Custom Game "Hide and Seek" Ruined Due to "Retribution" Patch

Bug Report
1

Hello Blizzard support.

My name is Kyle. A month or two ago, I discovered a custom game mode called “Hide and Seek”. In this game mode, there are two teams on an Elimination map, one group of six being the “hiders”, with the lowest amount of health possible and cannot do any measurable damage or healing, and the 2-3 group of “seekers”, with max health, and can do max damage and healing. It is the goal of the seekers to find and kill the hiders after the hiders have been given a set amount of time to hide, just like in real life (well, without the killing part :slight_smile: ). In love with the game, I decided to start my own H&S game, and that’s when a whole bunch of fun ensued. I met a bunch of friends, and together we spent hours, nay, days, enjoying ourselves.

Then came the launch of Retribution. With that patch, it seems as though the AFK system was reworked as to be extremely aggressive. Because of that, we cannot even play through an entire game of H&S without it being a suicide fest because no one wants to be kicked.

This is how the AFK system used to work: During our 135 second rounds, we would receive a message telling us that we were AFK. Then the 10 second warning would come around. If it did, we would be able to use our mouse wheels and scroll out of it. In fact, to prevent that message from popping up, we would as hiders just constantly scroll our mouse wheel until the end of the match once we had found our hiding spots.

Now, when the time would run out, the rules say that the seekers have to kill themselves and the hiders can cap the point, lest any blood-thirsty seekers want to kill all but one of the remaining hiders. Around this point in time a final, inescapable AFK message would pop up, and we would have to end the round before anyone got kicked. That was acceptable and totally fine, as it helped also to solidify a round’s outcome.

However, all of this changed with the Retribution patch. Come the second round, people will now get inescapable AFK messages, sometimes at the very beginning of the match, depending or not they had engaged in combat with anyone yet. This happens to both hiders and seekers. This forces H&S players to kill themselves, lest they be kicked from the game.

This new AFK system essentially breaks the previously working H&S custom game mode.

To show you want a “new” game of broken H&S would look like, I decided to film me and my friends playing our beloved game, with me filming both from the perspective of the seeker and then the hider ( https://youtu.be/jSt8dgggToI ) (Please excuse the poor quality of this filming; I apparently had my mic too far away from my mouth, so you can’t hear me that well, and I was “free-styling” the whole thing, so some cringe-worthy moments will appear from time to time :slight_smile: . Besides, this was my first time doing this.

Any who, this footage should give you a look into what plagues H&S now.

I heard from a H&S friend that this AFK system was probably the result of experience farms. I do not know if this is true, but I can see why.

This brings me to my conclusion. Here’s what I am asking for to be fixed: the AFK system. If it can be reverted back in some form to what it was originally, so that H&S custom games can exist as they once did, that would be great. Now, as Murpalani “Murp” said in the video, if this is the result of experience farms, if maybe you could add a feature, a “switch”, for custom games that enables a more lenient AFK system or just disables it outright, at the cost of reducing or not providing any experience usually earned each game, then that would also work. We would be fine with that, as long as we get our H&S game back.

Now, I’m sorry if this not considered a “bug report”. I felt that it deserved more attention than a “feature suggestion” kind of topic, since it is an “in-game problem”, a “bug” to us, hence why I am filing it this under a “bug report”. Feel free to let me know otherwise and move it to a different “branch” of this forum. This is also my first post to this forum. :slight_smile:

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Kyle

14 Likes
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The same thing is happening to me. I also like to play a H&S and before the latest patch the afk timer was 180 seconds and reset each round: I could set a game to end at 179 seconds with no-one getting kicked unless they spent a long time crouching or in a sitting emote (a fix for this too would be nice).
Now people are getting kicked really fast and the timer is carrying over to the next round (In the last game I played I got kicked before I could see anyone to even attack).
There is nothing in the patch notes about this and its really frustrating.

2 Likes
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Dear Blizzard Support,

My name is Taylor. I, too, host Hide and Seek lobbies, under the title of Balanced Hide and Seek (Seekers Die At Unlock). Over the last year of playing the game lobby with friends and people who would become friends, I gathered myself a small community of over thirty players who enjoyed the game enough to stick with it and join us in a discord lobby dedicated to the game. The game mode has been a lovechild of mine and a couple other players, and we have spent over 600 hours of time playing exclusively the Hide and Seek game mode we have made. I (and the wonderful people who have offered feedback and advice) have worked to make the game the most enjoyable it could be. We play once or twice a week in 4 hour sessions, and everyone was very excited for the now available Ayutthaya map to explore.

But, as of the Retribution patch, the game mode has become utterly unplayable. The random uninterruptible AFK notices makes playing the game impossible. The game that we have all come to love was, without warning, ruined. Many of the consistent players that play Hide and Seek with me play Overwatch exclusively for my Hide and Seek lobby, and to have all of that thrown away, right on the cusp of our 1 year anniversary, is devastating. Please, if any Blizzard employee could shed a drop of hope upon our predicament, I would be grateful.

With hope,
Taylor

6 Likes
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Chipping in here. I am relatively new to the Hide and Seek scene, but I had been playing quite regularly with a weekly H&S group for a month or two before this happened. It was extremely upsetting as I was really beginning to love the relaxed and casual fun of the H&S custom game, and I was finally starting to get kinda good at it, too.

Now, H&S is impossible to play. I am now playing Overwatch only about half as often as I used to, as previously I dedicated nearly equal time to the normal game modes as I did the casual and relaxing custom games, mostly H&S.

I beg that someone on the Overwatch team will fix this issue somehow, as I love this game and feel now like a critical part of the Overwatch experience has been taken away from me.

2 Likes
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I’d like to put in my two cents as well! I have found a community of people who play hide and seek often, and who are very passionate about the game mode. It’s been really fun building up my skills at both hiding and seeking. It’s really disappointing that we can’t play right now, because it’s always a blast. I really hope that this thread gets some attention, because in custom game modes that don’t revolve around shooting/killing the enemy, the inactivity timer coming up when you haven’t hit anyone is really frustrating and makes the game impossible to play.

1 Like
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Wow guys. I’m glad we weren’t the only ones experiencing this issue with our beloved game mode. Thank you for adding your own stories. I’m sure that this will help our efforts to get “Hide and Seek” back to where it was. :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Dear Blizzard Support

My name Goojaba. host Ape hunting (alternate Version of hide and seek we call Hide and Hunt )So basically as hider(Winston) will be an ape (I know he’s a scientist So sorry)will hide and stay away from the hunters he can only jumpjet for escape and live until ult’ ready then they can fight the hunter back to win the game as hunter (other heroes) must hunt all the ape that still live before the they got ult , the game really fun many player who join love the game so much and I also made some new friends.

This mode was made and played since before the last year (2017) first uprising event comes, until the retribution patch came my game mode is unplayable with the system of inactive that come with the patch

I wish the system will be fix or change back soon

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Eh, no updates on weather this is being addressed or not?

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I had a similar game mode that I would host time to time, this pretty much killed it :frowning:

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I’ve been playing OW since the beta, and I’ve loved the game. I was super excited to learn about custom games, and I’ve been playing Hide and Seek for a while now. With the new patch, I’m unable to play, and it’s honestly reduced my desire to play Overwatch. Having so much fun in Hide and Seek was a motivator for me to invite friends to start playing overwatch and for me to be on the lookout for new skins and emotes; but now I’ve been losing motivation to get on. I’d love to see the inactivity issue get fixed so I can enjoy the game again.

11

It’s been over a week and no attention has been drawn to this issue. Please, Blizzard. We have spent hundreds of hours into this creation, and to have it taken away from us, ruining the reason we logged on Overwatch, is a horrible feeling.

1 Like
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Yeah, if they added a switch to disable AFK timer at the cost of disabling EXP, that would work fine and be great.

1 Like
13

Yeah, shouldn’t this topic have received a response from the Blizzard team by now?

Not trying to sound impatient or disrespectful or anything, but I would think they would have said something by now. :\

2 Likes
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There was a hidden change in the patch notes! Now, instead of kicking us, it just disables experience. I honestly don’t care about experience as long as we can play our game again. Thank you Blizzard!

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Yeah, I had a blast doing skin contest with friends. The judge made a theme at the start of the round and players had to make the most interesting character and skin choice to match the theme. ie. Horror, sport, war, romance, work, sci-fi, etc. They then proceed to eliminate players and have to justify why they have chosen the winning skin. While playing this we had a few problems with that annoying afk system. Suggestion: Can they add an option in the custom match settings to turn off AFK system. That would be awesome.

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I’ve just tested it. I can confirm that long ‘inactivity’ periods don’t trigger a kick timer. Sitting emotes do still start the big red warning pretty quickly but anything else just stops you getting XP.
Thanks for the fix Blizzard

P.S. You do however still get kicked with NO warning if you stand still for too long.

17

Okay, after a day or two of testing with the “new” AFK system, here are my findings, which do go alongside what users “mmp” and “Bliztron” said.

Yes, it seems with the latest patch (ver. 1.23) that Blizzard heeded our suggestions (inactivity, at the cost of no XP). If you do remain inactive, a message will pop up saying “If you remain inactive, you will receive no XP” (paraphrasing), and at the end of the match, you will receive 0 XP.

However, this is where things turn somewhat sour. As “mmp” mentioned, it is possible to get kicked without warning. For a few of us (including me), as long as we keep scrolling our mouse wheels, we can avoid the out-of-the-blue kick (in the same manner as before the Retribution patch). However, for others, constantly scrolling the mouse wheel doesn’t seem to work. It could be that for those who it does work, they have something “associated” with the mouse wheel (for example, I made my scroll-wheel-click do melee), but this is just conjecture.

Rarely, though, you will get the official AFK warning, from which you can scroll out of, but again, this is rare. You are more likely to get unwittingly kicked then get kicked with a warning preceding the kick.

So, with all of that being said, here are my thoughts.

It feels as though that this new AFK system is a half-baked “hybrid.” While the Blizzard devs began to implement the “inactivity for 0 XP” system, it feels as though they left parts of the old “kicked for inactivity” system in place, resulting in this weird, still-aggressive, and irregular AFK system that can blindside you which, while better than the one implemented right after the Retribution patch, is still not as complete or reliable as the pre-Retribution AFK system.

So, while this recent patch has brought our game back to life, it does so with a couple caveats.

Blizzard, if you are still listening, I want to ask of you this: can you please iron out further this new AFK system, so that it is truly “inactivity for 0 XP”, without any automated kicking, or at least automated kicking WITH fair and obvious warning? It would be very much appreciated. :slight_smile: