According to Overwatch lead designer Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch’s new endorsement system has had a significant impact in reducing toxicity. The post where Kaplan explains this can be viewed below:
As the post demonstrates, in the Americas alone, the number of players engaging in daily abusive behavior has gone down nearly 29 percent. While it remains to be seen if the numbers will remain at this level, this is undoubtedly already an impressive impact. While some players have complained that this system has led to people being “fake nice” in order to score XP and loot, a game environment of fake nice people beats out a toxic hellhole every time.
Overwatch had a noted toxicity problem in the past, with many players (especially women) feeling like the harassment and stressful environment turned them off of the game. Blizzard implemented smaller measures to curb this in the past. One example of a much less serious measure they took was automatically replacing the phrase “gg ez”, which mockingly means “good game easy”, with humorous phrases like “I feel very, very small… please hold me…” and “It’s past my bedtime. Please don’t tell my mommy.” The endorsement system seems to say that Blizzard is now taking in-game toxicity much more seriously than it has in the past.
Blizzard isn’t the only developer working hard to make their game communities less toxic. Ubisoft recently added an automatic chat filter to their popular online shooter Rainbow Six: Siege which boots players from games automatically for using racist or sexist slurs, among other words. While trash talk has been a staple of competition ever since man first picked up a ball, there comes a point where harmless trash talk becomes harassment. While this has been present in online gaming since its inception, saying “that’s just how the internet works” doesn’t cut it anymore.
