And people are getting logged off from games. I’ve not played comp at all today to avoid SR troubles but I got booted from a few QP games.
And then I see this now:
https://i.imgur.com/IkpSeb3.jpg (Repeatedly leaving matches early will result in a penalty).
So even though Blizzard has enough information to know these disconnections are not the players’ fault, they are still counting it against some threshold when a penalty will be given.
This happened to me in QP but if I was playing comp, I’m sure I would get an 8-hour ban and lose SR.
My question: Why not disregard these disconnections when there is a widespread outage going on?
People need to understand that these systems are automated and there isn’t an actual Blizzard employee monitoring people that leave games and issuing penalties on them manually.
Obviously I can’t state why they don’t just disable the system during an outage but my guess would be that it’s too woven into the matchmaker and stuff to be disabled as in, it’d be too much of an hassle.
Think it should be kind of a no-brainer not to play competitive if it’s known that the servers are acting up, there’s a maintenance or something similar.
If you leave QP a bunch you just get -75% EXP I get it all the time on my moira only account in QUICKPLAY cause I can’t select anything if Moira is taken so I have to let the game kick me out.
Hey there, there have been updates to this. Blizzard Customer Support have identified the issue specifically to certain Internet Service Providers.
As a reminder, all disconnections and game crashes counts as leaving the match and will be penalized appropriately. The game server has no way to discern a legitimate disconnection or game crash from one that is forcefully caused by a dishonest player to bypass leaver penalties. You can learn about this policy here:
EDIT/UPDATE: Blizzard made a follow up post, it sounds like they are working with the ISPs to reroute players affected off the affected backbone hub:
Nope, its Dan the unpaid intern and papa Jeff’s yes man. He is the rude one who puts warnings on our screens and chooses the worse line ups for arcade games.
We have heard this many times here but there are many humans working in this outage right now that could be able to make that call and disable this system when it’s affecting a lot of people.
So OW is down for 4-5 hours, what’s the harm in ignoring the penalties during that time for everybody?
The people that left games maliciously will have avoided yet another step towards a penalty… but they likely will do that in the near future anyway. They will not complain in forums, twitter or with technical support that they got penalized… they know why.
The people that didn’t do anything wrong will get wrongfully penalized, will get angry, will complain to friend (“Blizzard is this, Blizzard is that”), will make angry posts on the forums (wink wink), etc.
Just have an automated systems that find all players with disconnections during the outage and cancel their penalties. It’s very simple, you don’t even need AI or anything for that. Pretty simple IT operations process.
They can disable Competitive for everyone, but this is only affecting a portion of our community. I have only seen them disable Competitive once for a region due to a game/server-related issue.
The problem by stopping penalties is that this gives risk for players to abuse Competitive by fake disconnecting during losing matches in order to inflate their skill rating. Also, most problems take only a short time to resolve (not this specific time, but most times).
Remember the penalty starts small at only a 10 minute suspension. Also any SR loss can be easily recovered as the loss does not direct affect the actual hidden matchmaking rating. So as you continue to play matches, you easily recover your SR to get back to your true skill rating.
Again, there is no way to distinguish disconnections versus those who do this:
I know this sounds frustrating, but really in most cases, issues that affect Blizzard are mostly outside of their control. In this case, it was a backbone hub that overloaded (which is why it affected a lot of players, but not the whole community), while Blizzard is able to work to reroute players off that hub, it still a problem that they have to reach out to network providers like Level3, or ISPs to resolve. Which is why this took a little while to fix.
You keep posting this gif but it’s not funny, really. There are ways to know that but I won’t get into the details of low-level TCP/IP networking and collecting debugging data from processes.
My suggestion is to go through all the players that were disconnected during a known outage on Blizzard’s side and cancel their penalties so it doesn’t count against some threshold. Nothing else. Pretty simple to implement.
I don’t care if a major backbone ISP is down and neither should Blizzard. For all players know, it’s their service/product that is down. End of history. Especially when Twitter/forums are flooded with complaints. Arguing about this is bad customer service and distracts from finding a real solution.
