Blizzard, fix the ddos problem on PC

Many people including myself have been booted out of the game without a warning. I’ve seen it happen on streams, I’ve seen it myself. Every comp game i play there is always a leaver, in my team or the other team.
When i play qp or any other modes besides comp, my ping is consistent and normal. but when i play comp, for some reason i get random ping spikes and sometimes i would get disconnected.
If this continues, i have no choice but to enjoy other games that appreciate the time and effort i put in.

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Pretty sure there is no ddosing on PC (for individual players). Only on console, Xbox specifically.

Bad server connections isn’t automatically a ddos.

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This.

If you are getting d/cs only in comp probably you connection can’t handle the intensity of the match. There are game settings to reduce received or sent data that may help with that (even though I have never seen it making a noticeable difference)

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its like 10kb/s or something

plus the game supports reducing that automatically if your connection can’t cope

OP probably has crappy wifi or some cheap crappy ISP (e.g. BT internet)

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there is an issue where groups on PC will suddenly crash to desktop for no apparent reason, this thread describes it to a t. happened so much last night. it was like a wave - first one person would appear as though they had left group, then stopped playing overwatch. then it would happen to the next person, then the next, until the only one left in the group/playing overwatch was the sole PS4 player. there was no countdown, error code, nothing.

we’re all in (west) EU and have decent to very good rigs and connection. it happened more when we went up against a group of people we’ve played against before, i assume they were a 6 stack. i’m not accusing anyone in particular, but it really seems like a deliberate exploit as opposed to a bug.

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We had a huge ddos problem in a game yesterday. Whole team but two got disconnected several times while the enemy team wasn’t. THAT is most assuredly a ddos attack

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What they’re talking about is something I have seen as well.

I was in an open queue game and suddenly the enemy team all started disconnecting and reconnecting. It happened in bursts, they would all come back, and then dc one by one again. They were very upset and confused, and explained that they were constantly crashing to desktop.

I couldn’t be sure who on my team might have been doing it but I’d lay odds on the level 30 endorsement level 1 Widowmaker though.

I would have reported for cheating if I knew who it was, all I could really do though was just stand there and feel bad about it.

I also saw people posting in both Overwatch Facebook groups I’m in about this happening, either to their team or the enemy team.

It’s not a ‘connection issue’ if it’s only one team and affects every member of that team.

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You have replay code for that?

ddos means ‘distributed denial of service’

A dos attack tries to flood servers with useless packets, in an effort to either shut the servers down or prevent actual packets from being received.

the distributed part means the ‘dos’ part is happening from a lot of different sources.

I doubt the players themselves was being targeted by a ddos attack, because they would likely need your IP address which is impossible to get from Overwatch.

However, a ddos attack on Blizzard’s servers is a definite possibility. This might crash some servers, thus shutting games down for many players.

This is not a ‘problem’ that can be fixed, because malicious actors are the source of the problem. And they can’t stop all of them from having an adverse effect.

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I’m not that poster, but here is a replay from when it happened to the enemy team in an open queue
comp game I (Mercy) was in:

RG05ZF

Note the first DC on the enemy team at 3 minutes, 28 seconds—they lose their Moira, who reconnects at the 4 minute mark.

Then they lose her again at 4 minutes, 25 seconds. So you’d think it’s a connection issue for Moira. She gets back at 4 minutes, 34 seconds.

Then at 4 minutes, 40 seconds, they lose their Reinhardt. Then at 4 minutes, 43 seconds, they lose their Torbjorn. Moira is still reconnecting but disconnects again at 4 minutes, 44 seconds. ONE SECOND LATER, their 76 drops as well. They start reconnecting at 4 minutes, 49 seconds.

At this point they started saying stuff in chat. Each one of them were crashing to desktop, reconnecting, then freezing/crashing again. You can actually see me standing still (if you’re watching from my Mercy pov) because I’m telling them that I saw someone posting about this phenomenon on Facebook.

At about the 5 minute, 40 second mark, those who had managed to reconnect start disconnecting again and then try to reconnect again. At this point the only two members of the enemy team who have stayed connected are Baptiste and Symmetra.

We get the payload in, next round setup is full of the enemy team accusing someone on our team of hacking and the members of my team being either confused or snarky (Widowmaker) about it.

They’ve all reconnected at that point, and the game proceeds as normal, and in fact they’re really aggressively pushing the payload. They make it to the last checkpoint. It looks like they’re going to push it all the way, giving us a third round and making it possible for them to win even with all the disconnects.

That is, until 10 minutes, 8 seconds - when they again lose someone. And even then they’re still giving us a run for our money. They get back around 12 minutes, 20 seconds.

We end up winning by the skin of our teeth and if it wasn’t for all those DC’s, we never would have.

I don’t know who on my team was doing it, but it was definitely deliberate and at the end they decided to only DC their sole healer (thankfully for them someone else swapped to heals and then the dc’d healer swapped to tank on their return) so as to not look quite as bad.

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One of the reasons I stopped to play comp…

I’ve never once been ddosed or seen someone be ddosed on pc.

There might be help here:

I wasn’t until yesterday.

Roughly during code of violence patch, they had a blizzard app update. That messed the game for at least 24-48h. The problem were somewhat random/persistent about til recently, at the time I tracked it to VC, recommending friends to use Battlenet built in and disconnecting from the game one.

We left from roughly 10-15 disconnect for day to actually 0. Check overwatch files, check blizzard app and check the windows updates, drivers update, if there’s a update do it.

If you’re playing on linux a friend of mine had some issues using it also during that time and even today have issues about it on random periods of time. We only started to use in game VC again like 3 days ago, so far we didn’t had issues, but we had several days without issues without it.

Glad to know it im not alone at getting the random crashes to desktop for no apparrent reason.

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This was yesterday…

The pattern appears to be similar, so the player could test the update path and play without VC and see if the issue stays.

Several folks during the patch had the same issue, at least 20 of my friends stop dropping from games afterwards those hints. On the first case was more generalized making all friends playing overwatch drop, after awhile a few kept dropping until they done the same as I mentioned above.

Also, they plan maintenance tomorrow, maybe this thing could be related. That kind of report also should be sent as ticket and tech support part of forum, the player even has replay for it that could help to narrow down several variables. If was intentional or not by example could be easier to know, while wouldn’t be 100% could be at least easier to notice patterns around it.

Hey everyone as a reminder, DDoS attacks are rare attacks that affect a typically large portion of the player base because of a coordinated data spam on Blizzard’s network providers. DoS attacks against a single player only happens if you somehow exposed your IP address to a dishonest user (which does NOT happen through Overwatch alone). Typically if you are disconnecting frequently across multiple games and days of trying to play Overwatch, you are NOT being subjected to any sort of attack, but instead have a persistent technical issue with your connection.

Disconnections can happen for a variety of reasons ranging from trying to play on WiFi (connecting directly through ethernet cables is much better), having issues with your modem, issues with the ISP, or connection hub problems between you and the Blizzard datacenter. This is why it is recommended work through standard troubleshooting first and if nothing helps, run a WinMTR test to map out your connection to the datacenter. We can help with any of these steps in the #technical-support forum.

I am personally tracking this problem and providing feedback to Blizzard as I get it. I am also monitoring this thread in the tech support forum which has the most related conversation from Blizzard from it: Random Overwatch Crashes not just me but also the teammates

It is not Overwatch-specific maintenance, just Blizzard Authentication Server weekly maintenance.

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RG05ZF

Explain.

See post above where I originally provided the replay if you don’t feel like watching it.