If I can't call someone a "noob" in Overwatch 2's text chat, what am I supposed to write? I'm not good at writing poems, I'm not a comedian, and I save love letters for my wife. Maybe I should just not write at all, because Blizzard can apparently ban players from game comms for these minor insults and a lot less.
A frustrated player in the Overwatch 2 subreddit shared a message they got from a game master. It was a reply after appealing a permanent suspension of in-game communication, which the game master rejected because the player "received multiple penalties for this type of behavior", more specifically, using the game chat to send "noob", "?", and "worth."
The GM's full reply is too nonsensical to believe a real human wrote that, so from now on, I'm assuming it's an AI job, or at least it's assisted by one. The AI must have at least written the message for the game master, even if they manually reviewed the player's chat history.
Fortunately, there is no sign that bans for typing a question mark in the chat are being handed out like flyers on a busy street. But this is a weird case of an outlier that shows that Overwatch 2's moderation tools can be wrong when they ban you, and that the appeal systems may double down on that error instead of helping you fix it.
A fair counterargument is that the player who shared this has probably said much worse things to their Overwatch 2 teammates, but Blizzard's systems just failed to show them. I'd agree with that. Even if we're right, it still shows how whatever AI the company's using can hurt the trust players have in their moderation team.
Trust in the game's ban appeal system is key because it's impossible to be polite all the time when playing a team game like Overwatch 2. You don't have the right to be toxic, of course, but I won't trust anyone who says they've never cursed or called someone a noob in text or voice chat at least once.
So when cases like this happen, we hope it's an outlier and not another case of moderation systems ignoring racist, toxic, and discriminatory comments to instead ban fair players for false positives.
The post I hope this Overwatch 2 ban for calling someone a ‘noob’ isn’t Blizzard using a half-baked AI tool appeared first on Destructoid.
