Overwatch 2 devs reveal why LFG team feature was removed and might not come back

During a livestream Q&A hosted by Jay3, members of the Overwatch 2 dev team revealed why the game’s group finder, or LFG, feature was removed and likely won’t return anytime soon.

Members of the Overwatch 2 development team have made a substantial effort to be transparent with the community and discuss changes made to the game both over time.

Recently, Overwatch 2 devs spoke about competitive SR tier updates coming in Season 4 through a live stream on the official Overwatch Twitch channel.

Now, two members of the development team joined a stream hosted by Overwatch 2 content creator Jay3 to answer some questions from the community, one of which involved the game’s removed LFG feature and the motive behind the decision to get rid of it.

Overwatch 2 devs discuss LFG feature removal

During Jay3’s live stream, fellow streamer eskay asked if the team had any intention to bring back the group finder option for Overwatch 2. Systems Designer Gavin Winter fielded the question and explained the rationale behind the decision to remove the ‘Looking for Group,’ or LFG, option.

“LFG had some social and disruptive behavior problems that we never solved,” said Winter. He then goes on to bring up the fairly recent custom mode controversy which involved members of the community naming custom games with offensive titles.

While Winter said the team has mostly solved the custom mode situation at this point, he explained that “LFG didn’t have any of those protections in place, basically. And we still hadn’t actually solved those problems when we decided to release PvP early.”

Winter noted that when the team was performing the engine upgrade from Overwatch to Overwatch 2, every element of the UI had to be fixed as well. As LFG included a lot of UI resources, the team decided to prioritize other aspects of the game like competitive 2.0 and ping.

Server Engineer Morgan also weighed in on the reason to leave it behind and noted that LFG was “very complicated on the server, too” which added to the team’s decision to leave it behind.

As for the question of whether or not LFG will ever return to Overwatch 2, Winter said that while the team still finds value in the feature “it hasn’t been a priority so far.”