There seems to be some sort of edge case with the “leave game” button where if you click it right after the game ends, it can still count as leaving an in-progress game.
Recently I had a frustrating experience playing a competitive match, so in the last moments of the match, when I was absolutely certain that we would lose before I respawned, I was in the “leave game” submenu ready to click the “leave game” confirmation button. I did not care about the PotG, nor the toxic things my teammates were going to say in chat, so I basically left less than half a second after the game ended. This resulted in my account erroneously being penalized with a 10 minute competitive ban and -50 SR.
How do I know that I didn’t accidentally leave the game early? Anyone who’s accidentally clicked the “leave game” button on the Esc menu during a competitive match knows that the confirm/cancel screen has a big red banner that warns you about the penalties for leaving the game early. This big red banner displaces the actual “leave” and “cancel” buttons down closer to the bottom of screen. When the game actually ends, the big red banner goes away, returning the “leave” and “cancel” buttons to the original spots in the middle of the screen.
While I was waiting to leave the aforementioned game, I was hovering my mouse cursor over where I knew the leave button would be after the game ended, not where it was while the game was still active. So even if I did click too soon, it would not have caused me to leave the game, since I would have clicked the red banner, which is not a clickable UI element.
It seems that the game’s UI was reporting to me that the game was over before it was actually over. This is an frustrating and disheartening user experience. It’s not a good feeling to know that the game might penalize you for doing nothing wrong because of latency or a race condition. I think that ideally, this “leave game” confirmation submenu would only reflect the game state of the actual server, and not try to predict whether the game is okay leave based on the client’s local clock.
Furthermore, I would like to request that someone on the Blizzard team take a look at my player profile and, if it can be justified, reverse the action taken against my account. Presumably, your logs should indicate that I left less than half a second before the game actually ended. I don’t ever leave competitive games (the only other time I’ve ever left one early was a few months ago due to a D/C), so it should be easy to find the game I’m talking about. It took place on today (3/10/18) in the late morning (some time after 11:00 AM). I apologize if this is not the correct place to request such consideration. If the team needs any additional information about my configuration that might be relevant to reproducing this bug (such as physical location, PC specs, internet speed, etc.), I would be happy to provide it.
Thanks and happy hunting,
An avid player