Blizzard has made some improvements to its player report system.

As first reported by PCGamesN, and subsequently released as part of the Winter Wonderland Event patch, players who have reported someone for toxic behaviour will be notified in-game when that person is banned.

"If you've reported somebody and they've gotten actioned you'll be notified in-game," Kaplan told PCGamesN.

"We've done a pilot program where we were experimenting sending emails to people. As of that Winter Wonderland patch we'll have the technology to do it directly in the game. Hopefully that restores some of people's faith in the system and then they use it more."

This follows a year of frank and open dialogue about how the team behind Overwatch planned to deal with negative elements of the game's community, as well as how taxing this toxicity was on the developers. Blizzard has even had to create a 'strike team' to handle the problem. A former Riot Games employee has also spoken out about the how scary it can be dealing with the League of Legends community. 

Despite these new measures, Kaplan says that this toxicity will - sadly - continue indefinitely.

"Toxicity is gonna be ongoing, there's not going to be a moment where it goes away. I wish that was the case," Kaplan said.

"There's not going to be a moment where we stop working on it. It's just a matter of what's happening now and what are our current priorities. As I've stated before toxicity is our top priority to combat."

Hearthstone senior designer Peter Whalen also responded to questions about toxicity within that game, saying he wishes the fans would express themselves in more positive ways. 

Ubisoft recently added similar in-game functionality to Rainbow Six: Siege almost two years after that title's launch.