Avoid as teammate should avoid playing against that player

Unbeliever-1375 · October 27, 2021, 1:40am

I almost only play Mystery. I use Avoid as teammate to avoid people who are toxic. That used to work (or maybe I just got lucky?), but now I notice I end up playing against that person anyway. Even if I report the person as abusive chat, I still get matched against them. I want to avoid toxic players. Please give me an option for that.

Kaedi-11739 · October 30, 2021, 1:28am

There used to be such an option but it was removed because it was heavily abused by the community. Here is the reasoning why from former game Director Jeff Kaplan:

Jeff Kaplan:

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.

Source - Overwatch Forums Developer Post Archives

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