> that seems like a win for gaming to me

Well, it isn't. What people are saying in chat has no bearing on the quality of the game. I'm not even playing devil's advocate like you are doing in this sub thread either, I literally could not care what people say in game chats. I take more issue to this obnoxious, cancerous, USA opinion that someone saying the N-word is the end of the world and requires me as an innocent bystander to bear the costs (such as having to use phone identification to play a game). You see the problem is not being racist itself, but the "solutions" you people propose.

This doesn’t seem coherent. The team voice chat is used by players coordinating to play the game. If somebody is shouting nonsense into their mic, they’re interfering with people playing the game, which makes the game less fun. If they’re shouting slurs at other players, they’re making the game less fun for those people. And blizzard wants the game to be fun, as do I.

Why are you arguing like a lawyer instead of coming up with a valid point for me to rebuke? Obviously I was referring to just the general notion of people saying racist stuff in chat. It's no the end of the world when that happens.

Saying that you find the game less enjoyable when people say racist shit just makes you sound like an annoying person.

The fact that you brought up racism and then used this strawman of "game being disrupted" is actually hilarious and shows what a thin spine you have.

My point feels pretty clear: Blizzard is doing this to raise the effort required for people to evade bans by making new accounts. People get banned for cheating, for being disruptive in chat, or for throwing games on purpose. I support this decision by Blizzard, because those things make the game less fun to play.

No straw men here, and racism is only in the thread because it’s a common example of people being disruptive in chat.

Well congratulations, you prevented 0.01% of "bad things". I've been gaming for 20 years on competitive FPS. Cheating is a tiny issue. 99% of cheating reports are bogus.

not true. cheating is a HUGE issue in competitive games. call of duty also requires you to validate your phone number and they have a kernel-level anti-cheat called ricochet. games like tarkov are swarmed with chinese cheat accounts and undetectable radar cheats. there are monthly cheat subscription services where you pay hundreds of dollars for access to sophisticated aimbots, etc. counter-strike employs sophisticated frame-by-frame anti-cheat heuristics analyzing shot and input patterns, they have a system in place where good actors can review cases of alleged cheating (called overwatch) AND they ALSO require you to validate your phone number if you want to play comp matches. games like r6 siege and apex legend employ similar systems. stop pretending “cheating is a tiny issue”. either you don’t play competitive games as you claim or you have no idea what you are talking about.

Cheating is a tiny issue as in, its still rare. It's more rare than bugs in your typical shoddy post-2000 game. Any competent gamedev can deter it easily. Since they are deterring it, its rare for you to encounter a cheater. Remember, we're primarily concerned about general games here, not specific high ranked matches. Those are the _only_ place that any sort of extra validation would even start to be acceptable.

All that matters for casual games is that the company actively does something to minimize cheating. Identity verification is not a way to do this as it is not an active measure. It just puts one hoop for people to jump through. More useful is to do typical statistical analysis as that will catch 99% of actual impactful cheating (subtle cheating doesn't matter much since the average player won't be able to tell the difference anyway) and rinse and repeat.

Nice job using in-kernel a/c to claim how advanced the problem is. When those came out 20 years ago, it was just a few small patches to bypass them. Even some of them were still only signature based so you could just change the signature of your cheat and bypass it. But I'll stop here since you don't seem to comprehend the concept of cat-and-mouse nor the fact that pursuing it to the end just makes the game unplayable for innocent players.

Yes, I know some games requires phone verification to play at all, and I'm against that. My initial reaction to this thread was "um we are just now caring about this? they're moving onto photo ID now, which creates real life fraud problems". Gee I can't wait until game devs start stealing my ID and the subsequent "fix" of using a trusted third party that's also abusive and blocks me from multiple games because they have monopoly, and has integration bugs causing the game not to work at all if I press the wrong button on their web page embedded into the game.

I mean the real-world social aspect of the game - from eSports tournaments to casual/competitive play. Even the conversation we're having now. How others interpret gaming as a whole. A social system is created where only certain kinds of behavior is acceptable, and disputes are arbitrated by the platform-holder. When those disputes are won or lost, the platform-holder presumably will attempt to take action against individuals - not IP addresses, emails, or usernames.

We've already established that it's not really a game (seems more like a sport), so whether it's a win for video gaming or not is irrelevant to my thinking, though I do tend to agree with regards to the actual in-game communication mechanics.

Footnotes are used to call attention to idiosyncrasies in written communication so I used one here, similar to how I described another sentence of mine as sarcastic in an earlier comment - just trying to be fair :)

> If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.

Why not let stupid people shout stupid things ...

Because it’s disruptive to the rest of us trying to play the game?

Come on: also in real life stupid people say stupid things all the time.

Yes. Is that relevant here?

In-game chat isn’t bound by any requirement to support everything that stupid people can do in real life.

> In-game chat isn’t bound by any requirement to support everything that stupid people can do in real life.

Do you seriously claim that "not preventing" already means "supporting"?!

To be hopefully crystal clear: Overwatch voice chat is a privately hosted service that’s built to be used by players during overwatch games. Blizzard moderates the content of that chat to remove disruptive content, where disruptive means “chat that makes people not enjoy playing overwatch”. In general, that’s people shouting slurs at their teammates or rambling about nonsense. Changes like the phone number requirement are part of their approach to expand the preemptive blocking of this activity. And I am fully in favor of them doing this, because it improves the quality of the game.