While Blizzard designed and currently runs Overwatch with an all-inclusive and welcoming aesthetic, featuring characters of every size, color, and ethnicity, it's difficult to take the human element out of anything. Despite their positive message with Overwatch, Blizzard has recently received flak for not doing enough to punish griefers and generally toxic people.
Well, apparently when Blizzard tackles a problem brought up by the community, they do it as flashy as possible. The latest way they've tackled players ruining the experience for others is with a group of employees called a "strike team". Yes, the creators of one of the most popular competitive shooters have an anti-griefing unit called a strike team. How cool is that?
This team, according to game director Jeff Kaplan, is dedicated to monitoring and finding ways to eliminate these bad eggs and their ways. The strike team is run by game designers assisted by analytics and support staff.
“We’re starting to action less toward silences and more toward suspensions,” Kaplan told Kotaku at BlizzCon. “If somebody’s doing bad behaviour, just silencing them can sometimes convince them to do things like throw matches and grief in other ways. If you keep exemplifying bad behavior, we’re gonna have you leave the game [permanently].”
Strike Team's responsibilities include devising short-term plans to curb griefing, and long-term plans to maintain a pleasant gaming experience overall. Machine learning is actually used to determine phrases and other behavior that is associated with toxic players. When you're the most popular competitive shooter on the market, apparently you take this stuff seriously.
If this wasn't enough, there's another team called Risk, which specializes in specifically fighting cheating and hackers. Imagine having these teams on your resume.
