Blizzard has announced that they will be removing the “Avoid This Player” feature from the PC version of Overwatch.
In a post on the Overwatch forums, game director Jeff Kaplan explained why the developer decided to remove the “Avoid This Player” option.
“We recently realized that “Avoid This Player” was wreaking havoc on matchmaking,” Kaplan explained. “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.”
Overwatch is available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.