If you’re a dedicated Overwatch 2 player, it’s definitely advised to stay cautious during your gaming sessions because Activision just banned a quarter million gamers. This was done for multiple reasons that include: being disruptive in the chat, straight-up cheating, offensive name-calling, griefing, and a lot more in one massive purge. So, if you do not indulge in any of the above-mentioned activities, chances are you’re probably safe.
250,000 is quite a huge number, and those many players have been banned from playing Overwatch 2 in an effort by the developers to finally get people to stop cheating.
Overwatch 2 Being Free-to-Play Is Proving to Be a Problem
Overwatch 2 was actually released as a free-to-play title, meaning anyone and everyone could just join the game without any kind of cost. Because of this, an abundance of problematic accounts were created, with players committing all sorts of offenses while playing the game online. Fortunately, the developers have ensured that many of these gamers can’t play the game any longer by getting rid of them once and for all.
Although Overwatch 2 was meant to be the superior replacement for the beloved original, it has still not managed to pull in the same large number of players as its predecessor. This was mainly because you had to pay in order to play the first game, and thanks to that, it was mostly protected against too many hackers, griefers, cheaters, and other offenders.
In fact, even with a very serious End User License Agreement and an extensive Code of Conduct to be followed in-game, there are a lot of people in the sequel’s community that just do not care about the rules they basically agreed to before starting the game.
However, that is not to say that Overwatch 2 isn’t being played by anyone, as the game has a whopping 1,570,000 players on average every single day. So, banning 250,000 does not seem like a big deal for the development and monitoring teams.
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Activision’s Defense Matrix Initiative Reaches Overwatch 2
The Overwatch 2 banning purge is basically a part of Activision Blizzard’s new monitoring policy, known as the Defense Matrix Initiative. The core reason for the majority of these bans is that many players were disrupting the online multiplayer matches through offensive chats and naming, along with griefing.
The game’s competitive mode was not the only one to get affected by this latest cleansing, since many accounts were banned across different game modes as well.
According to the developer and publisher, the Overwatch 2 team is currently working on various systems to prevent cheating for good and to completely ban offensive players from ever being able to return. A lot of these disruptive accounts were actually reported by the game’s active online community, while many of them were deeply dug out by the task force specifically created to uphold the Defense Matrix.
You can check out the announcement regarding the bans on the Overwatch Cavalry’s official X account below:
Over 250,000 Cheaters have been penalized in #Overwatch2 🚨
The team took action against thousands more for grouping up with cheaters, and they are actively addressing inappropriately named custom games and BattleTags.
📰 Read More: https://t.co/mNwc2ltyEI pic.twitter.com/TZB6cNyKr5
— Overwatch Cavalry (@OWCavalry) September 8, 2023
It’s clear that the machine learning algorithms being used by Activision Blizzard to catch Overwatch 2 cheaters are proving to be really effective.
But anyway, have you ever come across cheaters or offensive players while playing Overwatch 2? Let us know in the comments!
Source: Blizzard
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