'Overwatch' Game Director Gets Mad, Will Ban Anyone Farming XP In Custom Games While AFK

If you use Overwatch custom games to farm experience while being away from your keyboard, you will be banned, according to a new Overwatch game director, Jeff Kaplan. In a dev post on the Battle.net forums, Kaplan seems uncharacteristically upset that players have been using custom games to farm XP while AFK. He implores players to report anyone creating custom games with the intention of cheating the system and promises that those players will be banned.

“When we put this (custom games) feature live, we had an internal escalation plan for how to combat this behavior. Today marks the first steps on that path. And in a lot of ways it really makes me sad. The feature is so much cooler and better for everyone if we do not have to put draconic restrictions on it,” Kaplan said in his forum post.

Over the next 24 hours, a patch will roll out that will add an AFK timer to Skirmish mode and remove experience gain from that game mode. Kaplan wants to make it perfectly clear that starting a Custom Game just to gain higher levels and more Loot Boxes is unacceptable behavior and it saddens him that players are abusing the system.

It’s a bit ridiculous to expect the people playing your game not to cheat, but I can understand where Kaplan is coming from. He wants the community to grow and flourish without having to resort to underhanded tactics, but that’s not how online games work. Players will do everything in their power to gain an upper hand; sometimes by installing scripting programs on their computers so they can automatically aim or dodge, or by leaving games in the middle for no good reason.

Kaplan cares about Overwatch , but sometimes you can’t treat your community like babies.