I’ve been at endorsement level 5 since approximately last July, when I had been playing the game for about a month or so. Back then, I felt that even though it didn’t have any real or meaningful reward, the psychological effect was positive: it was making people think a bit more before being toxic or unhelpful, reminding them in a way.
In the meantime, I’ve played a lot more and had time to consider it again. Tonight, I dropped to endorsement level 4 for a few hours, for the first time since back then. I got back to 5 but it just solidified how I’ve felt about the endorsement system for a while now.
It felt incredibly punishing to have level 5 taken away. I did leave some games because people where being horrible to me. I play support/tank mostly, so even though most of the time people are ok, there’s times and days where people are very often hostile and look to blame someone else, which is of course the healer (“If I died, it must be because I wasn’t getting healed!”). Over time I’ve decided to just play with match and team chat muted when in quickplay because I’ve grown tired of it.
The fact is, most players and especially the toxic and unhelpful ones, don’t care about endorsements at all. They don’t care to give them or get them. Nobody cares about the number next to someone’s hero avatar. Over time, everyone’s realised it really doesn’t represent anything. I’ve seen wonderful people who are at level 2 and 3 (which is the average) and toxic and unhelpful people at level 4 and even 5. You’d expect people in groups would endorse more since they can’t endorse each other more than once but they endorse less. Nobody cares anymore.
It doesn’t give us better matchmaking because it’d hurt queues and would just group people who don’t play much (or play with groups) with the toxic players, punishing everyone except the toxic players. It doesn’t reward us with cosmetics or credits (getting 4 lootboxes every few weeks at level 5 is practically negligible) because then people would just farm it apparently and that’s not what the system is intended for.
So what does it do? The only people who care about endorsements are those who are going to be non-toxic and helpful anyway. The effect it has on us is to make us feel punished for not being way above average in behaviour all the time, even when we’re being treated like trash. The rest of the time we just can’t play dps because: there’s always 4-5 dps on the team, especially in quickplay, and because we feel obligated to fill in or face the threat of being punished by losing endorsement level.
I don’t feel rewarded by this system, I feel punished and trapped by it. I feel it just puts even more responsibility on my shoulders than I deserve. Everyone else around me seems to just be having fun, playing anything they want, saying anything they want, doing anything they want but me, the person who does care about this awful system and being helpful, I have to constantly worry about how to fill in, how to be helpful, how to keep things fair and positive etc.
It’s a failure. It can’t be fixed to reward more for reasons I mentioned before (makes it a farm or matchmaking punishment) and if it rewards nothing, nobody cares except the people who’s behaviour it doesn’t change in the intended way. It doesn’t give toxic players something to gain if they’re not toxic, it only gives non-toxic players something to lose. It’s punishment.