I’m going to be talking about quickplay here because it’s the easiest, however this issue exists in arcade modes and has existed for as long as I can remember.
If I spectate my friend in a QP game, the spectator is very buggy. Sometimes it will only allow me to spectate a few out of the six players. Sometimes I cannot even spectate the friend that I clicked “spectate” on.
Pressing “F1” works for spectating a player, but none of the other function keys will spectate any other players–only F1.
If I press F1, it may let me scroll back through 5 players but then only scroll forward through 3 players. If this doesn’t make sense to you, that’s okay because this bug is very strange.
I don’t know why this happens or why no one else talks about this. It can be easily recreated by trying to spectate people in QP games. It shouldn’t take many tries before you’re placed in this broken spectator.
I’m open to answering clarifying questions about the bug.
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I see what “bug” you are talking about, but not sure I would if I didn’t experience it myself.
Basically, the mouse wheel doesn’t allow you to simply go through the list of 6 players, but instead behaves weirdly.
I don’t get the specifics of it, but you should be able with ups and downs on the mouse wheel to find any player you want. Not sure how much of that is bug or feature though
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I’m not using the mouse wheel. Clicking M1 or M2 scrolls through players by default. I haven’t tried using the mouse wheel but I’d imagine that it just wouldn’t do anything or it would have the same issue
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I don’t know why I said mouse wheel, I had M1 and M2 in mind
I have this same issue, none of the hotkeys to change spectator work. Although sometimes I can press F1 to change the player I’m spectating a single time, but then I am stuck on that play.
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Also have this same issue. It’s been going on for a while with no work around yet. As DrinkandMcro described I can successfully use F1 once, nothing else workings, whether it is mouse or keyboard. I tried different custom bindings too and nothing worked.
Has anyone found a fix to this? I have the same issue. Even tried to change what keys controlled the players that I spectated, but no luck.
Nope. The in-game voice chat has been bugged for weeks or months now and Blizz has already done a patch but didn’t even address that issue that everyone has been complaining about.
I don’t expect them to address a 4-year-old bug any time soon either. Dev team seems to have gone MIA.
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This is still an issue, a month before the OW2 Early Access launch. F1 works to spectate that player, but mouse controls or other Function keys by that point don’t do anything. I’m unable to switch between players, and spacebar doesn’t work to swap between 1st-3rd person. The only thing you can do is move the camera with the mouse over the player tied to F1.
This is all while joining a match a friend is currently playing, whether it’s QP or Arcade.
Edit: Possibly related, this is usually spectating my friend playing on PS5 while spectating as a PC player.
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Since this is the first post that comes up when I search about Overwatch spectate controls being broken ill comment on it. If you are spectating cross platform the game doesn’t register your native control scheme. If you plug a controller in on PC it will register those inputs and allow you to use spectator controls.
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Hate to break it to you, but I just experienced this bug. Even though I have a controller in and tried all the different inputs on the (keyboard, mouse, AND controller) I was unable to switch views from the first player it put me as spectating. And spoiler alert, it didn’t even start me off spectating the player that I joined specifically to spectate.
So, having a controller plugged in (even if cross-play) does not help at all.
Touching back on this again. I thought the issue had been fixed in OW2. For a while I hadn’t experienced it, but it now seems to be an intermittent issue. Not sure if it’s per session or what. When it happens, none of the spectator controls work at all besides F1, and that only works once.
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Still no spectate option on XSX. 
touching here to mention that this is still an issue, for lack of any better option I attempted to scan and repair game files but it seems to be rooted in spectating across platforms. f1 still works though
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Still having this problem as well. Just had it today,
Still an issue in Overwatch 2 :\
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Maybe they’ll fix it one day… Moments before OW3 
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How is this still an issue like 2 years later? I knew blizzard was a trash company, but this is just sad. Spectator functionality completely broken when spectating cross-platform.
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Technically, as was noted in this response above, the functionality isn’t completely broken.
The consideration is that the lobby is a console lobby, so primarily controller inputs are accepted for players and spectators. Having a controller connected to your PC, you can spectate a console-based lobby using the controller-based spectator controls.
I think, in order for this to be a smoother experience for PC players to spectate a friend’s match in a console lobby with keyboard and mouse, there would need to be some core changes to the structure of how those lobbies are created, which would take a lot of effort for something that can be fixed by plugging in a controller.
My speculation is that the lack of most keyboard inputs in those lobbies suggests it’s probably done to mitigate console players using mouse and keyboard in the match.