Prefer over Avoid?

[Regal-11132]

Thanks for the information, never knew that.

[Keanu4Cats-1694]

you seem to forget prefer this player and avoid this player were both heavily abused by this community

just like the weaponized report system that you do literally nothing about

way to continue to fail at game design jeff

[Kaleidoscope-21937]

it would probably work now that you have reduced the ow player population.

[FXtrt-21979]

eventually you need to get better by yourself instead of divine by avoid and prefers

[WiseWolf-2653]

I think it is pointless, I mean you can add people to your friend list nothing stops you for doing that and queue with them in group

[Katz-2956]

That may seem silly to some, but personally I prefer friend-list to contain actual friends, separately from accidental acquaintances met in random PuGs. You cannot fool Dunbar’s number.

[LFBoyfriendǃ-2185]

The issue with Prefer is, a lot of pros and popular players had a lot of people following them and throwing their games, since as long as you were in the same rank, and had access to their profile somehow/their name in chat you could prefer them.

[Terx2-1856]

You can see a prefer system could be used in a harmful way right?

If you like a person friend them, if your not up to it just endorse them and wish them well. If they throw a tantrum, spout racial, homophobic slurs or just generally toxic then block or avoid them if you feel they are worth taking up one of 3 slots.

Doesn’t have to get more complicated then that.

[anon29269486]

How many players play at peak times? and how many players play on average?

From my point of view players should not be able to influence who they play with. You can play with friends together in groups. I don’t know why Overwatch takes a unique approach in many areas.

[Krizzzzly-1168]

No, I don’t want potatoes preferring me thanks. You could however add them as friends if you like them that much. I would like the avoid list to go up to at least 6. 3 is just not enough sometimes.

[Vintorez-1327]

What if we had an settings option to select that was like “Prefer teammates on Victory” that would automatically enable the “Stay as Group” button when coming out of a win?

[Micraft29-2805]

just duo with them for a few games and then decide

[ƑaylenSøl-1922]

@JeffreyKaplan

we actually had a “prefer” system in the game.

because of the population size, it worked less than 1% of the time. we ultimately removed it to reduce UI and matchmaking code complexity.

obviously, we like ideas like this – that’s why we tried it. we’ll continue to brainstorm along these lines.

I actually made a friend in game due to the old prefer system.

A Reaper One Trick who beat my own One Trick Hours on Lucio (I was at like 500 hours on Lucio at the time). He preferred me and did so back without communicating. We kept ending up in each others matches. After the third game in a weeks time we just started grouping up.

He told me he added me on his preferred list after the first game, which was funny since I did the same.

[PixelPerfect-11274]

Sometime back in 2017 or so I made a suggestion for a “I’d buy this person a coffee” option but it never happened.

[Player-167488]

@Katz-2956

If long “Avoid this player” list is never happening, why not to introduce a “Prefer grouping with this player”? This one can be however long and won’t implicitly reduce the matching pool.

Additionally it could act as a first-stage friendship filter: enjoyed playing a match with some randomly matched player but unsure about adding as a friend yet? Are you picky or just try to keep your friends list short and neat instead of an ocean-deep cavern of “who are all these people”? Add to “Prefer to be matched with” list and enjoy higher probability play with them!

P.S. Since a similar feature was there in the beginning and was misused quite a bit, it could work in the following way:

@Regal-11132

“Soft-friends”, where you can send a preferred invite and the other can accept, but does not add them to their friends list nor the benefits of it and the only thing you could do was turn off preferred.

this game is such a dump now that it wouldn’t matter if you had 100 avoid slots. your experience wouldn’t change at all, i promise.

[Regal-11132]

I actually genuinely don’t find it that bad but I understand my experience does not reflect others.

[Vagabond-21734]

Easily abusable. There are many ways where this system would be used for bad rather than good, and ultimately break the matchmaking experience:

• Could be used to creepily stalk people.
• Could be used by boosters
• Could be used to prefer smurfs for a quick SR boost
• Could be used to prefer a player to troll/throw his games out of spite

And it would create a bunch of extra variables for the matchmaker to place 12 players in 2 teams fairly and accommodate all prefrences:

• Does this player prefer someone?
• Is another player on that team avoiding that player at the same time?
• Do we have two players of opposite teams preferring the same player?
• Is there a role clash with the preference system?
• What if the preferred player changes roles between matches? Would the players who preferred him still want to match up with him if he wasn’t playing the role they liked him for?
• How would the queue times be affected for all players (preferred/preferee/avoided/avoidees) while the matchmaker is trying to sort this mess out?

It just creates a messy puzzle for the matchmaker to solve if it wants to please everyone.

[Prett-1169]

Gotta love necros making me think we finally got a dev on here

[sephiroth-24437]

10 MONTHS LATER

Talk about random necro.

[Disco-11503]

Holy necro.

But this would be an amazing tool for griefing people. You thought people spam inviting you was bad, wait until they can be stalking you from game to game.