchmaking. One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. 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). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match.
The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had “opened up” to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous."
That was removed even more the start of season 1 Competitive details can be found in a very big post from Jeff Kaplan which I have archived here:
