40 million gamers additionally confirmed

Blizzard, along with reconfirming “over 40 million gamers” have interacted with Overwatch 2, has additionally offered particulars for his or her “Protection Matrix Initiative,” which is outwardly “making strides to push towards a fairer gaming expertise for all gamers.” In brief, it’s an enhanced anti-cheat system.

Overwatch 2 now has customized sport moderation and “disruptive voice chat detection”

That is the massive one. The workshop system and customized video games have been inflicting points since launch, and Blizzard is making an attempt to “present methods to verify customized video games stay protected and pleasant for all gamers.” Moderation instruments will “mechanically take away customized video games containing inappropriate titles or content material,” whereas penalizing accounts that accomplish that.

As for the chat bit, Blizzard is implementing voice-to-text transcription and “AI studying” to help moderately, which began with Season 2. Blizzard says they’ve “already begun working to cease disruptive gamers with relevant chat silencing and account suspensions as wanted”

A brand new “streamer safety” system is in place, and there’s extra of a concentrate on taking down cheaters

Within the ever-growing gaming panorama, issues for all sorts of gamers are at all times a priority, together with streamers. Whereas Blizzard admits “stream sniping” (the try of queuing right into a streamer’s sport to disrupt the stream) is a troublesome nut to crack, they’re making an attempt a couple of issues to mitigate it.  This one is arguably the most important coverage rollout: “Gamers will now be capable to disguise their present BattleTag or disguise the tags of the opposite gamers in the identical sport they play in on their very own sport consumer. This can stop those that could also be watching that participant’s dwell stream from figuring out in the event that they’re in the identical foyer. Gamers can even now disguise the present queue time and even delay it for a random time earlier than the sport truly begins to discover a match for that participant. Replay Codes can even now be hidden from showing within the sport consumer. These options can be obtainable beginning in Season 3 for all gamers and might be discovered within the Social choices in your settings.”

Blizzard additionally re-ups their dedication to taking down cheaters, noting that “over 50,000 accounts” have been handled. When Season 3 hits, they’ll be capable to extra simply determine cheaters with the Protection Matrix Initiative, and controversially, will sanction gamers who’re “grouping up with anybody who makes use of cheats and hacks.” The concept is to take out “gamers who knowingly group up with cheaters,” which can contain suspensions (whereas the participant who’s immediately utilizing cheats can be banned completely).

We’ll see how this one shakes out! Overwatch 2 and Blizzard as a complete aren’t in the perfect spot when it comes to public notion, so I count on this aspect of the initiative would be the hardest to implement going ahead.