Blizzard removes ability to “avoid this player” in Overwatch

Kyle Orland

Don't avoid me because I'm lethal.

File this in the "department of unintended consequences." Blizzard has announced that it is removing the "Avoid this player" feature from online shooter Overwatch, partly because it was isolating players that opponents thought were playing too well.

In an announcement earlier today, Blizzard said the Prefer/Avoid player feature system "was designed with the best intentions; however, it's not currently performing in a way that we feel is healthy for the game." While the ability to note that you prefer beneficial players is working as intended, the ability to avoid "problem" players "has impacted the matchmaker in [a] negative way and led to some very poor player experiences."

Game Director Jeff Kaplan went into much more detail on the change (and matchmaking in general) in a long post about the matter yesterday. The following anecdote about what happened to a highly skilled Widowmaker player explains the situation beautifully, so we'll just quote it here in full:

For example, we recently realized that “Avoid this player” was wreaking havoc on matchmaking. One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy—they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match.

The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had “opened up” to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous.

Moderating online games like Overwatch is a constant balancing act between letting players avoid the trolls without letting trolls abuse the system to punish polite, legitimate players. Apparently, the "avoid this player" feature was starting to lean too far toward one end of that spectrum in Overwatch.

Kaplan's entire post on the Overwatch matchmaking system is well worth a read for anyone interested in how Blizzard tries to balance short waits for matches with finding quality opponents that will make for an interesting game. It's not nearly as simple a process as you might think, with enough variables and vagaries to make you long for the days of direct connection via IP address.