Social features have cut down on toxic behavior in Overwatch

Blizzard's global insights group has just finished putting together some statistics surrounding the new social features added to Overwatch a few weeks ago, including LFG (looking for groups) and endorsements.

It seems as though the additions have made an impact on the Overwatch community, as Jeff Kaplan revealed LFG and endorsements are significantly removing toxic and abusive behavior already.

LFG was introduced to allow players to search for parties who have similar interests or have a certain play-style, while endorsements encourage players to publicly commend a player for their attitude, communication and skill.

According to the numbers, competitive matches that contain abusive chat is down 26.4 percent in the Americas, with 16.4 percent in South Korea.

In addition, the percent of daily players being abused is down 28.8 percent in the Americas, followed by 21.6 percent in South Korea (although it isn't clear if this abuse comes from chat).

"We’ll keep working on iterating on these features to make them better as well as exploring other systems to improve the gameplay environment," Kaplan writes.

It's worth noting that the statistics above don't include the European server, which players say are still ripe with toxicity. Kaplan followed up by assuring players that he didn't have numbers from Europe yet, but it will be interesting to see if LFG and endorsements have an impact on those severs as well.