Despite its continuing popularity, online multiplayer gaming has always come with some drawbacks, the majority of these being the behaviors of an annoying minority that can spoil matches for the rest of the players. Having player repeatedly rage quit or leave matches is even more frustrating in a team based game like Overwatch. For this reason, Redditor Pkbronsonb has suggested a smart new way to punish them.
Rather than in-game punishments or bans, the simple sending of a message to the guilty Overwatch player can prove an effective punishment, especially when it simply states “Your Team Won Without You.” The perfect passive aggressive message for someone who lets their temper spoil the gaming experience for others. It may also fool them into thinking another player has endorsed them, adding to the trolling.
Fellow Redditors reacted largely positively to the message, with some suggesting that Blizzard should implement the message into the next Overwatch patch, while others worry that it would also show rage quitters when they would have lost, thereby justifying their decisions. In addition to rage quitters, Overwatch also suffers from widespread cheating, although Blizzard has been active in banning cheaters, with over 34 thousand accounts banned in China alone during the first half of 2020.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Warzone developer Infinity Ward has received praise from players and anger from cheaters recently, for introducing new measures to tackle the rife cheating in its titles. These include shadowbans, which either do not alert cheaters of their ban, or match them up only with fellow cheaters, combined with the requirement of a unique phone number per account. However even with these measures the problem is still significant, on top of issues like rage quitting.
Sadly rage quitting and intentionally leaving a match is hard to accurately detect, and perhaps rightly, gets less attention from developers than outright cheating via mods and hacks. With this in mind, it’s positive to see Overwatch fans taking matters into their own hands, thinking up ways to punish those who spoil matches. Perhaps players can take a leaf out of You Tuber Scriptkid’s book, he created a clever fake mod which trolled Counter Strike cheaters into killing themselves and their team members in comical ways.
No-one likes losing, but rage quitters and cheaters not only ruin the experience for other players, they damage the reputation and earning potential of the very games they play. Perhaps Overwatch 2 will include some new approaches to the problems when it launches, although no official date has been announced, rumors suggest it may launch before the end of the year.
Overwatch is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
