The Overwatch Avoid As Teammate feature allows players to avoid being paired up with particularly useless or annoying users. The ability to “avoid” others is currently being tested on the Overwatch PTR, and following some tweaking to ensure it doesn’t have unfair impacts on matchmaking, should eventually hit live servers.
Players who are avoided won’t be seen for seven days. If a player is avoided many times, they will receive a message letting them know that they’ve been blocked on a considerable number of occasions, and so queue times may be longer. This will hopefully cause those players to rethink the way that they play.
Overwatch Game Director Jeff Kaplan detailed the new Avoid As Teammate in the latest developer update:
Game director Jeff Kaplan discusses a new feature currently being tested in Overwatch: Avoid as Teammate!
- 01:21 – Introducing new feature, Avoid as Teammate!
- 01:37 – Players you select with the feature will be avoided for seven days
- 02:22 – How to use this feature to help control your game experience
- 03:32 – There might be side effects of this system, but we’re closely monitoring it
- 04:10 – Thoughts on why we limit how many people you can avoid
- 04:40 – How this system affects those who have a high number of players avoiding them
- 05:52 – We are paying very close attention to how this feature performs
- 06:00 – We will continue to create features to help you craft your experience in Overwatch
Do you think the Overwatch Avoid As Teammate feature is good for the game? Or will it hurt the community? Let us know.