Good day Elminster,

I hope this post from one of my associate’s can provide you more clarity and insight on this subject.

Hey, everyone.

I just wanted to chime in, because there’s definitely some confusion around one-tricking, and we wanted to take a moment to clarify our philosophy as a development team.

We believe players can choose to play any available hero during any game at any time, and that their choice of hero alone is not a behavior that should be penalized by our customer service team under any of the player report categories (including griefing, inactivity, or poor teamwork).

We believe players should be evaluated based on their actions with whichever hero they choose. If a player disrupts their team by intentionally feeding with ANY hero, you should report that player for griefing. If a player is staying in the spawn area, refuses to attack the enemy, or refuses support those that are, you should report that player for inactivity. If a player actively refuses to play the map’s objectives or communicates to the team in a negative fashion, you should report that player for poor teamwork. If a player communicates in a hateful or harassing manner with ANY hero, you should report that player for abusive chat. However, if a teammate is actively trying to perform well on their hero and help their team, they should NOT be reported under any category.

Players who inaccurately submit player reports in an attempt to punish someone’s hero choice are considered to be harassing or griefing their fellow player, and inaccurate reports make it more difficult for us to appropriately action the players who DO disrupt the game. We’re continuing to make improvements to our reporting system (which includes, but certainly isn’t limited to making our false report detection more robust), and we will continue to pay close attention to players who are at high risk of being falsely reported and taking appropriate actions to prevent it.

Your teammates can respectfully provide their opinion and suggest using a different hero for the gameplay situation that your team is experiencing, but the final decision about which hero you want to play with is yours alone.

We built Overwatch around the concept of teamwork, and we believe the game is much more fun for everyone in a match when we’re picking heroes that contribute to the overall success of the team. At times, this means we’ll be playing our mains; other times, we should be trying to help the team by choosing heroes that round out the team’s composition. We won’t be actioning you if you only play your main, but we also don’t believe this is the ideal way to play Overwatch—especially in competitive settings.