Lol? What? Some of the best chat in the game is from the spectators messing around. Is this a war on fun and social interactions? New accounts already have had their chat disabled recently, and now you’re taking away people’s ability to speak at all.
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They can possibly be a distraction or give away the enemy’s position by acting as a second set of eyes.
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It is a good thing imo. Spectators have no business messing with the match that they are not part of.
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No. This is the only change I’m happy about.
Literally the ONLY thing spectators use chat for is to insult whichever team doesn’t have their friend on it. That is literally it, that’s all I’ve ever seen spectators do.
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I agree. This is a little heavy-handed and dumb. If someone is being abusive in spectator chat, just action them like any other player. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwatwr
No they haven’t. New accounts start on endorsement level 1 which allows for chat functionality.
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New acounts’s chats are disabled by default.
Like disabled in Settings?
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I enjoyed when a random spectator was commenting on my Lucio, called me Frogger lol
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Yes. People have to go into settings to turn match chat on.
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Lmao. Gg Blizzard…
Nah Spectators need to go. They’re just there to slow down the game and distract people.
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It’s called “spectator” not “commentary track”
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I can’t stand some looky Lou spamming “DIFF” every single time someone they joined to spectate gets a kill. It’s annoying af not to mention they can feed enemy locations
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I’ve had to actually open up support tickets because of spectators and what they have said to me before. Unlike the gamers in the matches. There has been some really awful spectators.
its a nice change. 10/10
kinda nice to know they are putting a squash on hecklers for once. 
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Nope, not happening. Pay attention.
The chat restrictions coming to Overwatch are coming in Season 10, and only affect people at endorsement level 0. You only get to endorsement level 0 if your account has been actioned. If you started a brand new account today, you’d automatically start at endorsement level 1.
And spectators do not need to be able to chat to players who are playing. It’s distracting, impacts the game (because if you’re typing in chat to respond to a spectator, you’re not playing the game properly) and is an avenue for toxicity/sniping. I’ve seen it happen, it’s annoying. So the less of that, the better.
The only people using the chat should be the people who are playing the game.
It’s literally already happen, what are you talking about, lol? New accounts have their chat disabled by default. They can enable it at any time, yes, but their chat is still disabled by default. You pay attention. Jeez.
Honestly in my 1200+ hours of playing overwatch- I can’t think of even a single time where a spectator chatting was an issue.
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Nobody wants to play a game where adolescent’s and morons sit a chat and terrorize people. People that enjoy this, there is a name for it, “Psychotic.”
Time to grow up Junior and if your already technically an adult (18+), your parents failed you.
You can’t currently report spectators hence why they are just removing their ability to chat period.
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There chats are disabled by default for the first 10 games. After that, you have to change your settings to “open Mic” to have chats open to talk on. After the first 10 matches in QP, your text chat is auto opened.