Private profiles do more harm than good

General Discussion
1

Before you read i want you to know I made a post earlier checking arguments that support private profiles called “If you support private profiles I want to know” if you want see it check my activity. But I have seen the support for and I have my opinions against private profiles. So before you go into the comments and write “YoUR ToxIC.” I have spent time checking all sides of this controversy. If you notice a flaw with my opinion and want me to give me your opinion go into the comments and we can have a civil discussion I’m gonna try to change your mind and I want you to try and change my mind.

Point A: boosted players and trolls
Now before I go on I want to state that not everyone who has private profiles is boosted or a troll, however private profiles do make boosting and trolling much easier to get away with but let me show you why.
Boosting
Boosting is now nearly impossible to catch due to private profiles being available. You can get from 2300-3600 without any evidence because you can flick a switch. This is a huge problem that takes away from competitive. High tier players now have to put up with boosted players that don’t belong in their rank and when I say “boosted” I don’t mean they got overplaced by two hundred SR. I mean they paid for someone to play on their account or had a higher tier friend play for them. I checked some boosting websites and you can go from 2000 SR to 3000 SR for under $150. While it is expensive it definitely is affordable for a lot of people
trolling
When I say trolling I don’t mean someone picked doomfist to get bronze eliminations, that’s just being stupid. What I mean is when people will just overall throw and people like to be sneaky about it by pretending to try one moment and then mei wall people the next. Often a 10-20% winrate was good for confirming that they were a troll but now people like to hide that with private profiles

Point B: How do I know what my teammates are comfortable with?
Sometimes when I will be sitting in the lobby I like to browse through my teammates career profiles just to see what they are comfortable with. Let’s say I’m sitting in illios and I pick mercy but i see my teammate who picks reaper is a mercy 1 trick (1 trick NOT main) so in teamchat I ask reaper if she would like to swap heroes so we are on heroes we’re both comfortable with. We agree and we avoid that annoying scenario where we get steam rolled on the first round and someone says I can only play “XXXXXXXX”. Because I had the information available I was able to get my team out of that situation. It’s also good to know what kind of heroes people main whether it’s projectile DPS,off tank, or main healer if we do terrible we can swap what we are good at. You can make the argument that asking people what they main is better which is true but not everyone has a mic so it’s difficult to go through a list of heroes and guessing than checking their profile and KINDLY asking once or twice if they want to play their mains or swap with them.

Point C: Private profiles give birth to new toxicity
While blizzard can try to eradicate toxicity the insane amounts of toxicity will never go away unless we remove text chat and voice chat. No matter what blizzard tries toxicity will find away into your games and all private profiles did was replace bossy toxicity with private profile shaming toxicity. Now whenever I go into a game instead of people getting screamed at for not swapping (which still happens) people get shamed for having private profiles which while I hate private profiles I wouldn’t ever shame someone for having one. Instead of reducing toxicity it kinda did nothing to it but give a new reason to scream at your teammates. Even the post Jeff Kaplan made on reduced toxicity didn’t mention private profiles once, only LFG and endorsements.

debunking common arguments
For the rest of this post I’m gonna put my two sense into common arguments i see supporting private profiles. Just so you know bold is the question.

I don’t want the enemy team to see my heroes
This is fair but why isn’t this a feature by default? We could add this feature where you can’t check the enemies profiles until the game ends

main shaming,time played shaming,etc.
This is the argument I see most often when people defend private profiles, yet it is the most flawed. If you get shamed in game for your hero pick, who you main, or hours played yet we had all the tools before private profiles to avoid this. All you have to do is mute,report and move on with your life. And if it becomes such a problem that It happens every game just avoid teamchat and mute the text chat.

Why do you force people to swap
Ughh. I hate seeing this argument because it is completely flawed. Look, there’s a difference between kindly asking someone to swap once or twice and screaming at McCree to go hanzo. There is nothing toxic with asking someone to swap to a different hero as long as it’s done in a kind way. Plus if they do swap the only person who went to spawn and clicked change heroes was YOU. If your teammates are pressuring you to swap in a toxic way mute and move on.

Those are the only arguments I could remember but if you have anymore comment them down below*

11 Likes
2

Try communicating with your team. God forbid you have to do that in a team-based game. Stop with the constant whining over private profiles. They only keep proving more and more WHY they’re necessary.

If you suspect someone is cheating or boosting, report them and let Blizzard decide what the case is.

6 Likes
3

I keep mine private just to trigger people like the OP, you can already see my level, comp ranking if I’ve done any and endorsement level but if someone asked nicely I would gladly fill them in about my hero play.

1 Like
4

You didn’t read the post. Plus you avoided this Part

5

Private profiles are completely useless in fact only helped people to throw and derank much easier than before.

I mean if you have a Tank main with all positive win rates and suddenly the guy insta lock Hanzo with 20 minutes and 15% win rate never swapping or saying anything in the whole match that player is OBVIOUSLY trying to lose on purpose.

Now the same player can do the same but nobody can confirm it anymore.

When you have someone with so many hours playing X and wants to try Y character that person always says is nice and try to communicate by saying stuff like

“I’ll try X if not work I will switch”! that how people played before.

5 Likes
6

I wish that this was the Only problem with private profiles

7

If people weren’t toxic, we wouldn’t have a need for them in the first place.

3 Likes
8

No we don’t need them, if people are getting toxic mute,report and move on. We never needed private profiles

9

Got a couple of counter points.

Boosting is a general problem and something OW should have functions in game to detect. Theoretically a huge jump in SR followed by decay or steady falling should be something the game picks up on.

Trolling is an action per match, while winrates may help in announcing it the troll still needs to be reported on a per infraction basis. It’s a bit of another overall issue that will always be present just due to the nature of the game.

Hero comfort problems with private profiles can be avoided entirely with the looking for group function, everyone clearly states what they want to/can play. Second while a comfort zone is fine they can also be constricting. Constantly being pigeonholed into a single role or hero is generally not what people want, OTPs being the exception. Especially when people are being encouraged to play other heroes it seems ridiculous to shame them into switching via their hours played.

Finally the mute, and move on tactic is weak at best. Sure it does make it so you don’t have to listen to the non shutting up party anymore, but they’re tilted, potentially throwing and creating an oppressive negative atmosphere for the entire match. That’s assuming you don’t get them on your team the following match as well.

So I stand by private profiles.

5 Likes
10

True, but I was just stating private profiles make them worse

Just like for boosting private profiles make it harder to detect

While this is true not everyone likes to do LFG, it’s basically a glorified solo que

But private profiles don’t do anything to stop this negative environment, if anything it gives more fuel for the fire, now they can tell people to report because they’re that “thrower with a private profile”

1 Like
11

First off, I commend OP on doing their due diligence and asking the community for their opinions on the value of private profiles. I appreciate when people really try to understand the other side of an issue like this, and I think it only leads to more meaningful conversations.

That said, I think it’s clear that the community has already made up their minds. There have been countless threads addressing this issue, and over time opinions seem to have only solidified.

From what I’ve read, there are plenty of people who find private profiles valuable. Over the course of thousands of games, I can understand why. People can be downright cruel to others when playing Overwatch, and literally any scrap of information can and will be weaponized to belittle and berate the target in question. Taking this information away from those types of people means they have less tools at their disposal. While they may simply say, “private profile scrub lol must b mercy main!!!”, it really lacks the same punch when they’re just blindly grasping at straws in an attempt to harass their target.

I’ve seen plenty of posts about why public profiles are important, but I’ve never found the arguments terribly convincing. Perhaps it’s because they’re often peppered with suggestions like, “stop being such a snowflake!” and “just grow a thicker skin!”, but if one tries to get to the real argument, it seems that most people just miss the ability to quickly glance at their teammate’s most-played heroes when forming a team in-game. I suppose I understand that, and I certainly did the same when profiles were public, but I can count the times someone offered to make a switch or allowed someone else to play a hero they had more time on with one hand. Either way, the “value” of profiles was incredibly small in my experience.

Because of this, I don’t really see why there’s such a controversy. This seems like a prime opportunity for “live and let live” to shine. Respect the wishes of other members of the community, and they are much more likely to respect yours in turn.

3 Likes
12

True, private profiles can aid in the first two I can’t deny that point.

As for LFG being glorified solo queue I’m not sure I follow? Isn’t the point of it to form a group of synergystic roles instead of leaving it up to RNG like solo queue does? If that’s not its function I have no idea why they added it.

I really have only seen people equate private profiles to trolls or boosterseats in forum topics about why they should be removed. Not once in game have I seen a player instantly correlate the two. Of course it could become synonymous if private profiled players were almost exclusively trolls/boosted but only time will tell.

13

Boosting can’t be forbidden, cause:

(a) smurfing is official allowed and (b) the game has a SR range you need to be within to play ranked together.

and who can tell if booster and costumer arn’t friends? :wink:

14

Boosting is already dealt with.

You don’t need private profiles to troll, and knowing that you have a thrower from profiles does not make a difference compared to seeing it in game.

You don’t need private profiles to do that. If you can’t ask people for their hero pool you’re not going to be able to get them to switch, and inversely, if talking to someone gets them to switch you could just ask at the beginning of the match.

You can’t prove that there was an increase. Anecdotally I see a net decrease, where people go to their team profiles, see that it’s private, and suck it up and continue playing the game.

False reporting is an issue, and there’s no guarantee that your teammates will do the same, which leaves them vulnerable to tilting. And neither scenario is exclusive to public profiles, but private profiles do help the problem.

As for your thread title, I fail to see the harm at all.

1 Like
15

(before I start I’m going to clarify I’m on PS4 incase y’all wanna argue for a point that isn’t even an option for us)

This is my #1 problem with private profiles. I don’t C A R E if you’re a one trick idk lets say D.va. If there’s a one trick D.va on my team, how am I supposed to know? If I lock in D.va, they’ll play some other hero they either a) have about 3 minutes on or b) are choosing just to genuinely throw because they can’t have their one trick hero.
“but but you could just talk to them, stinky! >:CC”
yep sure, totally can talk to the person who’s not even in the voice chat, sure buddy, good argument there.

I am one of those people who obsessively would check each and every member of my team’s and enemy team’s playtime/most played that season and maybe even previous seasons just to form a team comp that could counter things like if they had two Pharah mains on their team I’d run a hit scan or get someone to or something yknow, so it’d be good if the enemy team couldn’t even take a look. (I’ve had games where people try to run a Winston against me because my profile is public and I’m a Symmetra main and borderline one trick (in personality not actual playtime), though it never works out too well for them :wink: ).

My MAIN problem with private profiles is it made them automatically private. This was an utter GARBAGE move on Blizz’s part. They said they would test to see if it was a popular function or whatever, but the genuinely smart way to go about that would have been to give them an option, chuck in a pop up once the update was live saying “Hey, we’ve got private profiles now! Choose one of the three options, public, public to friends or private, coolio have a good day!” But 9/10 people don’t even bother to open up their audio settings (cough, the audio/voice chat bug that was on ps4 overwatch for like two weeks or more, cough) let alone their social settings.

What annoys me about private profiles is it just opens up those with public profiles to even more toxicity (IN MY EXPERIENCE). I literally have games where myself and my friend (a Sym main and a Widow main) are the only ones with public profiles on the team, and then I’ve had people when we’re on the hero select screen just be like “Are you throwing”, they check my profile and they’re like “oh gross f’ing Symmetra one trick, go back to Mercy or D.va” (in order of most played in all modes, Mercy, D.va, Sym) and then refuse to switch off of a 3rd or even 4th DPS so myself and my friend are forced to switch off anyway, like yah alright bucko, if your profile is on private you have lost ANY AND ALL rights to judge me for my picks, especially when you were the last one to lock in. :roll_eyes: sorry for the rant but yeah you get the gist.

On top of that the amount of players who literally throw are HELPED by this system. That Widowmaker on your team that hasn’t gotten a pick all game, keeps “accidentally” falling off the map, but you didn’t say anything when they chose Widow because why not, they picked a second DPS and maybe they’re good at Widow, but surprise surprise, their profile is private and you’d never know that they have 29 minutes on Widowmaker in all modes with a 0% win rate, an average 14 deaths per 10 mins and an average 10% scoped accuracy :sleepy: I mean sure that can be called a thrower problem not necessarily a private profiles problem but then at least I can put some damn facts in my report, not just “i think they are throwing”. (If anything this is shade towards blizz’s garbage report system. fix it, blizzard, get some real goshdarn people to look at reports.)

TL;DR; i’m fine with it being an option but it should not have been automatic.

16

Why would muting and reporting be better than avoiding the toxicity in the first place?

I believe private profiles are a good thing, the only thing I don’t like about them is that if you’re playing in od or some other tournament you can’t check the enemies’ profiles before your game.

2 Likes
17

frankly i agree but i think private profiles are good in the same manner seagull does.

Heres an example. I am a rein/brig/zen/mercy player, however if i have say 1 hour on winston, people would expect me to be able to play winston. This scenario happens all the time and ranked and i can imagine it gets quite annoying

18

Thats how people wished they couldve played before. Instead they were faced with alot of “youre throwing” “No just be X as you clearly suck with Y” “if you dont pick X im throwing” etc meaning their main hours were increased forcibly.

1 Like
19

Just endure harassment and stop using essential game features is not a solution. Toxicity is down, that’s a fact.

2 Likes
20

I agree with the sentiment that private profiles are bad, but im just letting you know it will never change, because it was put in place because of a law in EU that states in online games you have to have concent from players to display their stats, and they have to be able to withdraw that concent at any time. The private profiles are that concent.