Given the massive popularity of Overwatch, matters important to the game’s community have maintained their position as a priority for Blizzard. This especially rings true in the area of mitigating negative behavior committed by players. They’ve made a consistent effort to ban such harmful players in the hopes of making the Overwatch community more welcoming and respectful. Now, it appears that Blizzard is going to extra mile to be proactive about combating such toxic Overwatch players by finding instances on YouTube and other social media platforms.

Blizzard posted the video seen above to their official YouTube account, which focuses on their various efforts to stop negative behavior from Overwatch players. Overwatch Director, Jeff Kaplan, and iconic face of the “Developer Updates” calls it a “major initiative” for their team.

Kaplan references some of the newer tactics to curb negativity that many players have recently seen enacted, such as allowing console players to report toxic users and giving warnings to players exhibiting behavior that could lead them to being suspended, silenced or banned. It seems the extra measures have helped. In fact, Kaplan mentions that abusive chat in multiplayer matches has decreased by 17% and reporting of bad behavior has increased by 20%.

It seems that Blizzard is also finding ways to fight toxic Overwatch players outside of the game’s infrastructure. According to Kaplan, the fight is being brought to social media, saying:

We now proactively seek out social media sites like YouTube, for example, and look for incidents of very toxic behavior and track down the accounts that are participating in those and action them, often times before anybody’s even reported them or they’ve shown up in any other place. That’s just one example of us being proactive that I think is going to make a big difference over time.”

No other social media websites besides YouTube are specifically mentioned by Kaplan, but it can be reasonably assumed that popular networks like Facebook or gaming-focused sites like Twitch would at least be in consideration for monitoring. It sounds like these new measures are quite effective at snuffing out bad behavior. Hopefully, Blizzard can continue to protect this wonderful payload that is the Overwatch community, so that gamers from all around can find a place to game in peace.

What do you guys think about Blizzard finding toxic Overwatch players on social media? Let us know in the comments below! Be sure to stay tuned for the latest Overwatch news, such as the contents of the new massive Overwatch “Blizzard World” update, here on Don’t Feed the Gamers! Follow us on Twitter to see our updates the minute they go live!