Developer Update | Upcoming social features.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_pnpZK_oYM

(summary credit /u/seagull_no1_fanboy on /r/cow)

• We have two new upcoming social features: Endorsements and Looking for Group!

• Recognize players in three different ways: Sportsmanship, Good Teammate, and Shotcaller

• Players who consistently maintain a high endorsement level will be rewarded periodically

• Looking for Group is coming your way!

• Craft your gameplay experience using specific parameters to create your dream team

• Attack and Defense heroes will now be merged under a new category: DAMAGE!

• Player profiles can now be set as private, friends only, or public

• Our Symmetra re-work will go live in the next patch!

• The Horizon Lunar Colony map will also receive several significant changes

• More social systems are on the way, two in the summer followed by another later in the year

__
Discuss!

I'm personally very excited for the LFG. As a support main in ranked i'd love to be able to guarantee that I don't get on a team with 4 support mains. I can't really DPS or Tank at my SR effectively.

Yeah as a fellow support main this is music to my ears! The amount of times I've had to go tank because we've got double support one tricks (as in Mercy or Lucio one tricks) + me is insane. I guess it hasn't been so bad in the Brig meta but this really will help out.

LFG and Endorsements are huge, I was actually in a ranked game yesterday and we had a really great guy, who picked for the team, provided advise and took criticism, and I thought at the time how I wish I could commend him like in Dota 2, then I saw the Developer update. Actually excited for Overwatch for a change

after looking for group comes looking for raid cant wait. this wow 2.0 seems to be a really cool game.

The Horizon Lunar Colony map will also receive several significant changes

They could scrap it completely maybe?
Honestly, it's my least favourite map, by far.

What about in game will you be able to see peoples top 5 heroes? Can we set it to team only? Would be nice to hide it from the enemy team but let your team see it.

I expect the system to be abused and simply provide a new reason for people to tilt on eachother. It probably will be fine but to be honest the backbone of the whole thing is still the report system and the agressive silence sensitivity. People have a major coping mechanism in attacking others to make themselves feel better about losing or just in general. Right now the report system seems to be in a delicate state where it is effective but its also close to being sensitive to false reports. Multiple torb and sym onetrick streamers have been actioned. Blizzard seems to be on the fence as well stating that you can play whoever you want and the report system should not be used based on hero selection. While also saying that if you got actioned its working as intended even if you were not trying to throw. Its a pure numbers game and the worst thing that could happen is people abusing it. I think blizzard have the right approach in cultivating positive psychologies. The fear lies in will people start seeing others with high ratings that they dont like and reporting them just to attack them?

So yeah I am for sure paranoid but like most of the changes that have gone into this and heroes of the storm (WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE MERCY CANCER META) Im confident that my fears will be unfounded and I will learn to love the changes with time.

Part of what i hope and expect to happen is that the endorsements system will also eventually by used by the matchmaker to help pair like minded players. I'd like more games with positive/upbeat people.

DanceNumber [#7]

Part of what i hope and expect to happen is that the endorsements system will also eventually by used by the matchmaker to help pair like minded players. I'd like more games with positive/upbeat people.

Lol the high rated team would crush the level 0 team every time. On one side they are figuring out their strat and using voice to communicate. On the other side they are attacking eachother from the start and getting tilted over every lost fight. One person didnt like how the rest of the team didnt build around him so he went rein and is just charging in and feeding. The two dps are attacking eachother over who is worse and neither is doing anything effective. The one healer actually tried to throw out a comp but because it didnt have hanzo in it the hanzo is now claiming that hes not getting any heals. The only one still trying is doing so because hes not in voice to hear the flamewar but he doesnt realize his team has given up. They all report him for gameplay sabotage. Meanwhile the level 4 team is literally setting up each spawn rape in a highly ochestrated manor. One player has little tank experience but it doesnt matter because his team is filling him in on every enemy action.

Looking for group sounds promising. Bastion main looking for Symmetra, Torbjörn, Mei, Sombra & Genji for the ultimate Overwatch experience.

DanceNumber [#7]

Part of what i hope and expect to happen is that the endorsements system will also eventually by used by the matchmaker to help pair like minded players. I'd like more games with positive/upbeat people.

The problem with implementing this "paradise matchmaking" is that you create its counter-part "living hell matchmaking"

accountseverywhere [#6]

What about in game will you be able to see peoples top 5 heroes? Can we set it to team only? Would be nice to hide it from the enemy team but let your team see it.

I expect the system to be abused and simply provide a new reason for people to tilt on eachother. It probably will be fine but to be honest the backbone of the whole thing is still the report system and the agressive silence sensitivity. People have a major coping mechanism in attacking others to make themselves feel better about losing or just in general. Right now the report system seems to be in a delicate state where it is effective but its also close to being sensitive to false reports. Multiple torb and sym onetrick streamers have been actioned. Blizzard seems to be on the fence as well stating that you can play whoever you want and the report system should not be used based on hero selection. While also saying that if you got actioned its working as intended even if you were not trying to throw. Its a pure numbers game and the worst thing that could happen is people abusing it. I think blizzard have the right approach in cultivating positive psychologies. The fear lies in will people start seeing others with high ratings that they dont like and reporting them just to attack them?

So yeah I am for sure paranoid but like most of the changes that have gone into this and heroes of the storm (WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE MERCY CANCER META) Im confident that my fears will be unfounded and I will learn to love the changes with time.

There is (and will never be) a system to prevent a community to be "toxic", not completely at least, not one that can run without a huge amount of direct human involvement, aka persons paid ONLY to check each and every report, bby going into the server, recovering the match a specific report concerns to and check if it's actually valid.

This is way behyond the scope of any company, and the costs will be huge, what we can all hope is that people could"take care" of themselves, I'm not a toxic person, but I know for a fact, over the course of my OW expperience I've been toxic at least a couple of times (I could make excuses, but that's not the point), and I'm retty positive each and everyone of us has been at some point.

For the same reasons I try to avoid spamming the "report" button, guess I used it like 5 times in total and received 2 confirmations out of them (those guys were really something, on the lines of threating sons and daughters of other players), for everything else... I just suck it up, it's a game afterall.