Overwatch - Leavers

They can’t raise leaver penalty anymore though. They have to take into account people who disconnect for reasons out of their control. Internet connection drops, power outages, or server issues happen from time to time to everyone. They are just things the player could not have predicted.

There is also the fact that some people leave voluntarily for legitimate reasons. Emergencies could happen when you are playing too. What if someone in your house needed to go to the hospital? What if you spilled coffee on your legs and started feeling harsh burns? What if you saw your pet/baby chewing on an electric cable?

They have to make some negative consequences to discourage leaving, however they can’t go completely ham and banish you to the shadow realm because there are some circumstances where leaving is either out of the player’s control, or for a good excuse.

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I always agree that life happens, but if it would happen to me I would gladly pay for it with my points for the whole team, the team does not get any penalty and that is it.

If it’s my fault, i should be the one penalized not the whole team regardless of reason, it’s my internet connection - so it’s my fault, it’s my power provider so it’s my fault, it’s my “rage” quit - it’s my fault so I should pay for it.

Not on a statistical level - where if you quit X matches in Y time you get Z penalty, and then when it’s X*2 they increase your penalty and so on and so fort. It should be from the first time.

It sounds harsh ? Yes. Is it harsh ? - Debatable Is it fair to the other players in the team - Yes.

That’s very noble and all, but is EASILY abusable by boosters. You stack with someone who has a burner account (an account they don’t care about SR on), and whenever you feel like it’s a lost game, let the burner account leave so you don’t lose any points for the match. Rinse and repeat until you hit top 500.

I know it sucks. We’ve all been there. You have a leaver on your team and you are pissed that you are losing a full load of SR regardless. But understand that this is in place to protect the integrity of ranked.

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So we are returning to my original statement, if Blizzard can make the experience of a Top 500 / Pro / Streamer at 110% with the cost of “normal players” matches to be ruined by leaver or more - we move on.

P.S: Last week almost 50% of my matches had at least one leaver in them, record was 3, I always reported - of course no result, but we have to take it and move on.

As for Burner accounts - You have IP an address, MAC address tons of ways “to protect” if you truly want to - You can link check the accounts if they were paired, etc. But again - why renounce on the 40-50 Eur spent on a new copy - More profit :slight_smile:

They do it on sites like Reddit where people scam or troll people so we should be able to do it on here. The only reason is blizz puts up a fake facade of caring. The only people they are hurting are the ones who abide by the rules

You do realize that even the top players get leavers, right? Streamers have gone through the leaver experience countless times and it has happened on their streams too (i.e the incidents are documented).

There isn’t some conspiracy for the top 1% regarding this matter. Having a leaver in high GM ELO is handled exactly the same as Plat or Bronze leavers.

That’s just unlucky. We can’t do anything but move on.

IP and MAC addresses can easily be spoofed.

The starting penalty for leaving a Competitive match is 10 minutes suspended from the Competitive Play mode and a full 50 SR loss. This suspension time increases if the player continues to leaving multiple Competitive matches. It can take as little as six consecutive leaver violations to trigger a season ban. A player who is banned from the competitive play season will forfeit all end of season rewards including bonus competitive points. Furthermore, a player who is banned from three Competitive Play seasons will receive a permanent ban from Competitive Play.

The starting penalty is relatively small but firm because Blizzard knows that many players do not leave a Competitive game on purpose, but they have disconnected or crashed in some manner. Disconnections and crashes are no fun and getting penalized for it can feel like salt in the wound, but by penalizing all forms of leaving including those caused by technical malfunctions. Bad leaver behavior including being ignorant of technical issues can be corrected. On a side note, Blizzard will never use increasing skill rating penalties or make the leaver take the SR loss from the rest of the team because this would give players an easy way to deliberately tank their rank in order to smurf lower rank matches.

The remaining team members take a loss because if there was any form of compensation, some players could try to become disruptive and bully other players into leaving the match. This was a bad problem back during season 1 when the game used to compensate for when there was a leaver.

With all of this being said, I did recently confirm during the Reddit AMA with Principal Designer Scott Mercer that the Overwatch team is looking to revise key rules for leaving games in Overwatch and we should be expecting changes sometime soon.

That really irritates me. And what pisses me off more is that blizzard have no solution for balancing the teams in a COMPETITIVE mode. How is this even considered a cometitive game?

Not to mention, this problem with people leaving all the time (in any mode) seems to be exclusive to OW only. Just take a look at Paladins. You will rarely see any leavers there.

Also no matter how harsh the punishment for leaving will be, people will still do it because the game doesn’t reward individual skill. If your team sux, there is nothing you can do about to change that if the game doesn’t let you solo carry.

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Are you talking about matchmaking or balancing when there is a leaver? The development team doesn’t believe that “Catch Up” mechanics are a good idea because they will be perceived to be overpowered or pointless to have to begin with.

Matchmaking for the most part is based around the general SR range of the 12 players involved with consideration to connection quality and group sizes. There used to be more strict measures, but they were removed at the start of season 17 in order to make Role Queue work effectively.

There should be something to compensate for a missing player. Anything. Having 1 player less in a game like this is fatal. 99% of the time it is a guaranteed lose. I don’t really know how it can be any worse. Even QA has backfill and it is not even a competitive mode. It is just mind blowing they left unresolved for s long such a major flaw.

Competitive does not use any form of backfill, this is because it is a ranked match with specific SR/MMR amongst the original 12 players.

A backfill scenario in a competitive match would feel terrible for the team who did not have the leaver, if a backfill came in and carried the match.

It really shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a solution for backfill without affecting the SR or MMR in a drastic way. Lets say getting SR only for winning as backfill and not losing any for a lost game etc (or just reduced amount of SR change for backfill. Just a throw away ideas.).

So how it is any better for the team with the leaver? Is playing 5vs6 more fair?
Also very unlikely to have solo carry in a losing team.

It’s not fair for the team without the leaver. However its more fair for the overall match in consideration of all players involved. Also it is important to remember that as long as you are not deliberately leaving matches yourself, you put yourself at technically better odds of having less leavers than your opponents in the long run. Furthermore, you can group up with reliable friends at your rank to minimize your impact of leavers even more.

But most of the time people leave just so they can have “revenge” on their bad team by leaving them play 6vs5 and they do it because they can.

I just don’t think some middle ground will make the things any worse. The situation can only improve. People have been asking for ages for at least having a bot as a replacement.

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Have you ever played with the current AI? They just constantly feed, and technically even a bot falls under the same reason why player backfills don’t happen.

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Well, I never said having a bot is the best idea. Just that everyone is desperate for a change that they would prefer even a bot over nothing.

As I stated in my original reply there are changes coming soon, but I anticipate they will be more likely to deter players from trying to play again if they leave a game (possibly low-priority queues if anything).

In the end, being desperate for a change in the rules of Competitive Play or the leaver system does mean the game has to immediately change right away. There have been many planned and deliberate changes in the early days of Overwatch when handling leavers, but there have been many reasons why many ideas don’t happen. I have tracked these responses from the devs here.

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Harsher punishment has been tried few times in the past and it never worked.

There has to be something to encourage you to stay in the match… but even with that if a person leave due faulty connection etc, their team is still going to suffer regardless.

I would have to disagree with this. I have never left a match in 150 hours of competitive gameplay, yet in 60% of my competitive games I still have leavers in my game.

Appreciate this is a tricky thing to address. But fully addressing this should be high on the developer’s agenda. As for many this is ruining the overall experience, of an otherwise great game.

What you have to understand is that anyone, including you, can be subjected to any form of technical issue without warning, and this is a good portion of leavers in the game. Yes there are those who deliberately leave, and there are those who leave for not very good reasons (and in rare cases… for very good reasons).

Remember in the end, this is just a video game and while Competitive needs to provide a serious fun experience, this is still just a game.