Posted Wed Jun 22, 2016 at 06:44 AM PDT by Sophia Edwards
Skilled players won't have to deal with extremely long queue times.
'Overwatch' director Jeff Kaplan has recently confirmed that the "Avoid This Player" function, allowing players to completely avoid playing matches with any other player they wish, will be removed from the game, following issues it caused with the matchmaking system. While the function is largely meant to help players avoid people who are meanspirited, most simply used it as a way to avoid skilled opponents. He said the following regarding one of the world's best Widowmaker players:
"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."
He went on to add that "The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous."
While it's a shame the feature has to be removed entirely (I think we've all encountered at least a handful of people we'd rather not deal with again in-game), high-level players suffering means it's an action that really needed to be taken. The feature is currently disabled, and the option will be removed entirely in the near future.
Source: Blizzard
The latest news on all things 4K Ultra HD, blu-ray and Gear.