With a mysterious wait until Overwatch 2, the game’s players are instead trying to fix their current game. As such, the community seems to be rallying around one message they no longer want to see in game chat.
Toxicity is, in some ways, inherent to competition. The lines between sportsmanship, trash talk, and banter are often toed as players embrace their passion – and Overwatch has obvious examples of all three.
Lately, the Overwatch community hasn’t had much sequel content to think about. It remains unclear when Overwatch 2 will come out, so people are focusing on how to improve their current experience instead.
In a since-deleted post on the OW subreddit, a user by the name of ‘tylercreatesworlds’ complained about one game chat message they are absolutely sick of hearing: “Ez.” Receiving thousands of upvotes before it was deleted, it seems many agree.
Overwatch players don’t want to hear “Ez” anymore
Stop typing “Ez” in the game chat after a win, you sound like a tool. from Overwatch
While Tyler’s post was deleted by the moderators, you can still see its title: “Stop typing ‘Ez’ in the game chat after a win, you sound like a tool.” Originally, that was followed by paragraphs explaining why hearing “Ez” was so tilting.
In the replies, people voiced their concerns. One player explained that “it’s worse when the smurfs do it.” Another went into the psychology of the phrase, claiming that “the reason they say ‘ez’ is because they don’t have the balls to say that to someone’s face”
If any Overwatch character was likely to type “Ez” after a win, it’s Reaper.Before the post was deleted, it had over 3,000 upvotes, a number of awards, and over 1,000 comments. It’s pretty obvious that typed-out trash talk is a hot topic in the Overwatch community.
There was some balance, though. While many complained about phrases like “Ez” and “DPS diff,” one user came up with an interesting solution to the toxicity.
According to ‘Dr_StevenScuba,’ there’s a sneaky way to disarm people’s bad vibes: “I like saying ‘Rein diff.’ But only if neither team chose rein. Get ahead of the toxicity.”
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