14 DAY TRIAL // Overwatch developers are releasing a new feature called “Avoid as Teammate” that should give players a little bit of control over the quality of the teammates.
One of the problems with online games, especially ones that rely very much on cooperation, is the quality of the teammates. It’s possible that the people you play with are not primarily interested in cooperating, or maybe they just have a negative attitude towards other people.
In most cases, unless the player does some egregious, like swearing or other kinds of offensible infraction, you can’t really do anything. There is no point of reporting someone just because you don’t like the way they play, so Blizzard figured out a way to give regular people a little bit of power.
“Avoid as Teammate” is actually a good thing
Before you get all angsty that the system will be abused to punish other players, you have to know the details surrounding this new feature. In truth, it seems quite reasonable, but it remains to be seen just what the ramifications are.
First of all, if you don’t like a particular player you can just select the “Avoid as Teammate” from his profile, but you have only two available slots for this option. It means that you will need to be sure that you’re marking the right people. If the two slots are full, you will have to unselect someone before marking another player.
Selecting “Avoid as Teammate” ensures that you’re not going to be paired with that person for seven days, after which it will be deactivated. If you still want to keep that option for a particular player, you will need to select it again after a week.
Furthermore, people who are tagged with “Avoid as Teammate” by many other users (the number wasn’t specified) will receive a warning so that they have a chance to change their behavior.
The downside of this new feature is that it can become difficult, at low and high difficulty tiers, to find other users to play with, but the effect should be minimal. Blizzard hopes that problems will correct themselves over time, so that the feature won’t be as used.
You can check out the developer’s diary below for more details.
