“Here is the thing. Not to be mean, but please Do not ever “call a game” when it starts. Seeing a team mate announce in the match chat “gg for us”. Is very rude.”
When I say “call a game”, I mean things like “we need a healer” or “team, stay together”, or “tracer flanked us, let’s kill her”. Not “gg”.
The closest I get to that is, when people don’t listen and don’t play a healer or shield, or run off alone to get killed a lot, I’ll say they make it more likely we’ll lose. And yes, I sometimes say it pretty strongly, when they’re rude in response, and that’s how we got here.
Frankly, some of the time I DO break the rules responding to especially bad behavior, mostly when people say things especially irritating and rude, I tell them they’re an idiot and that I’m blocking them, and that does violate the rules I guess - the point here is, Blizzard doesn’t know whether I did or not.
And the system allowing the assumption people did, isn’t good.
Imagine if the way the law worked, was someone tells the police they saw you do something wrong, and you’re put in jail assuming they’re right.
Blizzard goes on the assumption, apparently, that numbers substitute for verification; that even if someone screams profanity and racism at you, if only you report them, that’s just one person, who knows if it’s right; but if your team refuses to play a shield or healer and loses badly and you tell them they deserved to lose for that, and they all report you for abusive chat, that’s credible because of the number reporting, and they’ll assume it’s correct.
That number system is subject to exploitation.
For example, I’ve had groups who intentionally throw games or grief the team. I’ll say nasty things to them. Yes, I report them - one report. I don’t know how the ‘gameplay sabotage’ reports are handled. Those groups I see later, and they often spend the game trying to spawn camp my character or if on the same team ice blocking it - yesterday, one of them made a roadhog who would stand in front of me the whole match trying to block my view.
The point is, what if that group reports me for abusive chat whether I said anything abusive or not?
The fact they’ll spend game after game griefing my char after that means they’ll have no problem agreeing to file false reports.
And Blizzard will just assume they’re right, if the numbers meet whatever their threshold is.
At least the blocking system mostly works - I tend to block jerky people pretty quickly. The problem is how the blocks don’t last long.
I understand the practical problems with a system. That Blizzard probably can’t read and listen to every match that’s reported to determine the accuracy of reports. What I’m saying is simply that the current system is abusable, and they should think about how to improve it to better keep enforcing the rules against those who deserve it, while not allowing people who didn’t to get punished simply for the numbers that can be people abusing the system.
In the meantime, I’ll probably work around the issue by just blocking people even more, and letting the bad behavior go on.
As we all know, there are a lot of people who behave very badly who play, and the system only usually probably gets it right dealing with that.
At some point, it’s an issue that raises whether Overwatch is worth playing, versus other multiplayer games that don’t have or allow that abuse.
Games need to learn lessons on this and evolve. World of Tanks, for example, used to allow typed chat between enemy teams - and it resulted in a lot of abusive chat. I had to report things like slurs hundreds if not thousands of times. They finally limited chat to only within the team, and the abusive chat went to a small fraction of what it had been.
(For whatever reason, Overwatch allows match chat, but it doesn’t seem to have as high a rate of abuse. Though there is a decent amount.)