Overwatch Toxicity down Overall

According to a blog post by Overwatch Game Director Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch has become a much less toxic place in the last few weeks. At the end of June, two new social features were added to the game, Looking for Group and Endorsements, which seem to be working at making the community a little nicer towards each other.

In the wake of the additions to the game, the percentage of competitive matches that contain abusive chat has dropped by 26.4% in the Americas region, and 16.4% in the Korean region. Additionally, the percentage of daily players being abusive is also down, with a drop of 28.8% in the Americas region and 21.6% in the Korean region.

“We’re really pleased with the community’s efforts to make OW a better place! Thank you all!” Wrote Kaplan in the update post, “And we’ll keep working on iterating on these features to make them better as well as exploring other systems to improve the gameplay environment.”

The endorsements feature works by allowing players to give a little boost to teammates that they feel helped the team, whether they were excellent shot callers, good teammates, or just nice to play with. While some had concerns about the endorsements becoming meaningless over time, at least for now it seems to be effective at suppressing the formerly toxic behavior that was so prevalent in the game.

For more on the discussion regarding the update, check out the blog post itself, here, and for more Overwatch news, check out the start of the Overwatch League playoffs, here.