Leavers mitigation idea

[Úlfhédinn-1747]

Since appliying RQ in Comp, the lower tier games have become generally playable again with a major exception: leavers toward the beginning of the match.

Given that queue times are higher with RQ for anyone queued as or with DPS roles, its infuriating to wait 15 or 20 mins for a match, get started into the match and a minute in have a “leaver” … who never actually picked a hero or came out of spawn.

In looking for similar topics, WyomingMyst had this suggestion a year ago, which I think bears revisiting:

@Kaedi-11739

One of the biggest problems I am seeing players struggle with is getting disconnected in the pre-game sequence of a Competitive Match. Now players are supposed to be committed to a competitive match once they are paired into that match. However, many disconnections will result in a “Failed to connect to Server” error, while the technical reasons about this are often outside of the hands of either the player or Blizzard to correct (it’s typically due to a problem somewhere in-between the connection). How the match goes about handling it is a bit unbalanced. Here is my solution.

When a player is paired for a match, they should be taken to the loading screen however the loading screen hides the names of all players, their tiers, the map name, and the teams’ average skill ratings. There is then a confirmation button on the screen that each player must press within 30 seconds to confirm they are ready for the match. Once the game receives confirmation of all 12 players, the match stats mentioned above is revealed for about 5 seconds and the match moves to the Hero Selection Screen as normal. If after 30 seconds a player fails to confirm, they are dropped from the match and be given their appropriate Suspension but NOT a match loss or loss of skill rating , and the match will then backfill appropriate players from the queue until the match is confirmed by 12 players. At this point, the competitive leaver protocols that currently exist take over.

The above would be a good start, but given the long queue times, players often go do other things, so this is a side-effect of RQ itself. Let’s do the above but give players 2 mins to click ready, just in case they’re AFK and the match came back faster than thought. If everyone clicks ready it goes as everyone is ready. If at the end of those 2 mins someone doesn’t click in, the players are returned to the top of the queue since they never actually got into the game.

Once this system is in place, given the frustrations of getting a match, once everyone has clicked “ready” and players select heroes, the match is never cancelled if someone leaves.

However, if they leave for whatever reason and are gone for more than 2 mins (from either half of an escort / hybrid / assault or from any individual point on the control maps), they suffer no SR loss, rather they (and also any group they future queue with) will for an increasing period of time and amount be down-weighted in the queue; this should be clearly indicated that there is a queuing penalty on the queuing status box. The individuals will suffer a % penalty for any SR gained, e.g. if they won a match and would have gained 50SR, they would only receive 40, 30, 20, 10SR.

In addition, those penalties would be tracked across Comp play time, so rage quitting on Sunday night when they’re not playing again until Friday still costs them and they can’t just burn time in the arcade or QP as penance, which will also be down-weighted in queue times.

I like RQ, I like that at the Bronze/Silver level it generally re-balanced the game, but the queuing and leaving shenanigans need some love so it’s more fun.