Server Disconnections due to DDoS Attack - July 8 2018

I swear this said the issue had been fixed originally…i rejoined because i wanted to win back some SR tonight (feeling good bc I’d been playing well all day!) Only to have it happen again. The issue started with players complainign of lag and suddenly being unable to move at all. It was rather weird, seeing everyone standing still. I wasn’t experiencing any lag before I got kicked.

I played a qp match in the middle to test and see if things were really ok- they were, and i thought i had the go ahead from here! Might have misread it, might have been edited to explain things were still going on. :frowning:

This time I’ve closed the client, logged back in, but it still won’t let me rejoin the match. Clicking the rejoin button does Nothing, and furthermore, I could actually open my lootbox from playing (?) the match.

Figure the status update from my end as well as explainigng im sitting here, unable to rejoin match still…oh well. Realy am going to bed this time, it’ll be fixed in the morning…

Oh Wait! IT let me back in? Maybe??.. but its Right as the match “Finished” and now I’m stuck on a screen that says “Game found, joining game”…

I’m just stuck in “Joining game” now…the searching instead of “play” option is just stuck loading. it’s been like this for a good minute now…hmmmmm

Canceling search does nothing too! Thats odd.

last edit! pressing x on the searching thing actually pulled up the screen with game options this time… Still couldnt cancel the search, but it had the decency to tell me I’d lost another bundle of SR and was now banned for 22 minutes by the time i looked. I logged off all the way. This is a bit silly…oh well! my climb to diamond (again) will continue tomorrow.

Nice. No inappropriate language in that edited section, an entirely apt metaphor used, but you get to delete the one-two punch that calls out this company for its own toxic behavior towards players and make it sound like I’m a villain with your inserted edit. Very nice.

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Cmon I lose 50SR and got a suspension, you can maybe disable comp?

League and other games shut off the comp when they see a MAJOR problem with servers and the players are getting punish by just playing…

Just as an update, Blizzard tweeted out, this is a DDoS attack apparently…

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Thank you for keeping us up to date!! :frowning: I had thought that it might be something along those lines…

Oh wow. I Really wasn’t expecting that. Thank you for letting us know about the situation.

This issue isn’t quite resolved currently, but we’ve identified that the cause was a Distributed Denial of Service attack. This is being tracked on our BlizzardCS twitter now. Please keep an eye on this so that you know when it is safe to play modes that could result in penalties.

This is likely going to be my last post of the night as I’m about to leave the building, but good luck to all of you, and thanks again for reaching out about this.

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Thank you so much for taking the time to tell us all this ! have a good night regardless! ! and i hope its resolved!!!

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The high ping and rerouting of servers away from Singapore is still present and in effect. I just got off some games earlier and my ping is consistently at 190ms.

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We understand that you can’t restore the SR people lost but we really need you guys to come up with a solution with the leaver problem sooner than later even if it means you guys have to put off the development of new additions to the game which, with all due respect, are great additions.

The community thinks it is unfair for our skill rating to be determined by things that are 100% outside of our control and it never encourages anyone to continue attempting to climb.

Also, when you guys along with a majority of the community say that “everyone is prone to these problems so it evens out,” people like me believe that is a very unfair and dismissive way to approach this problem. The fact is NO ONE on my team or the enemy team should have to deal with these types of things AT ALL.

Yes, if it’s the user’s ISP’s issue, then there is really no fault at Blizzard for something like that. But in cases like these, it is only fair that you guys do us a solid and come up with a plan of action for things like this in the future.

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Hello. I understand not giving back sr, penalties, etc. because it encourages leaving games and not being punished, but in this situation Blizzard is clearly to blame. Console users especially are being punished for this. Personally, these crashes have cost me 250 sr and my endorsement level going from level 4 to level 1. As it has been for a while though, console has been largely neglected in pretty much everything. Anyways, sorry for the rant, and thank you.

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Is the customer always right? Traditionally that’s how everyone should perceive service, and I guess your complaint should be put into a file. The thing is though, we all want the same thing, I mean if we look at it in a perspective where the customer is always right, might as well pause the entire game until the missing player gets back, yet everyone will complain about that because who wants to wait?

I’m willing to acknowledge if the concept is a bit stretched in this example, but my point is along that line.

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A multi-million dollar game from Blizzard, that officially gets it’s first professional league, should be able to recognize the difference between a disconnect and an actual quit (leaver). Disconnects should not be penalized AT ALL as it’s not their fault, especially with the events currently going on, and penalties to our Endorsement ranks. It’s disappointing that a company “blanket” statements their punishments with respect to anybody who exits a match early, regardless of reason, regardless of “It’s a lesser penalty”. We work hard for what we earn and it’s not our fault that YOUR server disconnected us.

Blizzard makes so much money off this game that this comment won’t mean a thing to them, and that’s unfortunate. The only resolution I see them suggesting is “Don’t play our game right now, because you’ll get penalized for disconnecting.”

As a community, we pay for “rights” to play your game. We also expect a level of support. And this area, is sub par.

Texas, what is the difference between a person pulling their network cable out and a DDOS attack against ISP’s causing disconnect?

Just to let you know, from a networking perspective Blizzard has absolutely no way of determining that. It is impossible for them to know how the disconnect occurred, just that Player X stopped sending/receiving packets.

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It’s less about Blizzard figuring out WHO’s fault it is and more of them blatantly knowing an issue like this was their fault and they continue to be so stubborn about finally coding a system that will give people their SR back.

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As a reminder this is a SEPARATE problem from that of the DDoS attack. Please remember to follow up with this thread for the latest developments:

Just remember that the community is also more upset about dealing with leavers. Now a problem like this affects a great majority of people but the situation is still the same it is out of control for both the end user and Blizzard. Realistically, there are no perfect solutions that I can see. However, if you truly believe in wanting a competitive experience, then the rules as they stand are about as good as they can be.

Remember that many factors such as how they treat the rest of the team when there is a leaver do have to be considered. As I am sure you are aware, remaining teammates must take the match result including the appropriate SR adjustments when there is a leaver. Sounds rough, but they have a specific reason for it to ensure Competitive stays competitive.

So in this case, if concessions are made to compensate users for say instances like a DDoS attack, players could be incentivized to deliberately attempt to play Competitive (especially if they know they are not in the region of the DDoS attack), and force disconnect on a losing game just to turn around and blame it on the DDoS attack to be compensated.

There is also a technical factor involved and from what I understand of the Global Network Operations Center and the Battle.Net framework, you can’t just reverse and rollback. We are way too big of a game and community for something like that. Same reason why we don’t see many PTR snapshots (updating the PTR accounts to reflect our live accounts).

Blizzard didn’t start the DDoS attack… A DDoS attack is when a cybercriminal uses multiple servers or computers to send a bombardment of singals to a target. In this case the network providers that Blizzard connects to the rest of the Internet with. Now eventually the network providers is able to block the signals and mitigate the traffic (or the attacks just stop), but on Blizzard’s end, all they can do is communicate the problem to those network providers and ride out the storm.

There is no effective way to recongize a player who disconnects the ethernet cable from their computer or disable their WiFi router in order to bypass leaver penalties. Furthermore, part of why penalties for disconnecting players exist is to encourage players to NOT play when there is a technical issue present regardless of what that issue is.

Remember to look at the bigger picture, the internet is the big mesh of computers all tied to each other, its going to have problems at any time.

Per the End User License Agreement that you have agreed to when you purchased your license to play Overwatch:

Limited Warranty. THE PLATFORM, ACCOUNTS, AND THE GAME(S) ARE PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” BASIS FOR USE, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF CONDITION, UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE USE, MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NONINFRINGEMENT, TITLE, AND THOSE ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

Quite right you are.


Times like these are rough, but as one of the forum MVPs I want to make sure each and every one of you understand where I believe Blizzard’s position is and what options they have to make the best possible decision that will benefit the community as a whole. A situation like this stings tonight, but is quickly forgotten for many the day after. There are many competitive games and sports where a player can lose or be penalized at no fault of their own and in reality, one bad night does not ruin an entire season of Competitive Play.

I hope this helps enlighten things. Cheers! (^^)v

Wyoming, I’m aware of the User-Agreement. But again, the fact that the current solution for the problem is “Stop playing our game”, to me, is not acceptable. If a player disconnect happens once or twice, maybe in season, no penalty, it was probably a disconnect. But Blizzard can track how often a player does leave or disconnect from the game.

Like I said, there are solutions. Immediate penalties for disconnects, in my opinion, are not the way to go. Your average gamer, is not going to dc their Ethernet cable or reset their router.

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Unfortunately, I remember way back when such exploits were around. But as I said in this thread before, 50 SR in my opinion is NOT a big deal when you look at a season as a whole. Yeah its two games you have to win, but I do know a player that falls below their actual skill rating is very likely to regain their losses over time. I myself have had some really bad experiences in the past that cost me dearly. One time, I even fell all the way to bronze, but immediately rebounded within a single season because my skill was superior to that of Bronze or Silver.

Howdy!

Sorry for the confusion! Looking deeper into this issue we had a major event recently that impacted PSE1. PSE2 is up and running which helped a lot of users but we are still working on PSE1. We hopefully will have it back up today but we do not have an exact ETA on when it will be back up. This is a known issue that our developers are working as quickly as possible to resolve.

Thank you.

Update! This issue has since been resolved as reported on our Twitter Here. Please note the Technical Support forums are for information sharing, gathering and troubleshooting only. Any feedback or suggestions on how to improve the penalty system should be posted on our General forums Here for our developers to review.

I highly encourage everyone to review our pinned post about Overwatch Technical Issues, SR Loss, and Leaver Penalties located Here to better help understand our stance on this topic before you provide feedback.

Locking this thread since this issue has been resolved. If you continue to run into any connection issues please check out our Overwatch Disconnection Problems article Here before starting a new thread.

Thank you!

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