It’s an inconsistent problem, but a perpetual one that destroys player experience in competitive mode. I played 5 games today and 4 of them had leavers; twice on my team, twice for the other.
I do understand that it’s a really hard problem to tackle, so I’m just wondering if anybody has an idea on how to start mending this issue for competitive mode, because leavers create really discouraging environments to play in, especially for people who love playing competitive mode.
I’m also personally interested in what people come up with because I’m stumped.
I have always said that the most effective way to minimize the risk of leavers on your team is to group up with reliable friends you can trust. I wish there was more incentive to group up, but unfortunately this does not happen as groups of equal size pair together, and now Grand Master players can’t group 3 or more players together.
Let me point out a few things that Blizzard has to consider when dealing with leavers:
Disconnections and crashes counts as leaving the match. This is because there is ABSOLUTELY no effective way to discern a player who forcefully disconnects their game versus a legitimate malfunction. Furthermore, by penalizing players who are disconnecting or crashing, that encourages those players to stop playing Competitive and fix those issues before returning. Nevertheless, the starting penalty for Competitive leaver violations is only 10 minutes. This is because Blizzard knows any one of us can have a one-time malfunction (such as a power outage or ISP outage), so there needs to be a reasonable chance to not be too impacted from play,
Penalties for Competitive leaver violations technically do not count the loss of SR. When a player leaves a competitive match, their SR adjustment is a fixed -50 SR in most cases*. The development team has stated that will not increase the SR adjustment to severe levels as this would give players an effective pool to deliberately drop down to lower ranks to smurf against other players.
Skill rating calculations at the end of the match for all remaining players are not adjusted anymore. Back in the early part of Season 1, the game DID adjust the SR calculation for both teams based on whether there was a leaver. However, this resulted in worse player behaviors and increase leavers in matches. By not adjusting the SR calculation, players will not attempt to bully or collude with other players to leave matches so they can minimize the impact to their own SR.
Backfill for other players or even AI is not an effective option either for similar reasons above. Furthermore, when a match is made, that is supposed to be a balanced match between those 12 players. When a new player comes into a game they will contribute differently than the original player who left (even if they are a similar skill to the leaver). So say a team without a leaver is winning, and the team with a leaver gets a backfill, if that backfilled player carries the match, there would be a perception that the game cheated out the team without the leaver. Yes, a leaver cheats out their team, but that is something that is not controlled and therefore part of the overall match environment.
Leavers are always going to be an impact on games, and there have been key steps to minimize serial leavers in Overwatch. It takes as little as six leaver violations to trigger a season ban, and it only takes three season bans to trigger a permanent ban on that account. Competitive Suspensions and Bans for leaver violations cannot be appealed whatsoever either. There will never be a perfect solution to minimize leavers, but hopefully, this gives people a chance to see why there is a delicate balance in handling leavers in Overwatch.
The words I’d like to use to address leavers would cause the moderators to take action
Though I really don’t get leavers that much in QP, but both times that I did placements we had leavers in 3 of the games. I’m sure that didn’t help my ranking any.
\startsarcasm
The team started being toxic towards the player. Player leaves.
Omg! We have a leaver! Blizz do something!
Or, 5 dps instalock, repeated stomps, 6th player leaves.
Omg! We have a leaver! Blizz do something!
\endsarcasm
The leaver situation is fine in competitive, for the most part. The penalties are strict enough to really discourage deliberate leaving while not banning people for the occasional power or internet outage.
It is getting towards the end of the season though, and people that just do placements are a problem.
The one thing I would say is that leaver penalties for competitive should carry across seasons and only decay based on completing games in competitive.
(I believe there’s some sort of time-decay currently, or at least people believe there is strongly enough to buy alt accounts in an attempt to dodge penalties by rotating accounts.)
Then people who leave games at the end of a competitive season would get properly punished if they did it again the next season.
Even reliable players can have internet/hardware problems. I was watching Super on Twitch the other day. JjoNaK was on his team and dced. He came back later, but the point is, even players with great hardware can still have problems. It’s just the nature of online gaming.
That said, grouping is still good when you know your teammates aren’t going to tilt and throw or rage quit.
It already does this though? If you leave one game you’re banned from playing another for 10 minutes. If you leave a second it goes up (30 minutes IIRC). At some point leavers get banned for the current season, and eventually leavers get banned for all seasons.
It’s just about calculating the cost and benefits of each move you take.
I hope they are doing nothing about it because they have the whole picture and see something we can’t, and not just based on ideology of “protecting the player from bullies”.
Yeah I was talking about qp and arcade when there’s usually 1 person who leaves the nanosecond you lose the first push, which leads to neverending staggering, a string of people joining backfill, and either not playing well or leaving themselves
Ah oh. Yeah I personally don’t mind a backfill chain (if anything it encourages me to pull out my mains and go full tryhard), but I don’t take quick play too seriously most of the time so I could see how it could be frustrating for others.
Well I can speak from experience and say that season 1 was a really bad time when it came to leavers and toxicity. There was many of the steps that I listed taken in Seasons 1 and 2 to have a significant impact to deter leavers and it did help. Now leavers still happen, but I see little few ways to deter them unless we start things like separate low-priority queues.
The problem is not just leavers, almost half of it are DC either because of their PC or the Blizzard servers.
No amount of bans or even low-priority queues will help this.
There are other solution to help this, but again if just the argument “we afraid ppl bully other to leave”, which is inherently against any kind of compensation for the team with the DC or the Leaver, then yeah we can give up on any hope for really fixing this (huge) issue.
Btw we have tools to deal with toxicity, mute-block-report-avoid are pretty good tools.
So lets worry more about the other things which we don’t have tools against, like leavers and DC…
