Greetings all,
We’ve been working to improve some of the available troubleshooting resources for our games. We wanted to have a go-to resource for some of the most common technical issues you can experience in Blizzard games. Each of the following posts goes over a different type of technical problem and links to troubleshooting resources. If you continue to have problems after using our technical support articles, check the last expandable menu in this post for how to receive more help.
Before Troubleshooting the problem, we suggest checking our Known Issues sticky thread. We try to keep this as up to date as possible with known conflicts, so you may save yourself some time with this!
To proceed with troubleshooting, check these links:
If none of this helps, review this post for “what to do if you need more help” to post your own thread and get your issue resolved as quickly as possible!
For FAQs on technical issues, Click the Triangle!
You can browse our Known Technical Support Issues sticky for other common contact causes.
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Why am I only having problems with Blizzard games?
There is always the possibility that there is a server issue, but we try to post about these problems on the Breaking News bar on our site, the Blizzard Battle.net Application, and in game. We also update our BlizzardCS Twitter as soon as we can when we see server issues. If you suspect this is the problem, check those locations first before trying troubleshooting.
If you’re having connection problems with only certain games and services, everything you connect to has a different IP address. It’s very likely that you take a different path through the internet to connect to our servers. Comparing even two different games or services isn’t very useful because of this. When we suspect this type of problem, we’ll ask for connection tests so we can try to find out where the problem is.
Why do I receive a leaver penalty when I have a technical problem, or when the servers go down?
Any time you leave a match for any reason, you affect up to 4 other people’s chance at winning. There are also potentials for abuse of the matchmaking system like queue dodging or unfairly preventing loss of rating. For these reasons, we tend to be a bit harsh on this.
Regarding server issues, these do happen sometimes, and we understand that they are frustrating. However, they are also rare. The system allows you to regain rank no matter your number of losses, so these problems should not have large effects on your rating. If you do regularly have what seem to be server problems, you’re more likely looking at a connection issue and should troubleshoot it.
Please note that Customer Support does not restore lost skill rating or remove penalties when something like this happens. If you are having technical issues, please troubleshoot them to avoid penalties in the future and improve your game experience.
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I have a high-speed connection and my speed test looks fine, so why is my latency so high?
Connection speed tests measure bandwidth, which is different from latency.
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Bandwidth is how much data can possibly be downloaded and uploaded every second.
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Latency is how quickly you receive information from a specific location.
Latency can be different even between different games of the same company. More information on why this is can be found here. When you have high latency to a specific service, you still could possibly receive as much data as advertised, but there’s something delaying the flow of that information. When we investigate high latency, we run tests to find out why you are getting your information slowly from our specific servers.
Why do you suggest that I update or remove software when they were working with the game previously?
Other programs can have conflicting interactions with our applications, windows, or your drivers.
Updates to our applications, security programs, or other third party programs can cause the programs to fight with each other. A security program may suddenly mistake our games as a threat. Other programs may fight us for certain drivers or windows functions, which can negatively impact your gameplay.
Our goal is to help you play the game. If you do find a program causing a conflict, try updating or reinstalling that program. If it doesn’t fix the problem, contact the program’s support team. They can usually help you configure the program, or contact their developers who can fix the incompatibility.
Why can I stream or download from other sites without issues but have problems in Blizzard games?
Streaming services have the ability to buffer information. This means that they give your computer data before you see it, often 30 seconds or even minutes before you need to look at it. Online games on a 'live server’ need to send and receive data immediately so that you can react to it immediately.
A direct download can be interrupted by a connection issue, then pick back up when your connection returns to normal. Our games will try to do this, but if you disconnect for too long, you will be fully dropped from the servers.
Keep in mind that anything that takes up bandwidth can cause game connection issues or make them worse. We suggest playing with as few other applications running as possible for the best experience.
Why do I need to swap to Ethernet when my WiFi works for other things?
WiFi is less stable than a wired connection directly to your router or modem. Many things interfere with WiFi, like physical barriers (walls, glass, etc), other types of waves (microwaves, etc), damage to the hardware (USB Ports or wifi antenna), or computer power issues. The easiest way to see if your WiFi devices are the problem is connecting directly to your modem or router via Ethernet. Note that we do not directly support wireless connections. If you find that WiFi is the problem, you can contact the support team for the WiFi device or the wireless router.
Why is my entire internet crashing when I disconnect from Blizzard games?
When your internet goes down, regardless of the trigger, it means that your network drivers or network hardware crashed. If you have this sort of problem, focus on things like:
*Note: We do not support play on mobile internet connections. However if this works, it indicates the issue is likely with the modem, router, or ISP.
What is Rendering Device Lost and why do I only see it in Overwatch?
Note - If you are currently receiving this error with a RTX series Nvidia graphics card, there is a known investigation into this issue. See our Known Issues sticky for details.
“Rendering Device Lost” is an Overwatch error message for a TDR (timeout detection and recovery) incident. Timeout Detection and Recovery is a Windows-level crash which happens when your graphics card becomes extremely unstable. To prevent your PC from crashing, windows will crash your graphics drivers. You can read more about TDR incidents here.
There are a number of different possible causes for a Timeout Detection and Recovery event. Unstable overclocking, corrupt graphics drivers, program conflicts, overheating components, or even hardware issues could cause this kind of problem.
Although only a small percentage of players will encounter this error, it can be frustrating because the root cause is often difficult to diagnose. For help troubleshooting this error, see our Rendering Device Lost article.
Why isn’t Voice Chat working with my Bluetooth Device?
After some testing and reading up on bluetooth technology, this seems to be an issue with how bluetooth functions. You’ll also see these issues on other games that employ voice chat functionality. Bluetooth is designed for telephone audio, not high fidelity gaming audio. As a result, it is prone to issues in gaming audio when you need stereo audio and microphone access. There are work arounds for this, which I post later, but they result in a sacrifice in audio quality.
Bluetooth as a technology has three modes relevant to us:
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Headset Audio - Uses both stereo audio and microphone. However, the sound quality is very low. (8kHz/8bits.) Using this mode will probably make everything sound like you’re going through a tunnel.
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Hands Free - Gives you a mono audio signal and access to your mic. This has lower audio quality as well (16kHz/8bits.) Good for telephone/VOIP communication, bad for hearing where your enemies are since all sound will come from both headset cups.
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Advanced Audio Distribution Profile - Close to CD-quality stereo audio, good for hearing where your opponents are in overwatch, but disables mic and as a result voice chat.
Because of these limitations, it is highly recommended that you avoid using bluetooth headsets if you are attempting to use voice chat simultaneously. If you’re only using it to listen to the game audio, it should be fine to activate the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP, Stereo audio) profile for better audio quality.
Workaround Below
If you want to use both stereo audio and mic, enabling your bluetooth device’s “ Headset ” profile can give you the best compromise. Unfortunately as mentioned above, the audio quality is poor and on some devices may result in the headset not broadcasting any game audio at all.
I hope this provides some more information on why this is happening. Thanks for all the information provided in this thread thus far, as it helped us identify the common threads and get some test devices which we used to figure this out. I’m going to sticky this thread so we can share our findings with other players.
Note that not all threads may receive a reply from support staff.