D/C experience needs to be improved

Competitive Discussion
1

It sucks when someone disconnects. And I agree that if it is something that happens even moderately, that person should not be playing comp, at least until they solve the issue.

However, the experience of re-joining a game after a disconnect is terrible and wastes a ton of time. I have played the game for years, and have never had a disconnect until yesterday. It happened to me twice in the same game. After the game was finished, I quit, and the next day I replaced my modem. Not even playing around.

That experience ruined the game for the other 5 people because they were down a player. And that could have been mitigated if Blizzard had steps to actually make the re-connect faster.

The issues that I experienced are:

  1. When the game disconnects, I cannot log back into the game directly. I have to completely quit the game, and then re-login thru the Blizzard app.

  2. When I quit the game, the Battle.net app takes quite a bit of time to realize the game isn’t running anymore so it says “Playing”, and I have to completely re-log the Battle.net app or wait for it to sense the game is no longer running to hit “Play”.

The time it took to re-log was easily 50% of an Control objective or more.

Like again I get it a disconnect is always the fault of that player, even when it isn’t intentional, as much as it sucks. But the other 5 players should not be punished for this.

What I would suggest is this:

  • Server should know when packet loss issues are happening. I was getting indications just before it happened. I could hear people, and they couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t move my character.

  • If someone disconnects, the game should pause on the first disconnect. When the play re-joins, they should be put in the same spot, with the same hero and ult charge they started with.

  • If it happens a second time, sure we can consider them “dead” and start in spawn again.

  • There needs to be a fast re-join option. The game client should be able to reestablish a previous session without having to go thru the Battle.net client. The delay is easily 60 seconds or more. This needs to be cut down to <15.

Honestly this makes me wonder how many people are intentionally leaving verses getting disconnected. The process of re-joining is so infuriating and takes so long I can see why people don’t bother.

Again, first time it happened to me, and I made sure everything is good on my end and replaced my modem. I didn’t play again until that was done. The experience just needs to be better so the other 5 people don’t get shafted. The experience can be better.

2 Likes
2

I would hug you if I could.

I greatly appreciate that you are fully aware of the rules of Competitive and that you took great responsibility to ensure that your connection was stable and corrected before attempting to play again. I am not sure if I would go to the extreme lengths of replacing a router right away. I would have spent some time in quick play to see if the connection issue was persistent and then try to figure out if it was purely my connection or somewhere between myself and the game server.

I do find your ideas intriguing and constructive. My only concern is how easy it could be for a dishonest player that is willing to go to any lengths to exploit such features. For example, I would suspect that modding an ethernet cable with a lag switch (a hack exploit common with peer-to-peer online games) is an easy way to fake packet loss in general.

I do agree that there need to be easier ways for the game client itself to recognize a disconnection and not be immediately be hard stuck on the title screen. I myself often have to reboot the game client.

As far as how the game works to handle a leaver with the remaining players, that shifts more toward how Competitive match integrity is balanced.

2 Likes
3

Yeah, I don’t mess around with that. My modem was already 3 years old or getting close to that, and it was DOCSIS 3.0 and Xfinity sent out a notice how they are eventually deprecating that in favor of DOCSIS 3.1.

Had no issues before, but I know the signs of a failing modem, and it only gets worse over time. Not going to risk ruining more peoples games, and defiantly not going to wait it out long enough to get banned.

In the game it happened in I had some people report me, even after I said “this has never happened before”. I re-joined twice. Some people defended me saying “It’s only a game”, etc. but some people were pissed. I don’t blame them.

I’m not sure faking packet loss would be at all beneficial. At least in this case. Those exploits were for older games that didn’t rely on server verification. In those older games you could “glitch” out on the map and move “faster” than other people. Doesn’t work in games like Overwatch.

With this you’d get 1 game pause for 15-20 seconds (assuming they can make the reconnect experience faster) to give the player some time to re-join. There might be a slight advantage in anticipating your next move while the game is paused, but everyone gets that. The sheer disadvantage of being down a player, especially one that re-joins with 0 ult charge, is so big it nearly results in a loss every time.

At the very least the player re-joining should immediately spawn in the spawn room with the same hero with the ult charge they had before. Like if they died and were respawning.

IMO, 1 pause on a disconnect proceeded by packet loss is fairly reasonable. A second disconnect, or any other situation would not pause, but at least would preserve ult charge.

The whole idea is improve the experience for getting that lost player back in as quickly as possible. It’s not about the lost player themselves, it’s about the other 5 people.

We’ve all had a “leaver” and we’ve focused so much on punishing that person. Everyone hates it when it happens. We should be focusing on making re-joining faster and smoother and mitigate as much loss as possible for cases when it isn’t intentional.