Overwatch to remove 'avoid this player' option

Overwatch will be getting rid of the option to avoid certain players it didn't quite work as hoped.

It was intended that this feature would allow players to avoid troublesome players and trolls, but game director Jeff Kaplan said, "the results were pretty disastrous." In the end, players used the feature to avoid facing skilled opponents. This in turn played havoc with the matchmaking system.

Kaplan revealed, "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 misbehaviour)."

"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," he added.

Blizzard intends to continue working on the matchmaking system.