Endorsements Reduced Toxicity in Overwatch by 40%

A lot happened in GDC, and we talked about much of it over the course of last week. But there was one last little snippet that happened that warrants a look, and it comes to us from Blizzard and their GDC talk, where they spent a fair bit of time talking about Overwatch and their ongoing efforts to combat negativity.

Not terribly long ago, they introduced a new system into the game called “endorsements”, where you could basically give a teammate or an enemy a little boost for playing the game well and not being a jerk. You’d get a small EXP boost, and if they get enough of these endorsements, they get free loot boxes and their rank goes up. It’s not a terribly complicated system, but apparently, it’s working wonders, as research scientist Natasha Miller claimed that the system caused toxicity to drop by 40 percent since its implementation.

"If you’re not consistently getting endorsements, if you slip up, you’re not going to get endorsements and your level is going to slip. This often causes players to want to get that level back and keep going, which offers a path to redemption."

So that’s neat. And something that other games could hopefully learn from.

Here’s hoping it keeps working.