Blizzard has banned over 500,000 OW2 cheaters—and season 12’s update aims to further improve the player experience

Blizzard said today it has banned over half a million accounts for cheating in Overwatch 2, with an additional 40,000 suspended or banned for intentionally grouping with cheaters.

In a new Defense Matrix blog shared on Aug. 19, Blizzard outlined its ongoing efforts to combat cheaters and hackers using things like aimbot and wallhacks from ruining the experience for players everywhere. And it’s a never-ending struggle.

“We’re hard at work on new anti-cheat technologies and looking forward to stopping cheats in their tracks,” Blizzard said. “As usual, we don’t like to reveal details of what we are doing to make this happen. However, we hope that by showing the efforts to remove a half a million cheaters from the game shows, we’ve made great strides to stop cheaters in their tracks and will always continue to do so.”

Season 12’s efforts to better the player experience include the already-revealed improvements to the “Avoid as Teammate” feature, but there’s even more, such as an important optimization to reporting players while in a match.

Blizzard says it’s adding a new feature to the scoreboard where players will be able to “directly regulate the text chat or voice chat” of both teammates and opponents. With a couple of clicks, players will be able to mute text or voice, control voice volume, and a two-click button to file an instant report.

Another change is for the Streamer Protect feature, which will now require winning 1,750 games in OW2 in any game mode to “empower our seasoned players to use the Streamer Protect tool properly and not abuse it through the use of secondary accounts intended to cause disruption in games.”

As an update to a previous change in season 11 to protect players on console from those using “unapproved peripherals” to enable mouse and keyboard, Blizzard says it’s banned “thousands of the worst offenders.” But now, players who attempt to use the unapproved peripherals will lose access to Competitive Play and be relegated to the PC input pool for all other modes.

OW2 season 12 is set to go live tomorrow, Aug. 20.