Comp leaver solution

Kaedi-11739 · November 29, 2018, 7:34pm

RedMongoose:

Due to my personal experience with competitive matches I feel this has to be a major problem and i cant be the only one dealing with this. Leavers. Simple as that, it ruins your game and you lose ranking for somebody else’s problems. This has been my experience especially this current season. So Ive been thinking what could be done about this and I think I have a solution.

Add a “Game saver” system, what this would entail is say somebody leaves a match mid game. A timer starts like it already does (say they have like 45 seconds to reconnect) here is where after that timer is up somebody in Que (and this would be toggle-able in your career profile) to be a “game saver” where you can be thrown into a competitive game mid match and try to bring it back.

This “Game saver” would follow the same MMR rules as anybody else, they would receive no loss of SR should the team lose. However if the team wins they’re awarded with extra SR and you could have similar to arcade where every 3 wins you get a loot box, but for bringing back a competitive game every 3 games you receive a loot box with a rare or better item.

I feel this would make Competitive far more enjoyable. Thoughts?

The problem with your proposal is that it gives an opportunity for players to “manipulate” their skill rating. This sounds weird but really does a player deserve to earn “extra” skill rating. Remember skill rating is a “rating” and not a “currency” like you are perceiving it.

Also, any form of backfill in competitive is not done because you have to look at the problem for both teams if a new player comes in and wins the game for the team with the leaver. Is it really fair for the team that did not have the leaver to lose skill rating because a new player came in and carried the match? I don’t believe it is. When the matchmaker pairs 12 players together that original pairing is as fair and balanced (by the numbers) as it can be with the player pool available at the time. By forcing a change like backfill that promise of fair matchmaking is in a sense broken.

Blizzard Customer Service is not the same as the game development team. Web tickets and live chat are intended for service issues such as troubleshooting technical problems or account issues. The official forums are the primary place of feedback for you to express your concerns with features of the game and how they work.

I have never heard of this. Please provide the source of this information and which games currently implement this. Links to source please.

In the mean time I will note that Game Director Jeff Kaplan has specifically stated that they rather penalize players who disconnect in an effort to get those players to stop playing Competitive mode and take the time to resolve the issues.

Jeff Kaplan:

Hi ChapterFive,

We’re really sorry you had a bad experience due to a disconnect. Personally, I hate when that happens myself so I can relate.

Unfortunately, we’re in a really tricky spot with Competitive Play in regards to players leaving matches. If you read through these forums, we get a lot of complaints that players leaving matches is a huge point of frustration for our players.

There is no reliable way that we can discern if you disconnected because of a connection issue, or you forced a disconnect. Because of that, we need to treat anyone who leaves a match in the same way.

We’re way more lenient in quick play. And it feels like we’re generally in a good spot in Quick Play. However, in Competitive Play, if anything, we hear from our player base that we should be increasing the leaver penalties and making them more harsh.

For Season 2, we added a 10 minute delay to your first “leave” to make you aware that leaving is bad and there are in fact penalties for leaving. We also wanted to put in increasing penalties to help dissuade people who were having connection issues from repeatedly trying to reconnect to Competitive Play games. We know that sometimes the connection issues are not your fault. And that really is a shame. But also, when those moments are happening, it’s not a good time to jump into a team game and subject your teammates to the mercy of an unstable internet connection.

My advice for people who are having connection issues is to play modes like the Brawl or Play vs. AI until their connection stabilizes. Again, I know this isn’t the answer you want to hear, but hopefully you can understand the situation from the other side. It’s very likely that someone who was on your team in that match posted in one of the many angry “leaver” threads on these forums.

Hopefully this sheds some light on our thought process.

Again, apologies you had a bad experience.

-jeffrey

Source: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20749067802#post-13

Game Director Jeff Kaplan also stated they have no effective technological means to identify the different between a force disconnect and one that occurs unintentionally.

Source: Overwatch Forums

I spend a large amount of time helping players in the technical support forum to help troubleshoot disconnections. One of the things I ask for is a WinMTR test which is a way to map out the connection route between the user and the game servers. Most WinMTRs I get back from users indicate an issue between the game server and the user, such as an ISP hub not working, a network hub not working, or a cable break somewhere in the world wide web. Remember if you see “Lost Connection to the Server” or “Failed to connect to the server” those are error messages the game client says to saying it simply has lost connection. Very rarely are there issues with the hundreds of servers or Blizzard’s direct network providers. Of course when those issues do arise, Blizzard is very quick to respond and will communicate via the BattleNet app launcher and the @BlizzardCS Twitter feed.

Simply put, for players to be incentivized to backfill without risk to their own skill rating would have an increased chance of gaining skill rating without risk. This would cause skill rating inflation and will deteriorate the overall Competitive Experience because players could possibly be matched with players they would not truly be skilled to face against.

Exactly. And in the event something MAJOR, such as a DDoS attack, network provider outage or the “lobby server” is acting up which affects a high majority of the community, the development team at their discretion may disable Competitive Play (though this happens very rarely). Furthermore, in the event a single game server goes down (remember there are hundreds of game servers at several locations across the planet), you usually get a message “Server closed due to an unexpected error.” When this happens, the usual protocol is that the matchmaker will take the same 12 players and start a whole new match on a new server and the previous match is “nullified/no contest”.

BrownCoat40:

Tbh, there needs to be a heftier penalty for a repeat leaver, especially in Competitive. Not SR, not experience points, not a ban implemented later. Start with a 10 min IP time out, add 10 minutes per instance of leaving. Regen one “level” a week.

Leave once, 10 min ban

2nd time, 20 min ban

3rd time, 30 min ban

4th time, 40 min ban.

a week passes, so the ban time goes down 10 min

leaves again, 40 min ban

That way, if someone has a history of leaving more than once a week, their IP address is banned from OW for a significant chunk of time.
My first foray into rank coincided with my power supply going funky. I would have gotten a short timeout…less time than it took to figure out my PC issue. No big deal If your internet sucks, you probably shouldn’t be playing ranked, as it risks other peoples’ SR too. If a leaver makes a pattern of it, well they’ll have trouble playing the game; and an IP ban would impede them from switching accounts to keep playing.

While I see your logic to this idea, I am not sure about IP bans as that might be tackling certain legal issues at that point. IP bans are typically reserved as a protocol to enforce the End User License Agreement. Per the terms of the End User License Agreement, if a user account is terminated by Blizzard because they breached the EULA (for something like a Code-of-Conduct violation). Blizzard then has the right to enforce an IP ban to ensure that such a user does not “trespass” into the service. Again that gets into the point of legal issues which I think is overkill for the problem we are trying to address here.

That being said, the current Competitive Leaver Penalty system works very similar to how you describe. The starting penalty is only 10 minutes, but quickly escalates with each leaver violation. It can take as little as 6 leaver violations to trigger a season ban. Furthermore, 3 season bans result in a permanent ban from the Competitive Play mode on that account. While I know there is a perceived problem with “smurfs”, I don’t think the issue of players owning multiple accounts is so significant that it leaves the Competitive Leaver system in a place where it compromises the function of the penalties.

In conclusion, I appreciate RedMongoose’s initial idea, but I would not support it because I see the importance of maintaining a fair competitive experience overall rather than trying to make a single match that had a leaver feel better. As a reminder, Blizzard used to adjust both teams SR calculation based if there was a leaver, but they stopped doing this midway in Season 1 of Competitive Play because that system which tried to make it less of an impact to the remaining teammates where there was a leaver, but it resulted in bad behaviors such as players bullying other players into leaving and it also caused issues with players gaining skill rating and causing bad matchmaking overall in the long term. Learn more about that policy change here:

The balance of dealing with leavers and dealing with those who disconnect will be an ongoing war. There are no perfect solutions. Right now I do feel the system with handling leavers is as fair and as balanced as we can hope, however, the experience of other players who are impacted by leavers and disconnected players is part of a far larger issue with competitive, which of course is the randomness and lack of control players experience when playing Competitive. It is these general issues that I do feel the development team need to focus more attention on.