'Overwatch' has begun to mute players who gain a bad reputation.

Overwatch screenshot

Overwatch screenshot

The hugely popular multiplayer first person shooter game has been dealing with problem players for some time, and it has now been announced the publishers at Blizzard have teamed up with Xbox to create a new "Avoid Me" feature which means anyone who finds themselves placed in that category will be unable to use the chat functions.

Blizzard said in a statement: "Players whose Xbox Live reputation has been downgraded to 'Avoid Me' will remain in the same matchmaking pool as other Overwatch players. However, they will no longer be able to use the in-game voice communication."

The gaming company has yet to reveal whether the same function will be implemented for PlayStation or PC players, but the decision comes after game direction Jeff Kaplan recently revealed the "toxicity" of players was having a direct impact on the amount of work developers could do on the game itself.

Jeff argued that a need to take action against 480,000 accounts has resulted in a significantly slowed rate of development, as the team is too busy shutting down bad behaviour rather than working on the game.

He said: "The bad behaviour not just ruining the experience for one another, but the bad behaviour is actually making the game progress in terms of development at a much slower rate."

Whilst Jeff didn't detail exactly what constitutes as bad behaviour, he did highlight a need to put an end to cyber bullying, which he believes can be worse in video games because of the level of anonymity players have when they create an account for the game.