Overwatch: you can expect harsher silencing, suspensions and bans for "bad behaviour" from today

Overwatch players are warned to play nice and play fair.

"Effective immediately," those Overwatch players found to have engaged in "bad behaviour" will face "increased penalties", Blizzard warned today.

The developer's definition of bad behaviour includes but is not limited to "abusive chat, harassment, in-game spam, match inactivity (being intentionally AFK), and griefing".

The penalties include silencing, suspensions and account bans - but more frequent use of the ban hammer is not the end of Blizzard's efforts.

"This is only the first step," community manager Lylirra wrote on the Overwatch forums.

"Over the next several months, we have plans to make additional improvements based on your feedback, including scaling competitive season bans, a notification system that will alert you when a player you’ve reported is actioned, and functionality that will allow us to more aggressively penalize players who attempt to abuse the in-game reporting tool."

To aid Blizzard in cracking down on bad sports in Overwatch, players have been asked to continue using the report tool - which, unfortunately, is only available on PC.

"We also remain committed to bringing a reporting system to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. As console players ourselves, we know it’s been frustrating to not have this functionality on your platform," Blizzard added.

"We are actively working on the feature and have many elements of undergoing internal testing right now. Our goal is to implement similar reporting options as are currently available on PC, and any improvements made to PC between now and when it’s available."