An Overwatch 2 player is taking his bizarre ban public after Blizzard suspended his account for standard in-game banter.
Overwatch 2 has taken measures to curb toxicity through monitoring voice chat and doing a better job at detecting cheaters, but it doesn’t always go so smoothly.
Like any game or sport, officiating can be plenty of human error, just ask the Toronto Raptors head coach, and sometimes players can be punished for the most absurd of reasons.
In a recent Reddit thread, an Overwatch 2 player shared screenshots of their discussion with Blizzard where it was determined that praising allies and even typing “GG” was a bannable offense.
Blizzard bans Overwatch 2 player for common in-game banter
Online games have all sorts of slang phrases and acronyms, and as one OW2 player found out, Blizzard doesn’t exactly take kindly to telling a lobby “good game” after a match.
A screenshot posted by user ‘Nyro117’ shows a conversation with Blizzard about getting their month-long suspension reverted.
However, Blizzard claimed that their initial findings were correct and the ban would not be reversed. Furthermore, the company listed examples from chat that resulted in the suspension.
Of note, Blizzard felt the following phrases crossed the line: “F**k that was clean Hanzo,” “go back to it please,” “gg,” “that scared me,” “ns,” “bamf” and “yipppeeee.”
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The message ended by saying that while the policies may seem harsh, they’re in place to ensure every player is able to enjoy the game.
In the comments, users felt that the use of swear words may have been the issue, but were still perplexed at the common phrases causing trouble.
“To be honest, they shouldn’t even have bots do ban work. We get so much of this sh*t because of their severely flawed internal systems and they do nothing to rectify it,” one wrote.
“I had a similar experience. Kept getting suspended for swearing until ultimately my account got perma banned,” said another.
“Games have become way too soft, can’t even have a little banter,” someone else chimed in.
It’s not clear if Blizzard will end up reverting the suspension now that it’s been viewed so many times on Reddit, but hopefully the big Season 9 update also includes some changes to how bans are handed out, especially when it pertains to in-game chat.