Rant about Leaving Penalties

My girlfriend recently kept getting the “Rendering devices lost, shutting down” error in her games and so naturally, she is leaving a lot of the games. Whenever we try a method to fix the issue, we have to test in quick play, and if she crashes again, then the leaving penalties add up. I still haven’t been able to fix the error, we tried many methods including the disk restore health, sfc scan, cleaning drivers, reinstalling drivers, using nvidia profile cleaner, reinstalling the game, scanning the game, etc.

So to avoid being banned again, I said, we can play in Arcade to see if the errors appear. I chose 6v6 cuz it is a mode that has more players to test the problem. What i didn’t know is that the 6v6 in THE ARCADE PLAYLIST, YES THE ARCADE PLAYLIST, WOW THE ARCADE PLAYLIST, THE PLAYLIST THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE FUN AND CHILL WOW, AND THE PLAYLIST THAT SUPPOSED TO LET YOU TEST STUFF, still has leaving penalties active so she got banned for 2 hours when she eventually crash again.

I still remember people fervently defending this fundamentally intelligently challenged gamedev decision, and said go play Arcade if you want to leave. Like yea, now we have leaving penalties in Arcade now.

I seriously do not comprehend the logic of leaving penalties. It is a bandaid solution to all the hidden problems of this game. It serves nothing but alienates the playerbase, further splitting the already divided and toxic playerbase.

Rainbow Six Siege, a very competitive game, even more competitive than OW2 itself, also has a Quick Play mode and they don’t have leaving penalties.

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My understanding is that the penalty in arcade is exclusive and special cased for 6v6 because its a main game mode that they extended and for some reason couldnt keep it on the main unranked page.

That said, if you’re trying to stress test the issue, It may be useful to try finding custom games like 500%/TinyOW or something where a ton of stuff is happening. I dont know how frequently the issue occurs, though.

The logic is that there are a bunch of people ruining the game for everyone else because they leave mid game or after the first fight every time theres even the slightest chance of losing. People got fed up and asked blizzard to do something about it for ages, and they did.

Your scenario happens to be pretty fringe case where leaving is actually unintentional. It is unfortunate but there are definitely ways to address the technical issue without potentially causing issues for other people.

i tested it in custom games with bots and stuff with my gf and the issue did not appear, only when we play in proper gamemodes, like quick play. But Quick Play has leaving penalties so i took it to arcade

and i think leaving penalties is a bandaid solution to the matchmaking in quickplay, it is very frequent that you get matches that you just get blown to smithereens. So naturally, people are fed up of being rolled, so they quit the game. It is bad yea but implementing penalties instead of trying to find ways to make the matchmaking in QP less toxic to play, is not effective enough.

It alienates the playerbase. A lot.

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you can look up benchmarking workshop codes and see if thaat helps. You can even create custom workshop maps and join them when suspended.

This is an unpopular opinion here on the forums, but I dont think this is a matchmaking problem, it is a player problem. The game’s core mechanics are very volatile and perceived player skill can vary rapidly between matches for numerous reasons completely outside the control of the matchmaker. For example, it’s not going to know that someone had a bad day at work and decided to get drunk before playing. It doesnt understand that the person who plays genji 99.9% of the time decided this match they wanted to play Hanzo. It doesnt understand that players with the same overall skill may perform very differently if they are against opponents who play their counters well, or do not mesh with their teammates.

Leaving matches is just the selfish decision to give up instead of understanding how you can adjust to the match.

Yes there are unwinnable matches - everyone deals with them. But most people understand that when they queue up for a social online event, they are committing to something and follow through with it. If the game feels so unbalanced that you can’t put up with a few bad matches every now and again, you’re probably best off not playing.

I’ve only gotten the impression that the people it alienates are the people who were leaving all the matches to begin with. The general sentiment from the majority of the player base has been very positive and that match quality has improved.

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A leaver’s queue would have fixed the problem. But the devs keep insisting on punishing players. It’s really sad.

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Exactly. If the quitters are aliented and leave, the game is better for it.

If the non-quitters are frustrated and leave, there is no game.

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tbf i was trying to test the issue so the leaving penalties is a side effect
she only gets that problem when we played Quick Play so yea

i didnt expect the 6v6 mode in THE ARCADE PLAYLIST THAT IS SUPPOSED FOR FUN also has the penalty active. It irks me a lot and it is super annoying try to diagnose how and why the problem persists. It is the perfect mode to test cuz it has a lot of players, so queue time is faster and it can stress test.

Though, that said, I do feel the pain on 6v6 being in Arcade but not actually being treated as if it’s an Arcade mode. That’s just dumb on Blizzard’s part.

(But, I don’t actually recall if Arcade generally has the penalties or just 6v6.)

The players that like the 6v6 and are still playing don’t want leavers ruining the game by shopping for wins.

One thing I wholeheartedly will agree with is that this particular scenario demonstrates that the UI needs clear labeling of modes that are allowed to leave. If people are used ot arcade being game modes that you can leave and then you suddenly throw a mode in the mix that you cannot, it is just confusing and poorly designed.

That said, I can definitely understand why this mode would include these penalties, because they obviously do want people to take it seriously. This was an unranked mode that they only moved to arcade because it seems to have expired from the main menu on the build and they likely only have the means to dynamically change the playlists for arcade. Due to popular demand they found a way to keep it in the game this way.

I mean, a leavers queue is still a punishment to the leavers. They can pretend they don’t care about people quitting, but certainly won’t like being in matches with their own kind. Given I do think it’s a better solution than time penalties.

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Arcade does not have penalties. It’s just the 6v6 mode that was previously in unranked, that seems to have kept penalties when it was moved over for a couple weeks.

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AFAIK it’s just 6v6, it ALSO counts for the “unranked” dailies and weeklies though… so maybe it’s gotten moved but not actually reclassified.

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When there is lots of action happening on screen the game requires much more power to run because it has to deal with the 9 other player’s on the map and everything they are doing.

So it is almost nearly impossible to test this on anything but an actual game of Overwatch.

Quickplay is sweated over, way too much imo. so to me, no big deal if someone drops out.

But if it is a “rendering devices lost” issue


Typically the DDX to this is.

1 ) Windows could have updated its own drivers over your GPU drivers. - Have fun dealing with that issue, and then stopping windows from trying to update over it again.

2 ) Windows 11 is not playing nice with Nvidia drivers lately. Just had to help a buddy of mine yesterday revert to an older driver so their pc would game again.

3 ) Another popular issue is people using MSI afterburner or nvidia’s tuning software and they accidentally set their cooling perimeters wrong, thus causing random crashing.

4 ) Worst case scenario is you got a bad factory dud that they failed to use heatsink thermal pads on everything they needed to and it caused the card to get too hot and it crashes out.

5 ) Another really bad scenario is your power supply is going bad. Grab yourself a power supply tester, unplug your GPU’s power cable with the PC OFF, plug the other 6 or 8 pin power connector into the GPU. and the former cable you used, into your power supply tester, boot the pc and launch overwatch.

When you can finally get a game of Overwatch going and they aren’t tepid any longer of their petty not-so-glorious (and completely pointless) quickplay leaving, enter a match and watch to see if that power supply tester DROPS out of the range of 5.5volts from that threshold and if it fluctuates when the game is being heavily played. BINGO, a bad power supply. ie. your 5.5v power rail is failing. thus why only certain sections of the PC aren’t working right.

If you can test it in another game. that’d be your best bet. Since you know… for some reason this game thinks its above everyone else’s title…