One Tricking "Wiki" (Info, quotes, faq & more)

General Discussion
1

I wanted to create this thread as a “wiki” of sorts for people who appear to be confused as to whether one tricking is against the rules or not.

  • Official Quotes by Blizzard staff

This is a list of official blizzard staff talking about the topic. Maybe this will help those confused by the topic.

Jeff Kaplan:

You can’t ban somebody - it’s not a bannable offence - for just playing one hero, as long as you’re trying your best to win with that hero. (1)

Jeff Kaplan:

I think the game gets in a very dangerous state when we tell you who you’re allowed to play and not play with the game. (1)

Jeff Kaplan:

I mean, sometimes you’re gonna be countered, but we can’t leave it at other players’ discretion to decide what you should be doing. (1)

Jeff Kaplan:

All in all, the game lets you pick whoever you want. It’s not up to your teammates who you should play. (1)

Josh Engen:

We believe players can choose to play any available hero during any game at any time, and that their choice of hero alone is not a behavior that should be penalized by our customer service team under any of the player report categories (including griefing, inactivity, or poor teamwork). (2)

Josh Engen:

Players who inaccurately submit player reports in an attempt to punish someone’s hero choice are considered to be harassing or griefing their fellow player. (2)

Josh Engen:

Your teammates can respectfully provide their opinion and suggest using a different hero for the gameplay situation that your team is experiencing, but the final decision about which hero you want to play with is yours alone. (2)

Jeff Kaplan:

Let’s be clear here and not confuse policy: One Tricking is not bannable and should not be reported (it even says so in the text) (3)

Sources:
(1) Jeff Kaplan (December 2017)
https://www.pcgamesn.com/overwatch/overwatch-uprising-2018-next-event-one-trick-jeff-kaplan

(2) Josh Engen (December 2017)
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20760716149#post-10

(3) Jeff Kaplan (February 2018)
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20761616812#post-2

Even more quotes…

  • https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20759568420?page=24#post-467 (thanks Youko)

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

  • Can I report a one trick, not for one tricking, but for not switching when being heavily countered?

No. Not switching when countered is not a bannable offense, thus cannot be reported.

  • I think one tricking is the exact definition of “Poor Teamwork” so can I report them for poor teamwork?

No. One tricking does not fall under the poor teamwork category of the report system. The poor teamwork category is there for people who are not trying to complete map objectives or constantly communicating in a negative fashion (lE. “This team is horrible.”)

  • Is one tricking considered griefing, trolling, throwing, poor teamwork, inactivity, spam, or any other reportable offense?

Not at all. One tricking is not considered any of those things and is not a reportable offense.

Is One Tricking Griefing? Throwing? Trolling? Disruptive Gameplay?

A lot of people seem to be under the impression that one tricking alone is considered griefing, throwing, trolling or disruptive gameplay and that’s not the case at all. Griefing, throwing, trolling or disruptive gameplay are completely separate from one tricking and you SHOULD always report people who are griefing, throwing, trolling or disrupting your gameplay. However, one tricking is not any of those things.

That does not mean that one tricks are not capable of doing those things. Anyone can do these things. If you see anyone doing this (even one tricks) please report them as griefing/throwing/trolling is against the rules. But please don’t just report people for simply one tricking, because that is NOT the same thing.

Examples of griefing/throwing/trolling/disruptive gameplay:

  • Placing Symmetra’s teleporter exit off a cliff so that when your team uses the Teleporter they will fall down to their death.
  • Using Mei’s Ice Wall to block your own teammates in spawn or any other place…
  • Literately throwing yourself off the map repeately for no reason other than to show the team you are “throwing” and don’t care about the game.
  • Going directly to the enemy team with the intention of feeding.

The Report System
Here is a complete list of rules/guidelines provided by the report system that many people seem to forget to read before submitting their reports…

Poor Teamwork:

Poor teamwork is: not trying to complete map objectives or constantly communicating in a negative fashion (lE. “This team is horrible.”).

Poor teamwork is not: playing a hero that is not considered optimal by the community or staying silent in team voice chat.

Abusive Chat

Abusive Chat is: Any form of hateful, discriminatory, obscene, or disruptive communications. Threatening or harassing another player on either team is also unacceptable, regardless of the words used.

Abusive chat is not: Asking players to switch to a different character, or giving suggestions to a team member to improve their play.

Griefing

Griefing is: actively harassing or disrupting your own team through the use of game mechanics or player actions. This includes placing a Symmetra teleporter exit at a cliff edge, or intentionally allowing yourself to be eliminated by the enemy team (I.E. Feeding).

Griefing is not: simply making a mistake or playing poorly.

Cheating

Cheating is: using a third-party program to automate any facet of the game, exploiting a bug, or engaging in any activity that grants an unfair advantage.

Cheating is not: playing extremely well, getting a lucky streak of hits, or successfully predicting an enemy players movement.

Spam

Spam is: Overly repetitive communication that disrupts the use of normal communication channels, or advertisement of a third party website or services.

Spam is not: communication intended to alert your teammates of danger, or better coordinate your team trying to take objectives.

Inactivity

Inactivity is: a lack of participation in the game, either by not being at their controls or not attempting to engage the enemy.

Inactivity is not: playing a sniper or defensive class without the enemy entering an area you are guarding.

Bad Battletag

Bad battetag is: Any player name or battletag that is inappropriate, obscene or offensive.

Bad battetag is not: A player name or battle tag using a language different than your own.

I’m sure I don’t have to mention this again but one tricking (playing one hero exclusively) does not fall under any of the categories listed above.

Quick summary (TLDR;)

  • One tricking is not a bannable offense.
  • One tricking cannot be reported.
  • Reporting someone for one tricking is considered griefing and you can be reported & suspended for it.
  • Not switching heroes when being countered is not against the rules.
  • Playing a hero that your team doesn’t think is optimal is not against the rules.
  • One tricking is not: throwing, trolling, griefing, disruptive gameplay or any other sort of reportable offense.

I hope people found this post useful in some way. I tried to gather as much information as possible. I will update this with any other info that comes out in the future.

UPDATE ( 3/9/2018):

Are you frustrated with one tricks?

While one tricking is not against the rules, I can understand the frustration some of you guys may feel towards one tricking in general. Blizzard themselves also encourage players to try and flex and not stick to one hero but it’s not a requirement to play the game.

An overwatch player, Sylhiri, made a suggestion that I think is worth mentioning here. Basically instead of using the report system to vent your frustrations, talk about it in the forums and let the devs know how you feel about one tricking. But please voice your concerns on the forums in a respectable manner.

disclaimer: I obviously don’t work for blizzard, these are all just information I gathered from official blizzard sources and/or just from looking around in the forum. If anything here is wrong please let me know and I will fix it.

71 Likes
2

Inb4 someone replies: “But I feel it’s throwing so imma just report them anyways”.

Seriously though OP, good write up!

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3

I 100% agree with Blizzard’s point of view concerning one-tricking, but it is also super frustrating when you get a one-trick that’s getting hard-countered by 2+ heroes from the enemy team.

One-tricking should never be a bannable offense, but I personally feel like it’s still an issue that needs to be resolved.

EDIT: Also, super well written post, I’m impressed

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4

Thank you! I just wanted a place to gather up all the info/quotes about one tricking so that they were all in one place. It then evolved and I couldn’t stop lol.

5

Impressive work and display for this and I never knew there was a wiki about this.

6

Good post. This should be pinned at the top by the dev team/Blizzard employee.

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7

Unfortunately, people will continue reporting for it no matter what.

Worst yet, the real problem here is the automated report system auto-suspending innocent people.

Blizzard’s acknowledged its a problem multiple times now and has made efforts to try to remove the automated portion that’s banning off-meta hero players.

We NEED to get on Blizzard about this, otherwise nothing will ever be done about it.

But given how long this is going on for, and how toxic this player base is towards one tricks…it looks like that’s never gonna happen.

As the game, forum flagging abuse that required Blizzard to make a statement telling people to stop abusing the flag feature, and many other examples proven throughout the internet; you cannot give players the power to punish other players without it being horribly abused.

Until you as players start really complaining to Blizzard to fix their automated report system people can and will continue getting auto-suspended for one tricking from sheer report abuse.

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I agree 100%. The automated system is not a good system for this game. Specially with how toxic a lot of players are, specially to one tricks. A lot of Symmetra players have been banned because of this automated system. They really need to improve this as soon as possible. If anything, I think a “flag” feature might be better than automatically suspending.

9

I got suspended the day before yesterday.

The first representative told me it wasnt for one tricking Sym, said it wouldnt be reverted, refused to explain why, and hung up on me.

But half an hour later a different, very nice representative told me it did actually seem to be for that, and reverted it.

The advice for avoiding future bans? Find a group or play another hero.

I want to stress that this second rep was very nice and helpful, but thats a pretty bleak outlook. Basically 'flex or get banned repeatedly".

Im just hoping my high winrate will stop me getting reported too much.

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10

While there is nothing you can “legally” do in-game I would like to remind people that you can still communicate with the developers your thoughts and opinions on one-tricking. The Overwatch team does know this is a concern to the high level players and the general Overwatch population.

So do voice your concerns on the forums in a respectable manner.

11

This is the point of this post. It’s not to protect one tricks and it’s not “pro one tricking”, it’s to make not misinform people reading on the forums and believe that reporting one tricks is okay. Likewise, we need to express our opinions of one tricking to the developers, but do so by also respecting their rules and report system.

12

It’s a good reminder that people have options. People get frustrated because right now in-game they can’t do anything about it so they end up doing whatever they can to alleviate that frustration. The main post has the information that in the rules that Blizzard has made, there is nothing that can be done about one tricking in-game (which is true) without repercussions. It says nothing on anything that a player can do about one tricking.

While the information being made is accurate and informative, I wanted to make a point to tell people that they can do something productive in the meantime to vent such frustrations instead of using the reporting system or harassing players in-game and that the Overwatch team is indeed listening to them.

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13

That’s what i was thinking!

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I added a small section about it. Thanks for bringing this up!

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15

Thank you for adding the information. It wasn’t necessary but much appreciated!

16

Let’s refer to your TLDR list so you can actually understand what blizzard is saying;

  • One tricking is not a bannable offense.

Yes, play any hero you want, no problem. Merely selecting the hero and play it, no problem.

  • One tricking can not be reported.

Yes, it’s not a re portable function.

  • Reporting someone for one tricking is considered griefing and you can be reported & suspended for it.

See former 2.

  • Not switching heroes when being countered is not against the rules.

Oh boy, here’s where the line starts to get a little gray, don’t worry we’ll clarify.

  • Playing a hero that your team doesn’t think is optimal is not against the rules.

Frankly this is just a reiteration of the previous points, it be stupid to have a community decide what hero’s you can play based on a professional meta.

  • One tricking is not: throwing, trolling, griefing, disruptive gameplay or any other sort of reportable offense

You’re right, playing one hero is not any of those things.

You know what is though? When you aren’t playing the objective of the map because you’re constantly feeding the enemy team. Let’s be real here, most players aren’t reporting you for PICKING your hero, they are reporting you because we LOST since you wouldn’t get off the hero.

That leads to another entire subject matter of the report, we lost because you picked a niche hero, that gave no team benefit, it’s disruptive at that point. The fact you think you can play a torjborn and not even touch the objective because you’re edgy, while your utility is completely negated.

This is the reality one tricks have to face, and frankly they should be harder on them for it. Why are we protecting a specific group of people who are indirectly trolls?

No one wants to play with one tricks, people leave games (even at top 500) just to avoid playing games with them. We literally have dozens of threads begging for role que, player block and even a guild system JUST to isolate and remove this problem.

The thing is, it’s pretty evident what blizzard means when you’re banned for ‘one tricking’, you aren’t. You’re banned for the consequences OF one tricking, that’s being hard countered, pissing people off, and is a huge source of toxicity because of the entitlement issues of these players.

And until I see blizzard denounce what Gamer Master Arcaxenosi said, as far as I’m concerned it’s fair game to report those type of players. To be even more clear if I lose the game because your character loses their utility and literally becomes food, and even with the entire team trying to work around you, results in my loss? Report for poor teamwork and griefing as far as I’m concerned. The response clearly says refusal to cooperate. That doesn’t mean play what I want, that doesn’t mean you picked a character I didn’t like. It means you aggressively refused to help the team by switching to a hero who’s utility wasn’t made completely worthless.

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17

Then explain why whenever a OT streamer gets automatically banned from reports, when they go to Blizzard to get it repelled, it does. If reported players for staying on heroes that are bad IS reportable, then almost all of these streamers who OT wouldn’t get any repel on automated bans.

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The only bans that I see that are permanent are from hackers/extreme harassment . Almost every other ban done by overwatch has been overturned no matter what, or has a grace period that expires by the time they attempt to resolve it.

19

You are really reaching if you think dying before reaching the objective is not “Playing the objective”. Even if someone was being spawn camped, the are still trying to play the game. If you were indeed playing as a team, someone would come over and help the person who was being spawned camped.

Reporting someone for losing a game isn’t really a reportable offense though. Also blaming the one trick for a loss in general is a little bit crazy without context.

You are assuming one trick is tied to a specific hero. It’s not. Anyone who plays one hero all the time is a one trick, whether it’s tracer, d.va, mercy or symmetra. Also every hero has a benefit, I am not sure what you are talking about here.

People abuse the report system all the time. Blizzard has no way of knowing whether a report is legit or not. Since one tricking isn’t an option in the report system, people make up excuses in their reports and blizzard has no way of knowing if this is true because they don’t have access to the actual game footage.

The report system is a completely different problem that needs to be addressed.

You are choosing to believe anything that agrees with your views instead of listening to actual important blizzard representatives. I don’t really see the point debating any further to be honest. It won’t achieve anything… Also you are admitting to abusing the report system, just saying.

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One-tricking IS poor teamwork. I’m not talking about “Poor Teamwork” the report option. I’m talking about the the words themself and the combination of the word “poor” and “teamwork”. One-tricks are doing the opposite of “teamwork”, thus “poor”.
Therefore rename or remove “Poor Teamwork” in the report options.

3 Likes