Incentives for leavers to rejoin

[epicanova-1741]

First I want to preface that I don’t leave games, nor have I disconnected from a game in more than a year. Today I had my first game crash in a long time, and this occurred to me.

It’s silly that you can rejoin games after 2 minutes, win the game, and still get -50 SR and a competitive ban. What incentive do leavers have to rejoin games after the 2 minutes is up?

If they rejoin after 2 minutes and it’s a loss, fair enough. Give them a ban and drop their SR for contributing to the loss.

But if someone rejoins, and their team wins the game, there is absolutely zero reason why a leaver penalty should be imposed. Why hasn’t this been thought over in the 6 years the game has been out?

[Kaedi-11739]

@epicanova-1741

What incentive do leavers have to rejoin games after the 2 minutes is up?

Well, if they are a good morally-centered person technically try to help their team win. (Yeah, I know that is a lot to ask for.)

Unfortunately, the limited-time to return rule is to prevent leaver abuse to get around any penalties. Say a ragequitting leaver leaves right at the end of the first team fight gone badly, you don’t want that player trying to return when the match is about to end in order to avoid increased suspension times (especially if they have been leaving a lot of their games). There is also a rule that if you leave more than three times in a single match, it will result in a leaver penalty as well (to prevent hi-jacking other players from choosing to leave via the 2-minute forfeit option). Another reason for these rules is to discourage those who bad connections or technical issues from trying to play right away again. Yes, a technical issue can happen to anyone at any given time (and that is why the starting penalty is only 15 minutes), but if players think they can work their way back in by resetting and finishing the match, that means they are less likely to stop playing Competitive and work to correct whatever it is that is causing them to disconnect or crash. Even if you were to account for the match result, these problems of negative behavior would still be seen in the game, so regardless of the match result, a person gone for more than 2-minutes or leaves multiple times will be disqualified.

For more details, please read Blizzard official post here:

Overwatch Technical Issues, SR Loss, and Leaver Penalties

Hey everybody, I wanted to take some time today to discuss Leaver Penalties and how they relate to Technical issues. We understand that leaver penalties are an annoying thing to experience. Technical issues can be complicated to troubleshoot. To add penalties to your account can seem like adding insult to injury. This isn’t our intent. The competitive penalty system may not be perfect, but there is reason behind it. When we created the leaver penalty system, we took in a lot of player feedbac…

[epicanova-1741]

How will the leaver know when the game is about to end so they can rejoin? Games can last anywhere from 5 minutes to 20+ minutes, it’s impossible to know unless you have a friend in the game.

And it’s not like you can feasibly queue with a friend, troll your team by leaving, and get your friend to tell you if you’re about to win. The vast majority of those games will be losses, and you’ll quickly rack up lengthy bans.

I just don’t see how this can be abused. It only provides leavers with an incentive to undo their penalty by rejoining the game, playing really well and helping their team win. It also accounts for the fact that 2 minutes is kind of short, without allowing for abuse.

What if I’m on DSL and I get a dropout maybe once every few weeks, but it takes 3-4 minutes to reconnect? What if I have a 5 second power outage and it takes a few minutes for my PC to boot up again? Is the answer to never play comp because your internet or power might drop out on rare occasions?

You can’t make the grace period any longer for obvious reasons, but if you come back and help your team win, why should you be banned?

More importantly, if your internet does drop out for a few minutes, what incentive is there to rejoin and help your team win? You’ve already lost 50 SR and copped a 15 minute ban. It just encourages people to go and play something else until their ban is over.