Overwatch increases penalties for bad behaviour

When Overwatch launched, it was known for having a great community that was well-behaved and nice to each other. The game still has a nice community, but we've seen more reports of "unpleasant" behaviour over the last few months, which Blizzard also seems to have noticed.

The studio has announced that, effective immediately, they will be issuing increased penalties to players in response to verified reports of bad behaviour. Their examples of "bad behaviour" includes anything from abusive chat, harassment, in-game spam, match inactivity (being intentionally AFK), and griefing, and we're told to report every player that we come across who does any of these things. If found guilty, players "will be silenced, suspended, or even banned from the game as a result".

This is apparently just the first step to make things better in the game, as we're also told that will see several improvements over the next few months, including scaling competitive season bans, a notification system that will alert us when a player we've reported is actioned, and functionality that will allow them to more aggressively penalise players who attempt to abuse the in-game reporting tool. Speaking of reporting tools, Blizzard also says that they're working on bringing a reporting system similar to that we have in the PC version over to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. They don't have a time frame for that yet, but are testing several version internally, so hopefully this means that it's not far off.

Have you witnessed some "bad behaviour" in the game lately?