I was searching for a competitive match and was hit with a “Lost Connection to Game Servers” screen before I get any indication that I placed in a match. I logged in within 30 seconds or so to find that there was no rejoin option but I was suspended for 10 Minutes and had lost a big chunk of SR. Can I get this reversed? There must be some kind of error on the side of the gamer server. This has happened once before, but aside from this specific circumstance (i.e. connection issues prior to game join) my connection has always been rock solid.
Heya Swyft,
We don’t restore SR or remove penalties from disconnections for any reason. While I trust this was probably just a one off issue, that system is handled by the servers and it works this way to prevent things like queue dodging. (This was a way old school competitive FPS players would dodge certain players or teams to improve their rank.)
You weren’t able to rejoin because you disconnected too early, and the match was likely closed after your client disconnected to prevent other players on your team from losing an unfair fight.
I posted a more info here if you’re curious, but the basic gist is that if dcs are occasional, your SR should all come out in the wash. If you end up having these issues more frequently, please reach out so we can help you troubleshoot.
I would agree that during a match a disconnect disadvantages your team even if it’s not malicious. I would also agree that the system in place discourages queue dodging. I don’t agree that there should be a penalty for failure to join a match where neither of those two arguments would apply, provided the cause has nothing to do with the player and his equipment. I’m not the only player to experience this situation and I don’t feel like the timing of the disconnect would be difficult to detect.
I understand that you can’t take any action, and I have no proof to post anyway to support my claim beyond reasonable doubt, but I’m still disappointed that there isn’t a check for this since players have been (reportedly) experiencing this since ~ July 2017.
Swyft,
I appreciate that understanding, and entirely understand that position you have as well. As someone who plays competitive myself I know sometimes I have to fight tooth and nail for each point of SR and losing it for something out of your control is frustrating.
The reason it’s this way is that we can’t see the exact reason for why such a disconnection happens. If you’ve been in the FPS scene for a while, you may be familiar with behavior like manual disconnections. The SR system behavior was intentionally programmed to always penalize because of those kinds of possibilities. We also want people who have regular connection issues for any reason to troubleshoot them instead of living with it and in turn ruining other players’ game experience. It’s kind of a ‘how do we make the greatest number of players happy and keep things fair’ scenario.
Your situation, which I trust you’re telling the truth about, is also why the earlier penalties are more lenient. We know that this is going to happen for somebody at some point in time, so we don’t want the occasional one off to be an absolutely huge deal.
That link I posted earlier has some more information, like a Dev post on the matter and where to go if you have feedback on the leaver system itself. If you want to talk about possible tweaks to the competitive leaver system, I absolutely encourage you to hit up the Competitive Discussion forum and chat constructively about it.
On the other hand if you do suspect some kind of network issue and want a helping hand, we’re here for you on the Tech Forums or a one on one contact. Whatever you do choose, good luck with both the DCs and the season.