Developers working to make rating exploits detectable and actionable.
Jeff Kaplan has spoken out against the behaviour of full teams of six in Overwatch who deliberately lose games in order to reduce their Skill Rating.
While it provides a nice – temporary – boost to the team on the opposite side of the playing field, the end result is that a low-ranking team in the future (and one likely in a different bracket), will find itself in an uneven match-up that goes against the intended principles of the matchmaking system.
Whichever way you look at it, Jeff’s not impressed:
“We are strongly opposed to this behaviour and working on a policy to make it consistently actionable and detectable,” he began.
“Even if you are in a 6 person team, intentionally losing to lower your skill rating is not acceptable.
“For now, feel free to use the reporting system and chose Griefing / Inactivity to report this (coming soon to console).”
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Note that Kaplan is careful with his phrasing here and makes use of the word “consistently”, before also encouraging players to make use of the reporting system.
This would suggest that Blizzard currently employs some kind of manual detection system (perhaps based on multiple reports against the same team), while it prepares an automated system for detecting this kind of behaviour – and issuing penalties – in the future.
