Overwatch bans over 10,000 Accounts and Explains Their Long-Term Mentality

Blizzard has announced that they have taken action against 10,000 accounts for hacking and discussed why they are often quiet about when they take action.

In a forum post by Community Manager Josh Nash, he talks about the bans and the Overwatch team's mentality behind the ban waves.

Without going into too much detail, Nash says, "It’s in our developers’ best interest to not provide details surrounding the wheres, whats, and hows that this software works. Developing tools to counteract hacking software can be a game of cat-and-mouse, and the less information we provide, the less we’re offering for identifying potential workarounds".

Cheats that are more extreme take a bit more time to detect and this is when we see a big ban wave like we did today.

The team is always taking action though, with roughly around 1000 accounts being banned each week.

Overwatch bans over 10,000 Accounts and Explains Their Long-Term Mentality

The team wants to start communicating their effort in combating cheaters in-game with the community and assures everybody that while they can sometimes be quiet about the topic, there is always something being done to make the game fairer for everyone.

Action against accounts is normally thanks to a combination of behaviour by the player, how many reports were made against them, machine learning models and detections through the Warden anti-cheat software.

Blizzard stands by their core values of "play nice, play fair" and encourage players to report any suspicious activity using the in-game report feature.

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