Defense Matrix activated! Season 12 is just around the corner, kicking off tomorrow, August 20. We have exciting news about our efforts to stop disruptive and harmful play in Overwatch 2. Defense Matrix is ​​our initiative to make Overwatch 2 a fun, safe, and fair competitive hero shooter that’s accessible to everyone. So let’s take a look at what happened and what we have in store for Season 12 and beyond.

Fraudsters are not heroes

Cheating is an ongoing problem in any skill-based game, and Overwatch 2 is no exception. Cheating is intentional behavior where a player intentionally seeks to ruin the gameplay experience for others, and will not be tolerated in our community. Cheats like aimbots and wallhacks ruin the gameplay experience for all players. Our team has been working hard to stop the hacks and mods that enable cheating, as well as removing cheaters and those who exploit cheaters. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve banned over 500,000 accounts that were found to be cheating. We’ve also banned or suspended over 40,000 accounts that intentionally collude with cheat accounts.

However, our work doesn’t end with identifying and removing cheaters. It’s also important to remove hacks that enable cheating in the first place. We’re hard at work on new anti-cheat technologies and look forward to nipping cheating in the bud. As usual, we don’t like to give away details of what we’re doing to achieve this, but we hope that by outlining our efforts to remove half a million cheaters from game shows, we’ve made great progress in nipping cheating in the bud and will continue to do so.

Fair gaming on consoles works

In Season 11, we implemented extensive preventative measures to detect anyone on console using an unapproved peripheral to enable mouse and keyboard input in console pools. While this resulted in bans for thousands of the worst offenders who maliciously used these devices to climb the competitive ranks in Season 10, players who attempt to use an unapproved peripheral will now lose access to competitive play and be relegated to the PC input pool for all unranked game modes. This has greatly improved the quality of ranked play for those playing on console.

Control your team experience

As mentioned in our recent Director’s Take blog, our Avoid As Teammates feature is being updated to better help all of our players play with teammates they can rely on. Starting in Season 12, you can add up to 15 players to your Avoid As Teammates list. This helps customize the gameplay experience and prevents you from being put on the same team as someone you don’t mesh well with. You can also sort these players by preference of which players you definitely don’t want to play with and which you’d rather avoid if you can avoid it.

If you’re ranked lower than Grandmaster, you can probably avoid all 15 players on your list every game. Those at the top end of the competitive ranks, where there are fewer players available to play with, may still see some of your lower priority avoided players, especially as your wait time gets longer. But don’t worry! You can pin up to three players you’re desperate to avoid and keep them on your Avoid as Teammate list indefinitely. When your list is full and you want to avoid a new player, they’ll automatically be added to the top of the unpinned list and the player at the bottom of your list will drop out. You can reset the timer for any player at any time to move them back to the top of the list. Players who aren’t pinned will be removed from your Avoid as Teammate list after a total of seven days.

Optimizing match reporting

We have new details to share with you about improving the reporting and social features in the game. We’re adding a new feature to the Scoreboard where you can now directly control the text or voice chat of all your teammates and opponents. You can directly mute the text or voice chat of all your teammates, opponents, or yourself, and adjust the volume of players’ voices individually. You also have a quick two-click button to create an instant report for any disruptive player in your game. These new features are tailored specifically for console players, so you can quickly pause and find any action during the game in progress with just a few button presses. Stay tuned to see these social and reporting features in a future Season, coming soon!

Update for Streamer Protect

Knowing when you encounter a disruptive player is important because it allows you to protect yourself by adjusting your social features to mute that disruptive player or warn your friends who may be playing with you that that player is likely a problem. We’ve received feedback that players who like to cheat or disrupt use our Streamer Protect tools to hide their own identity, making it difficult for players to quickly identify them if they’ve encountered that player in a previous game.

That’s it for this Defense Matrix update. Stay tuned for more updates planned for the next few seasons. Please remember to keep playing fair and nice and always support the best part of Overwatch 2: the community. Thank you!