“I don’t want to stream the game, because I literally get stream sniped every day,” said popular streamer TimTheTatMan of a particular griefer who kept interfering with his matches. Now Blizzard’s announced that it has banned the griefer, but only after discovering that they were using multiple accounts and “systematically ruining Overwatch games for thousands of players.”




TimTheTatMan is a streamer who frequently plays Overwatch. He claimed that he was constantly hounded by a player who’d watch his stream, join his games, and purposefully try to ruin the experience—a practice known as “stream sniping” that’s become especially prevalent in games like PUBG. In this particular case, TimTheTatMan said the stream sniper slid into his matches, refused to play as anyone other than Symmetra, and made it difficult for his team to win.


“Until they can figure out what they’re gonna do with an offensive Symmetra one-trick,” TimTheTatMan said in reference to Blizzard during a stream a couple days ago, “I’m not interested really in streaming it right now.”



In certain corners of the Overwatch community, “one-trick” is the dirtiest of words, an insult reserved for players who lock down a single hero and have to be dragged off their pick kicking and screaming, like spoiled children. It’s also a subject of much debate, because Blizzard has rules against disrupting your team’s good time, but it also wants people to be able to play as their favorite heroes as they please.

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In explaining why Blizzard decided to intervene here and permanently ban all of this griefer’s accounts, it carefully noted that one-tricking wasn’t the straw that ultimately brought the banhammer down on the camel’s back.

In a post on Reddit, a Blizzard rep said that this griefer is “one of the worst offenders we have come across” with multiple accounts that have “copious reports each, all of which have been previously suspended for extended periods of time.”


“To be clear this player is being banned, not for their hero choice, but rather for systematically ruining Overwatch games for thousands of players,” the rep said.

Thousands! And yet, Blizzard failed to perma-ban them, despite the fact that their red-handed fingerprints were apparently all over the place. Blizzard went on to call this player’s repeated offenses a “failure” of its reporting system. “We’ve already taken steps to quickly eliminate outliers like this in the future,” the rep wrote.