Overwatch players are whiny babies

No one likes losing, but sometimes you need to experience loss to learn. Overwatch players don’t like to learn. Or, if they do, they want to learn without loss.

Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan posted a long forum message explaining the ins and outs of Overwatch matchmaking. There’s a little math, some wizardry, and luck involved. The main concern for the developers was that matchmaking should result in the best experience possible for everyone. Buried in the post is an example of how Overwatch players abused the “Avoid This Player” system to make things easier for themselves at the expense of others.

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. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous.

In another example of how Overwatch players are big crybabies, a teenage girl in Korea, using the handle Geguri, was completely destroying her opponents by using Zarya to dominate matches. Her performance was so good that she was widely accused of cheating. Blizzard determined she wasn’t a cheat, but Geguri was still being accused of using hacks that Blizzard wasn’t able to detect. It took a live demonstration of her skills at the Nexus Cup to shut her harassers up. Babies!