Except the reasons do matter, because those are what drive humans to make the choices we do. We may not know how consistently our ISP is going to dip out, we may not know if issues with our ISP have resolved after waiting a period of time & troubleshooting with our ISP, our ISP may even say the issues have been resolved and BOOM they aren’t… We can’t predict everything that may cause us to disconnect for any reason, like new updates in the game causing irregular crashes, or family emergencies. We are all at risk with this, some more than others for different reasons, some more understandable and deserving of more grace than others, sure.. but the fact is, COMPETITIVE MODE EXISTS! I wouldn’t be making a fuss if I knew I were playing on McWifi, okay? That isn’t the argument here, and it seems like that’s what it keeps getting strawmanned into.
It’s alright to leave a game occasionally, that’s not the issue here. If you have a family emergency or a construction crew hits your internet fiber cable or whatever, life happens. Leaving a game once in a while gets you little to no penalty.
The issue here that’s being discussed, not a straw man, is when penalties actually do start accruing from leaving quickplay games, and that only happens if it’s a consistent habit. You gotta leave a lot of games to get banned, and in those cases it’s where the reason doesn’t really matter. It’s consistent. Having to address something urgent and out of your control is one thing, but if you’re making a habit of leaving games, you’re being actively disruptive.
Imagine if you were going out to a local gym and getting in on some casual basketball games. It’s not competitive or done for any kind of ranking, but playing the game is fun and everybody is a good sport. If you have to leave in the middle of the game for a family emergency, people would understand, they can sub someone in. It’s inconvenient, but stuff happens. But if you’re consistently leaving in the middle of games, it’s gonna get annoying and people aren’t going to want to play with you, and they might prevent you from joining until you can prove you’re committed to playing together.
Same concept. Everybody else signed up to play a game of Overwatch.
You can’t convince blizzard to admit it! They always blame it on you.
Yes, but it doesn’t know WHY you did. Your internet dropping, the server itself crashing, you leaving game, a power outage, it all looks the same to the game.
The real problem is why there are such penalties in QP at all.
We’re still looking at this from two different philosophies.
You keep saying “if it becomes a consistent habit,” as though consistency necessarily implies carelessness or a lack of responsibility. That’s the part I disagree with.
Sometimes consistency is simply the result of a streak of bad circumstances that the player neither expected nor can immediately fix.
A game patch can introduce a crash that affects one subset of hardware. An ISP can become unstable for several days before identifying the issue. A neighborhood can experience repeated power interruptions. Someone can spend a week dealing with a family member in the hospital. None of those situations are planned, and none of them mean that player intentionally chose to disrupt matches.
From the player’s perspective, they’re often trying to play during the only moments they have available, hoping the issue has been resolved or that this match will be fine. They don’t queue up expecting to disconnect.
That’s why I don’t think “the reason doesn’t matter” is a fair standard for Quick Play.
Quick Play has backfill specifically because Blizzard recognized that players leave casual matches for many reasons. It has never offered the same guarantees as Competitive, because it wasn’t designed to. If a player leaves, another player can and usually does replace them.
Is that disruptive? Sure.
Is it ideal? No.
But that’s exactly why backfill exists.
Your basketball analogy actually illustrates my point more than yours. If someone leaves a casual pickup game and another player immediately jumps in, most people shrug and keep playing. They don’t decide that person should be barred from showing up to the gym for the next several hours because life happened to them multiple times in one week.
Competitive is where I think a higher expectation of commitment makes complete sense. There are ranks, visible progression, no backfill, and teammates have much more invested in the outcome.
Quick Play is different by design.
Historically, Blizzard and even members of the community regularly told players, “If you can’t guarantee you’ll stay for an entire match, play Quick Play instead of Competitive.”
Now the message seems to be, “If life keeps interrupting you, or you’re unlucky enough to be dealing with crashes, ISP instability, or repeated emergencies, maybe you just shouldn’t play Overwatch at all.”
I don’t think that’s a healthy direction for the casual mode.
The people most affected by these penalties are often already having a rough week. They’re dealing with technical issues, unstable infrastructure, or real-life problems, and instead of Quick Play being the place they can still log in and unwind, the game tells them to go away until everything in their life is perfectly stable again.
The problem is, life doesn’t work on a predictable schedule. When you’re dealing with intermittent ISP outages, repeated power failures, hardware issues, game crashes after a patch, or a family member whose health suddenly becomes unstable, you often have no way of knowing whether the problem is actually resolved. You troubleshoot, you wait, your ISP tells you it’s fixed, Blizzard releases a hotfix, the power comes back on, your loved one seems to be doing better; and you think, “Okay, maybe I can finally relax and play a few games.” Then, through no fault of your own, it all happens again.
That’s what I think people who argue “just don’t play until it’s fixed” are overlooking. In many cases, there isn’t a clear moment where someone knows it’s fixed. They’re making the best decision they can with the information they have at the time, hoping things have stabilized enough to enjoy a casual match. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re unlucky. I don’t think people who are already dealing with that kind of uncertainty should have Quick Play effectively closed off to them because they had the misfortune of running into another interruption they couldn’t reasonably predict.
To me, that feels backwards for a mode whose entire purpose was historically to be the more forgiving, lower-commitment alternative to Competitive.
holy its quickplay lol its not effecting my team dw they get a new teamate immediately and also lose no elo
its quickplay, go play comp
For a team dependent game, there are an awful lot of teammates you cant depend on
But comp lets me rejoin without penalty if the server kicks me for some random reason, QP doesnt. So for some, QP has harsher leaver penalties than comp.
Usually the problem in QP is disruptive teammates
Dying is disruptive because it takes a player out of the game for ten seconds. The same time it takes for backfill to find a new player.
And its QP, who cares?
Its like one or two disconnects and youre up to a 15min penalty. Its stupid, it just makes people AFK instead of leave.
Stop it. You’re ridiculous.
And I sure as hell do not need just another obstacle in my team
its qp go play comp lol tough news
It’s a team-based game, go play singleplayer somewhere else to have your free leaves. It works both ways
It does if it says anything server related like “Server closed due to an unexpected error” or “Lost connection to game server.” When these pop, it is 100% an issue with OW’s servers. Anything else it would be hard to detect what the issue was. But at least when it comes to server issues they absolutely know it.