A New Overwatch System is Designed to Encourage Positive Play
The latest Overwatch developer update announced a new feature to help encourage positive in-game behavior.
A new system of “endorsements” is designed to reward positive attributes shown by players in-game.
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In recent months Blizzard has rolled out several features that focus on punishing or discouraging negative behavior in-game, from further empowering the report system to enabling players to avoid specific team-mates that they don’t want to play with – which can in turn impact that player’s queue times if enough people opt to avoid them.
Blizzard doesn’t want to merely focus on the negatives, however, and Jeff Kaplan recognized in the video that the majority of players aren’t behaving negatively. In order to reward players who have a positive effect on the game’s atmosphere, they’re now introducing a system of endorsements, a carrot to counterbalance those previous sticks.
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At the end of each game, players will have the opportunity to endorse team-mates in three categories – sportsmanship, good team-mate and shot-caller. It will also be possible to endorse enemy players for sportsmanship.
The endorsements will operate as a sort of public record of how other players have been recognized by the other players around them. Players’ “endorsement level” will be reset if they are actioned in any way for negative behavior – silenced or suspended, for instance. There will also be some sort of reward for players who have a consistently high endorsement level.
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These features have been rolled out in the most recent PTR patch, which also includes the reworked Symmetra and updates to Horizon Lunar Colony.
