Farming experience points on “AFK servers” of Overwatch became too much. Now Kaplan is speaking clear, harsh words.
Just yesterday we reported that some players in Overwatch tend to find lobbies in “Custom Games” where all the players are afk. The goal of these matches is not the game itself, but just to earn experience points without actually playing. Until today, we speculated whether Blizzard tolerates this behavior, now Game Director Jeff Kaplan gave a clear statement about it.
The answer is clear: Those who want to obtain afk experience points risk hefty account penalties!
In a long post in the official forum, Kaplan states:
“We knew there was the potential to abuse this feature, but we wanted to give everyone a fair chance before we became too restrictive with the system. It is very disappointing for us that some players have exploited the system to collect inactive experience points.”
In response, a hotfix was deployed that now marks players as afk in “Skirmish” matches after a while and exits the game. But Kaplan writes even more:
“I have seen some discussions in the community under the assumption that this is a gray area. Is it forbidden or okay? Well, let me take this gray area and color it clearly black and white. Exploiting Custom Games or any other game mode to accumulate experience points while being inactive is NOT okay. I say this very clearly because we will now start implementing disciplinary measures against people who exploit this. If you create your own game and encourage players in any way to collect experience points through inactivity, you risk having your account suspended.”
It is also important that no humor is allowed there. Anyone who names their server just “for fun” risks penalties as well.
It is already possible to report servers. If you discover such an afk server, you should do so immediately to help the support team.
At the end of his post, Kaplan even indirectly “threatens” and hopes that the community prevents Blizzard from having to turn off experience points in Custom Games again.
“We, just like the majority of people who use the feature as we intended, do not want experience points to disappear. Please help us here.”
