The thing is, you don’t know you’re defaulted to private as a new player. This change was made a long time ago. Even older players might forget if they need to make a new account. I did when I moved to PC from Xbox. The fact that you’re defaulted to private and the game doesn’t tell you that or even hint that it’s a thing means there’s a lot of people out there on private who may not even want to be
1 Like
The negatives far out way the positives. No one has a right to your profile information. Anything you can gleam from a profile can be given to you by talking to the person.
What if they lie? Then it doesn’t matter if you can see their profile because they already know what they want to play regardless of you knowing how many hours they have on any hero or their personal stats.
If a dude wants to play Hog you looking at his profile and stating “but you have 4x the hours on Rein” isn’t going to change anything. He already knows that and has made his choice.
4 Likes
I disagree with your statement so I’m just going to point out your rank instead of giving an actual explanation as to why you’re wrong.
2 Likes
I guess I understand that, but I’m not wired that way. I’m more just curious at how high someone’s stats are if they impress me, or if I see they have an astounding number of hours on someone. I just think profiles are neat and people took away my ability to see them
Last I heard they were implement as why to combat toxicity. And I believe something about laws that games need privacy feature. Granted that only something I’ve heard about and not bothered to look into.
you know what would be cool? If you could choose which parts of your profile would be private, but here’s the kicker: You can never hide your Competitive Stats.
Does Dion Sanders get to keep his yardage a secret? I think not!
here’s my matchmaker idea, and it even goes as far to say that all games ever played should be viewable by the public!
Competition doesn’t take place in a vault. Unless you’re Bobby Fischer 
and even more so, his match where he shooed everyone out was captured on video
Unless you were an actual flex player.
Why are profiles even a thing? No one is entitled to know anything about me other than what I think they should know. By all means, criticize my performance as we’re playing together, but that’s all ya get.
1 Like
It’s been literal years. I think people just need to accept private profiles exist at this point.
1 Like
Ironically, placing so much importance on seeing someone else’s profile is the exact reason private profiles are still necessary.
2 Likes
Very simple, toxic players.
1 Like
I agree. Nothing worse than trying to look at what your team are good at, and seeing most, if not every single profile on private. Honestly don’t know why they put private profiles the default.
People with private profiles dig through others to use rank and main heroes as their only arguments as well 
TL;DR it lowers toxicity and has indeed lowered toxicity/needless “bullying” in a video game that’s made for fun.
Usually the ones who go “lOl PrIvAtE pRoFiLe??? I bet they’re the reason we’re losing!!! Why so scared to show your stats if you’re not bad???” are just angry they can’t dig up a specific stat from several months ago to throw in your face. Regardless of how good a player is, there’s going to be one unsavory stat that can be used to brand someone as the problem. And if not? No problem! Petty and rude insults will do the trick, somehow, for some reason.
Other people won’t bother to fact check, or it just takes a second “verification” of the “facts” to make people dog-pile on someone just doin’ their best. So. Ya. Private profiles limits that type of mess. You can tell just by the extremely low number of “I’m being verbally harassed by awful goblin manbabies” threads compared to ye old forum.
Profiles should never have existed in the first place. It’s because they existed that people think they have the right to see player stats now. But I don’t want people to tell me to go kill myself while in the hero select room just because I’m a Mercy one-trick (yes, that happened).
Soooo, you’re giving yet another reason why people go private or what?
Your reply is pointless either way because all I said was being public lets people use my rank against me
If you know why they were implemented…
you should know why they’re still available.
Personally I think privacy setting should be at max by default (for all the things you sign up for) as a general rule of thumb and you enable what your down with other people seeing.
The reason why they default to private is to stop the “oh that guys set his profile to private to hide x”. This is easily dismissed by “I can’t be bothered changing the settings, now just focus on your own game”.
If you mean public profiles fair enough, but I quite like the idea of being able to see your stats and others if they want to.
Tbh I don’t think they go far enough with the data they provide. I’d like to be able to checkout my stats on a specific day/time/when grouped with diff friends/etc. I’d also like to bring make the “mouse over name to see 5 heroes” thing BUT make it good where you can show whatever heroes you like+data. Ie if playing tank give a set of preferred tanks you like to play and also preferred Tank/Damage/Support partners, chuck in some quick stats like win percentage (I think the Sombras who actually know how to play their hero and win would like this most) accuracy blardeblarfhdblah.
I really don’t know why you NEED to know what other people play. You could always just kindly ask them;
“Hey who do you prefer to play?”
Rather than heading into their profile and harassing them to play someone they have a lot of time with.
Lot of hours does not equal skill.
2 Likes
I just wait 20~ seconds. If they don’t choose by then, I assume they are also flexible and I’ll choose what I feel works best with current tank/dps picks and the map.