Overwatch 2 player sparks controversy by holding game hostage for over an hour

Liam Ho
Route 66 Overwatch 2 Spawn

An Overwatch 2 player has sparked controversy within the community after they held a competitive game hostage for over an hour.

Most matches of Overwatch 2 aren’t incredibly long. Especially with how intense and demanding some of the games can be, it’s probably for the better most lobbies don’t run longer than about 15-20 minutes. Closer games can run for a bit longer than normal, with overtime and additional rounds being added to differentiate between the teams. But that’s about it.

There is one way to elongate a match by unnatural means, and that’s by never capturing the objective required to progress the match. Essentially, if a team never decides to capture the point on control maps, the timer never begins to tick in their team’s favor, meaning the game can go on forever, provided the other team isn’t able to capture it.

That’s exactly what happened to one Reddit user, who was seemingly held hostage for an entire hour by a smurfing player.

Overwatch 2 player held hostage for over an hour in competitive match

Reddit user DanialBlackBone reported the incident on the Overwatch subreddit. With a hefty 61-minute match timer, it’s clear that this wasn’t just a regular game of competitive Overwatch.

According to Danial, the enemy team never went to capture the point and instead decided to hold them at their spawn doors. Danial wasn’t sure if the enemy team was trolling or smurfing, but asked the community for an explanation.

Many players were quick to condemn the enemy team’s actions, advising Danial to report them for gameplay sabotage.

“It’s a Smurf and this is gameplay sabotage,” they explained.

Others demanded that there be an in-game form of prevention for instances like this.

“Yeah there needs to be a 2-minute timer before capturing the point that ends the round or something.”

It’s not certain if Blizzard has anything planned for these rare cases of gameplay sabotage, but with the problem being brought to attention, let’s wait and see if the devs have something up their sleeves.