Blizzard To Shut Down Overwatch Matches If It Detects Cheating

If you happened to be that person when playing Overwatch (you know, the kind that gets an unfair advantage), there’s some bad news for you from Blizzard: the company just revealed its latest developer update for the game, which can detect cheating during the matches. 

According to game director Jeff Kaplan, if a player is detected to be cheating, Overwatch will automatically shut down the entire match it has spotted that to be happening in. The other players will not be penalized for cheating and will not lose any Skill Ratings but the cheater will be facing some consequences, regardless on which team they’re on. 

What consequences the cheaters will have to face or how exactly the system itself works, these are details Kaplan has not revealed but it’s doubtful he would open up with too many details. After all, the aim is to keep said cheaters in the dark as much as possible and to further discourage this sort of behavior. 

“We think this is the next evolution of cheat detection in the game, which is pretty awesome,” Kaplan said. 

The feature can be found on the Public Test Realm servers for now – the special service used by Blizzard to test patches before public release. It’s unknown when the detection system will see a wider release.