Toxic player behavior in Overwatch’s competitive mode is on the decline, thanks to effort from both Blizzard and players, according to director Jeff Kaplan. Overwatch players have been reporting more bad behavior via in-game tools, but Blizzard is also going after toxic players proactively — specifically that the company is hunting them down on YouTube and taking action against them, even before any player has reported them.

In a developer update video posted yesterday, Kaplan called the fight against toxicity a “major initiative” for the Overwatch team.

“As you all know, we recently added the ability for our console players to report people which has been amazing and has shown us really great results,” Kaplan said. “We also added warnings for people who were about to get suspended, silenced or banned that their behavior was unacceptable and that if they kept getting reported by other players or noticed by us here at Blizzard that they would get in trouble and that’s helped a lot.”

Kaplan said that player-reporting tools and increased warnings have helped reduce “incidents of abusive chat” in Overwatch competitive play by 17 percent.

“We’re very pleased with those results,” Kaplan said. “On the other hand, player reporting the amount of times that you guys actually report bad behavior is now up 20 percent. We’re restoring faith in the system — it’s starting to work much better, and it’s actually having a big impact on the community. We know those numbers are not as great as they could be. We know that the problem is not solved and things aren’t perfect, but it’s getting a lot better and a lot of the initiatives that we’re doing here at Blizzard are starting to make a difference.”

Kaplan also offered Overwatch players a peek behind the curtain as it relates to how Blizzard is aggressively cracking down on bad behavior among players, not just reacting to reports of toxicity.

“We now proactively seek out social media sites like YouTube, for example,” Kaplan said, “and look for incidents of very toxic behavior and track down the accounts that are participating in those and action them, often times before anybody’s even reported them or they’ve shown up in any other place. That’s just one example of us being proactive that I think is going to make a big difference over time.”

Kaplan said that this tactic has “proven very positive” in curbing toxicity in Overwatch.

Toxicity in Overwatch competitive play is something the developer has been trying to tackle for months. Kaplan previously expressed frustration about player behavior in an earlier developer update video, saying that combatting the problem was diverting development resources away from the game itself.