Continuing the discussion from Overwatch 2 Retail Patch Notes - December 5, 2023:
So obviously previous penalties weren’t enough, now they’re increased (and prob still wont have any meaningful impact). When are you going to fix the cause of this? You know… matchmaking. Keep treating symptoms and ignore the real problem.
As someone who has benefitted from the decreased leavers in my games, might I suggest not leaving matches and you too can reap the benefits of not getting penalized for taking a placebo to satiate your ego’s inability to process defeat?
We might also consider that Blizard should first address WHY people are leaving.
You know, something that would have an immediate and positive benefit to the games health and reduce both leavers and throwers all in one go.
Or, you can continue to plug your ears singing “la la la I can’t hear youuuuuu” and just ignore the problems altogether and solve nothing.
Matchmaking isn’t fixable. I’ve talked about this previously many times. Without hero lock, the MMR system is too basic and the matchmaking simply cannot function with accuracy. Overwatch fundamentally cannot have good matchmaking.
The only other way to improve things, that I can think of, is to build the game away from hard counters. That is a long-term goal, one Blizzard said they had for OW2, but haven’t exactly had much success.
In no particular order:
Ego
Perceived imbalance/unfairness
Life Occurrences
Network Issues
Map preferences
Disagreements
You can’t fix perception if the player is hardstuck on years (if not decades) of a belief that they’re better than they actually are.
You also can’t fix networks for other players, nor can you cure the perception of unfairness, or disagreements with other players, and you have to be careful about how you fix map preferences and frequency. There are going to be detractors to various degrees despite even the best of intentions and fixes.
The leaver penalty is a blow to ego more than anything, and it’s necessary to no uncertain degree. The new changes go a bit far admittedly, but they’ve so far not been unwelcome by players who are affected by the leaver issues.
The quality of any game in question has never been a factor of why players leave matches, but rather a scapegoat.
Think of an example of an objectively phenomenal competitively geared multiplayer title, and guess what? Leavers still plague other players’ experiences to comparable degrees as they do here.
what do you expect out of a garbage tier dev and balance team honestly they dont seem to care about fixing the real problem
I like that you try to say “no particular order”, but the one that you list as first is the one you blame predominantly on why people leave. You can’t even be honest in your own “list”, so why should we trust you with other things?
You can match them with people of similar skill sets and not wildly imbalanced lobbies where a Gold player is pitted against Masters+.
You can’t fix networks, but you can improve your server quality. It’s not like Blizzard/Activision is hurting for money. They can always add more servers and improve latency with them.
You also can easily fix map preference by giving players the ability to vote, as I stated early on in another discussion. Giving people 3 options (Map A | Map B | New Random Map) gives the lobby the chance to vote and decide what they want to play. There is no inherent risk to match making or risk of fracturing the player pool by allowing a vote within the game mode chosen (UnRanked/Mystery/Etc…).
It’s a mark of a company trying to prioritize money over quality. It’s very simple, and we all know what’s going on. I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet. It’s all about engagement. Forcing more engagement means more opportunity to encourage people to spend money on content packs. That’s all it is. It always comes back to money.
The quality has always literally been a factor in matches I leave. Whether it’s gameplay quality, connectivity quality, or frame-rate quality. The quality of the match perhaps one of the biggest factors in why people quit. Incidentally, all 3 could be rectified by a competent gaming company that gave a crap about its player base.
The fact of the matter is, Overwatch is dying. Player counts continue to trend downwards as more and more players move onto Apex, Fortnite, and Call of Duty. Overwatch can no longer sustain with it’s player count the way it is which is why they’re trying the route of forced engagement to make up for it.
Rather than improve the quality of gameplay and actually address issues that could easily solve a large majority of the problems, they dig in and simply double down on them. Probably due to pressure from activision.
I’m not sure whether you just genuinely don’t understand, or if you’re expecting something in return for shilling for blizzard so hard in regards to the penalties for quitting, but if it’s the latter, just know you’re not gonna get anything worthwhile.
If you genuinely have an interest in seeing the game become better, then you should be pushing, like us, for Blizzard to improve these aspects of the game. There is literally absolutely ZERO downside to fixing these problems.
What’s the worst that’ll happen? The problems will be fixed and people still leave matches. Worst case scenario, they have a game with better quality of life. That’s not exactly a net-loss for the company.
Honestly, I recommend not wasting your time with this person.
On the topic, Team 4 is absolutely clueless about how to make this game actually good, and I’m pretty sure nothing will change.
They’re desperately trying to fix things in the wrong way, and they are not ready for the consequences.
Honesty they do need better servers… I’m from PR so im pretty far from florida and the servers kick me out, especially when seasons starts…
I never leave games, it kicks me out… and now ill get hard penalized because of them
My setup and internet are so good that it brings me back in secs so i know for a fact its their servers…
So how is it fair that i get penalized because of them
Plus i only play Quick Play…
I just want to have fun and enjoy my evening
And now… well i guess im screwed
People will keep praising this blindly like they did with role queue and ignoring the issues it is going to bring alongside it.
They shouldn’t hold us at gunpoint to play horrible matches, but give us incentive to keep playing games. More EXP? Skins? Would be nice to have as just a little reward for playing since lootboxes are gone
Honestly i love this game… but if this keeps up I’ll probably stop playing it
Shocker, but they can work on match making AND punish leavers. It’s not a mutually exclusive decision they have make.
If this is how they are going to treat us in Overwatch. its time their glorious (redacted) game director hears the hard truth. If you force us to play the game without leaving. its called get your (redacted) act together and actually take the job serious now. Make the game more pleasant or the community needs to call for him to Resign.
Its time for community demands now: and for us telling them “no”.
The arrogant (redcated) game director needs to start charging MONEY for their GD game again. BOTTOM line. 30 dollars for a copy of this game.
If we are PC computer players, we should be allowed to select MAPs that we want to play on. 1/3rd Their random maps are T-rash. Pure T-rash and a waste of time.
"avoid this player needs to be BACK, and it needs to be “AVOID THIS PLAYER” - not “team mate”. Player… "p l a y e r " . with the list expanded to 10 players.
hero Bans.
Unless a person is Q’d for crossplay with friends that are crossplaying. NO MORE. absolutely no more GD crossplayers in our matches unless we specifically Q with someone that is. it makes for absolute (redacted) unplayable matches with complete garbo hit registration.
Its time to turn the clock back on all the changes made in this game to heroes and put Overwatch 1 back in. All of the changes to the game’s heroes make this game complete garbo.
Oh my apologies: *except for the first two.
I didn’t leave anything out for why people quit. Take it or leave it, I don’t try to hide my biases.
Worked fine for Halo 3, people loved that game regardless of the inherent and blatant imbalance. Hell, it only became an issue in OW2 after players felt stiffed by Blizz, they complained about the same thing in OW1 but were far less vitriolic and acidic in their vocalization.
This perception of unfairness is just that. I had an issue with running into T500’s as a plat back in the day, until I discovered I could beat them and was beating them fairly routinely.
I see a ton of people suggesting network issues, but not a whole hell of a lot of them actually taking steps to diagnose it using tools outside of simple run of the mill diagnostics.
Until players can collectively definitively prove it’s not them (which Blizzard has addressed issues as such in the past directly) then it’s most likely on the players’ ends.
Not so much without starkly affecting the frequency of certain modes/maps. A straight democracy in gaming is antiquated. But at least it’s a step forward in general discussion before official mechanics are added.
Call it engagement, I call it having a match where I don’t have to worry about a player leaving and costing us anywhere from 10-120 seconds of lost ground.
I don’t give a hoot if it’s to keep the Blizzard money pipeline flowing, I don’t want a lopsided 4v5 match and that’s distinctly what I’m seeing less of because of the penalty.
That’s anecdotal at best my guy.
Leavers plague the competitive gaming scene regardless of the quality of title or the incentives/deterrents that are implemented. Point me to one single game that isn’t affected by leavers because it’s just that damn good, I’ll wait.
Ah the ad hominems begin.
Two truths:
They did improve when the leaver penalties were implemented, now there can be changes to better improve the overall QOL for players who want to play the game.
And for the record, I too am “us” 
Link me the stats of it dying. Every quantifiable and reputable metric available to both you and me suggests a stabilized population in line with late-‘17-late-‘18 OW1 at worst and slow growth at the best. Everything about the game “dying” that you latch onto outside of stats pertaining to this game’s players involvement is conjecture and anecdotal in the face of cold hard data, objectively
Apex, CoD and Fortnite are the kings of gaming right now and for the foreseeable future, what do you want a team based hero shooter to do? Beat the psychologically driven BR’s that replaced the team shooters of ‘00-‘14? Because OW will never do that no matter how objectively good it is. Counter strike can’t even do that.
Why does a losing match ever make leaving it OK? 
From their investor report in July. I can’t post links so just get rid of the gap after the h in the https.
h ttps://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/activision-blizzard-announces-second-quarter-2023-financial
OW2 engagement and player investment on decline, but we are looking forward to Season 6: Invasion
They pretty much said user engagement has gone downhill. I’m sure that there are dead cat bounces (K pop collab, start of seasons etc.) but it’s for sure dying.
To be fair, I am relatively certain that they have a grasp on their target audience and those people are not particularly known for critical thinking. That’s probably why Blizzard prefers them.
OW1 goes from 26th on the Xbox “most played games” charts (March 2022) to 3rd at OW2’s launch. From there it falls to 14th (July) at lowest, and has stabilized around 11th-13th.
If you go from 3rd to 14th, yes it fell, but it stabilized higher after spiking from OW1’s lowest points, as high (if not even slightly higher) as when OW1 was considered “peak” by the some of the playerbase.
I just gave you cold hard data in response to vague allusions. I’m gonna need more than a board meeting’s words when I have first party metrics from Xbox and Steam Charts to point to showing what was alluded to.
So are you saying that Blizzard lied to their investors about OW2 losing player engagement?