Overwatch no longer offering the “Avoid this Player” option

Now that the development team has released its patch (nerf) for Widowmaker and McCree, they have begun focusing on fixes to Overwatch's matchmaking system. Overwatch's Game Director, Jeff Kaplan wrote a very long (LONG) post on the game's Battle.net forum detailing his thoughts about the system going forward. Long story short, it's very complicated but there will be constant tweaks and changes to try and make it the best it can be.

One of Kaplan's major focal points was the game's "Avoid this Player" option. He says that while it was made with good intentions, the results have actually hindered the overall matchmaking system, creating longer load times for many people. 

He said:

"We recently realized that “Avoid this player” was wreaking havoc on matchmaking. 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."

Kaplan emphasizes in his post that speed and accuracy to get into a match is one of Overwatch's primary focuses in its matchmaking system. 

"Waiting a really long time to lose by a long shot is obviously not good. But waiting a really long time to barely lose is also a negative experience. And if we assume that your chances of winning are 50%, that means that even waiting a really long time for a “better” match means that you’re going to wait a really long time to probably lose half the time… If your expectation was that you were going to wait a really long time for an awesome match where you either 1) Won by a long shot or 2) Barely won… but still won nonetheless, your expectations for what the system can or should do are in the wrong place."

Given that the "Avoid this Player" option has proven to extend wait times, not only for players being avoided, but also the ones doing the avoiding (by many who acknowledge that they abuse the button), it seems counter-intuitive to Overwatch's design to keep the feature. Yes, it means a little bit of power is taken out of the player's hands, but frankly, that's not such a bad thing.

Source: Battle.net