Timeout-penalty for leavers in QP, Arcade & all non-competitive gamemodes
There needs to be some kind of penalty for leaving a match while it’s still ongoing and a timeout would be the perfect solution.
First of all: You would be able to leave during the Assemble your team screen without receiving a timeout penalty.
Now the situation after the Assemble your team screen:
It could be that for a leaver the game crashed or the internet connection went down temporarily. That’s why a leaver should be able to rejoin the match if it’s still ongoing and there’s still space for a player in his earlier team. So if a leaver rejoins the match, there will be no timeout.
The leaver will only have the option to rejoin the match but not queue up for any other gamemode. If he didn’t rejoin the match before it ended or another player already filled up his spot, then he’ll receive a 5-minute timeout. The timer will go down even when the game is closed/they are offline so people with connection issues will usually be able to instantly play again once the connection is back up.
This new timeout penalty would really discourage players from leaving QP/Arcade matches mid-game and letting their team down.
It’s beneficial for everyone:
Teams will have fewer leavers which would otherwise put them at a big disadvantage.
(It can often take a long time for some other person to backfill or no one ever backfills before the match ends and the team would always be down a player.)
It will happen less frequently that enemies are leaving which would otherwise make the match boringly easy to win.
Fewer matches are gonna be canceled which decreases frustration. The current situation is that A LOT of Arcade matches get canceled because of leavers, which is very annoying and shouldn’t happen.
Players are going to be less often thrown out of queue and backfilled into a match that’s already decided and ends 30 seconds after joining which is pretty annoying.
Potential leavers who would leave a match mid-game if there’s no penalty are now discouraged from doing so and therefore have overall shorter queue times and longer playtime. Furthermore, they will have higher winrates because before the penalty if the match isn’t going that great or the teammates seem to be bad, they would just give up & leave it which counts as a loss - but now they’ll have to continue fighting and often will win the match even though they thought it’s unwinnable!
The conclusion is that a timeout for leavers is needed and it would improve the overall Overwatch gameplay experience.
Thanks for reading and please share your feedback!
People ditch matches because the Match maker flatout stinks. Maybe ask blizzard to do a better job at arranging matches first, before asking for time-out penalties.
I dont know if you have ever played team fortress 2 or not. This game is fairly similar to it. People come and go. And unless this is a competitive mode where there is no backfills. You are pretty much playing a side version of “Whos line is it anyway” where the points are made up and a win doesn’t matter.
You aren’t going to gain a lootbox any faster and most wins and losses are fairly equalized across the board. The system stinks at building a fair match and any effort to make a ‘fair’ match doesn’t exist.
Not to be rude, but if you do NOT like leavers. Find 5 other friends to play the game with or play competitive. I mean I think I’ve heard this discussion at least 10 times a month. and most of the time people are leaving around people because they are causing the problems, themselves. But in the off-chance you are a kind person and have bad luck. That is about all I can say.
Yup, some people would do that, but the majority would continue playing.
And then there’s also the report function so players being afk will get punished.
A timeout penalty for leavers would have guaranteed positive effects:
-Less people leaving matches
-Less matches being canceled
I felt like most people who play QP and Arcade are really just there to goof off. It’s a very different environment from competitive play. So I don’t think a leaver penalty will entice casual players to play competitively
Even when you think your teammates are bad or the enemy team is just too strong and the match is not going so well, your team can always still turn around the situation and win. Furtherore, even if you lose a match, you could’ve still had great plays, cool moments and fun while playing.
So just giving up and letting your team down is not justified.
Especially when you’re in a full group and doing well, enemies are gonna leave more often and matches get canceled again and again.
I want a solution that improves the situation and the gameplay experience for everyone.
I and millions of other OW players have more fun playing Arcade than competitive and it’s a completely different experience depending on the gamemode.
Most of the time players don’t leave in my team - instead enemies are leaving. And then it only needs one or two people to leave and the rest of the enemies follow and the match gets canceled and then you’ll be in the queue again. Furthermore the current situation is that the match will count as a loss if too many enemies leave and it gets canceled. (More on that here: Arcade: When a match gets canceled, it counts as a loss!)
So your winrate is going down for playing well and you’re literally being punished for enemies giving up & leaving.
Nah, If I leave a garbage game with toxic players and know I have no option but to rejoin that game or wait I am just going to log out and play one of the myriad of other games out there.
This game is far to dead to be penalizing the few people left.
People ditch matches because they lost the first round or point and think it’s because the matchmaker stinks. There are plenty of times in Control maps where one team gets stomped the first round, but manages to stomp back on the next round. Some kids just get frustrated by the perceived loss and decide to ruin the integrity of the match by ditching early and forcing a substitute to get queued in.
It makes even less sense when someone ditches early on something like Mystery Heroes. It’s all RNG, why leave early?
And let’s not forget how people complain about joining a game only to see a “Defeat” screen. You know what stops that from happening? If people don’t leave with 30 seconds left because they already assume the match is lost. It’s incredibly frustrating that a player can be the worst teammate and ditch their team in the final moments, only to be rewarded by being able to queue into their next match sooner.
As far as penalties go. I’d rather just see the leaver get 11x avoids from the players they abandoned. Possibly leave it on a 12 or 24 hour cooldown versus the 7-day avoid that you set manually. This way, repeat offenders eventually run into longer and longer queue times for that day.
Sadly I don’t believe it would help. As others pointed out, if they were “forced” to stay, they would throw so hard you might wish they would just leave instead of trolling your match, even in QP.
And it’s going to be even worse in OW2. When the team is completely not up to the task, and the scoreboard confirms it, people will ditch left and right. Especially in the support roll, where the queue is nearly instantaneous. Why suffer through a terrible match, when a new game is 15 seconds away.
And understand, I dislike leavers, if for no other reason than I get pulled into more backfills than I care to count because of them.
There either is such a small player pool that it’s difficult to create a fair match in a timely fashion. Or the matchmaker is just bad. I stopped playing tonight because of it. We just kept stomping teams, which is zero fun.
It seems like no matter what they do to try and stop it, there will just be another issue to take its place.
Instead of blaming the players who don’t want to waste precious time of their lives getting inevitably stomped why don’t you blame Blizzards garbage matchmaking where every other match is lopsided?
It’s QP. There’s no SR on the line. You can leave just like they can. Some matches are flatout unwinnable. Get over it.
Due the nature of the game, matches often are too small on duration and often the player can’t go back when actually is a game issue and sometimes they’re not in groups.
QP/Arcade demotes your endorse level and gives you xp penalty. While you can rejoin the match you stick with those penalties anyways.
The problem with that is not always blizzard can put the leaver again and neither the leaver can rejoin the match that easily. Their system aren’t that well planned for it. If you have a group can be more easily because often if you drop from the match you don’t drop from the group even if the game crashes.
That’s why Comp nobody “backfill” the spot and they wait for you to rejoin even if most of the time you can’t because the game simply doesn’t help you at all to do so.
Games being cancelled are often based on server issues or folks leaving before the assembly phase. Which wouldn’t reflect penalties for anybody.
During my 800+ hours in Arcade I rarely have experienced “toxic” players nor do they lead me to leave the match and I just ignore them. Maybe you should do the same.
Can you give some examples of people being “toxic” to you and also explain why you don’t simply leave the VC or block them to not see their messages and then just continue playing the game?
Leaving the match and letting down your team in the most crucial moment when your teammates need you is one of the most toxic things you can do.
You left your teammates alone which makes it way more likely for them to lose and have a worse experience. Just because you don’t like one player in your team doesn’t justify that the whole team gets punished because of you abandoning them. Having to wait 5 minutes is completely reasonable after that.
Sure, that’s why over 8.5 million active players play OW monthly
(activeplayer .io/overwatch) and…
Overwatch jumped from the 57th most purchased game to fifth between May and June 2022. This leap is a massive improvement and something that no other game has done in 2022.
For Overwatch fans hoping for a renaissance of the hero shooter, this is as strong an indication as any that hype is brewing.
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Do you not want to decrease the amount of leavers also in your team that just give up after losing the first teamfight which greatly decreases your chances of winning and playing well?
The game should have a better system to enable the player rejoin the match, but at same time the odds of the match being backfilled before you rejoin is too high on those matches because the nature of those matches are “quick” finding players to play.
They have penalties but folks often just don’t care about them, at same time they should improve the system to enable folks rejoin matches more easily.
I’m not really for a leaver penalty outside of Competitive. If people don’t want to play against certain heroes, or are being treated poorly by a teammate then I don’t blame them for leaving.
In my opinion what they should do is make QP and arcade games full rounds. That way people have a better chance of playing a decent round.
That’s not really reliable because people would need to go and watch the replay to know who left because they won’t appear in the recent match info and only appear in the long recent players list.
Furthermore you only have 3 avoid slots and increasing that number has other unwanted consequences.
The 5 minute timeout seems like the best solution.
Or make it 3 minutes, just something pls!
I’m saying the 11x avoids would be an automation for the leaver; the players from the match don’t need to avoid the leaver, the leaver has already avoided the players. You leave a match early, you instantly avoid the 11 players you abandoned. That way, the following queues take longer, and if you queue into a match with the players you ditched, they will always play against you and are more likely beneficiaries of the match if you choose to leave again.
I suggested a shorter 12 or 24 hour avoid timer than the 7 day one because the leaves are more localized to the timeframe of queuing within the same play session.
A 3-5 min leave penalty also makes sense. It’s not as harsh as the 15 comp leave penalty, and doesn’t penalize the player too harshly if they DC’d. By the time they log back in, the timer will already be down a couple of minutes.
Well seems like most leavers don’t care about their endorsement level or that joke XP penalty and there’s no option to report someone because they left the game, this is currently not punishable in QP/Arcade.
I agree with you, but how often does it happen that the game crashes or your internet connection goes down? Once every 3 days?
Then having to wait 5 minutes is not a big deal.
Actually you can easily rejoin a match in QP/Arcade if you’re quick enough and no other player backfilled.
Is that true? I thought the xp earned at the rate of playtime through a match. The “penalty” is just not getting the bonuses at the end of the match, like backfill, consecutive, and medal xp bonuses. I don’t think there’s an actual reduction of xp for leaving a match.
And I’m also pretty sure your endorsement rating is only impacted by leaving a competitive match.
Then again, that’s just my understanding. I’ve never left a match intentionally, and I haven’t monitored those stats in the rare cases of a DC.
Let’s consider the viewpoint of your earlier team: They are down one player which greatly decreases their chances of winning. It’s way more important for your earlier team to get another teammate ASAP so that the match continues to be fair and not a 2v3/3v4/5v6 than it is for one leaver to potentially rejoin.
And how often does the game crash or the internet connection goes down? Once every 3 days? Then it’s not a big deal to wait 5 minutes. Go to the toilet and you’ll be able to play again.
