With the release of the latest Overwatch update on PC yesterday, Blizzard has disabled the ‘Avoid This Player’ feature.
In a lengthy forum post, Game Director Jeff Kaplan explained that ‘Avoid This Player’ was disabled because it 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.
As for the ‘Prefer This Player’ option, it’s “more or less working as intended,” so Blizzard is keeping it enabled.
The PC patch yesterday also addressed several crashes, and fixed bugs that allowed Reaper to Shadow Step to unintended locations on certain maps and caused projectiles to hit Reinhardt instead of his Barrier Field in “High Bandwidth” Custom Games.
“Please note that some of these changes may be rolled into a larger patch for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One at a later date,” Blizzard added, though they didn’t give a time-frame for the next PS4 update.
Do you agree with their decision?
[Source: Battle.net (1), (2) via Eurogamer]
