Suggestion for devs on handling leavers

Caveat: I mostly play QP and am a high-gold, low plat. player … so take this with comment with appropriate critique. That being said, I do game development as a ‘job’ and often have to brain storm ideas for solving problems.

What I’ve read/seen here are many complaints about how leavers drastically effect a person’s enjoyment of competitive, leading to frustration, stress, anxiety, etc. Basically turning the gaming experience from something to ‘enjoy’ to something that turns people off the game. My suggestion is a way to temper this to hopefully alleviate some of the negative feelings when you’re in game impacted by a leaver.

First, the devs should consult data and try to figure out the average amount of time it takes a person who involuntarily left to come back. Lets say this is 45 seconds for our discussion.

Second, the devs should add a toggle on the bottom of each role queue that asks the player “Willing to backfill?” It should default to ‘no’ and only if people are willing to backfill should it consider them (I’m uncertain if this should only be available to players who have selected that queue to play or if a person could queue for dps, but also select that they would be willing to backfill tank, for example).

Third, if a person leaves a competitive match for any reason, a timer starts. After 45 seconds (*from above), if the person hasn’t returned, the game pulls a person from the backfill list who isn’t in another match. This means a team that loses a player knows that they will only ever be down ~45-60 seconds before getting a replacement.

Fourth, the person who backfills can NEVER lose SR. They can still gain SR if they somehow pull off the ‘win’, but if the backfill and their team loses, the floor of their SR +/- is zero. So backfill is a ‘no risk’ proposition for players, BUT they lose their position in the queue for a full match.

Fifth, alternatively (or inclusive) to the above, you could institute a minor penalty + bonus above what you already have. Specifically, I’m thinking 0.05% of the leaving player’s current SR is immediately transferred to the backfill player. Obviously if the same player returns in the 45 sec, this would not occur/result in no change. So if a 3000 SR player quits out and leaves, 15 of their SR would be lost immediately and given to the person who backfills for them. If a 1000 SR player leaves, then 5 SR would transfer. This could also be just a flat ‘5 SR’ or something … you want it enough to be a token show of appreciation for backfill, but not enough to really mess with the ranking of players (i.e. a player should not be able to get to masters just by being someone who volunteers to backfill :slight_smile: ).

Anyway, that is my ‘clever suggestion’ for today…

3 Likes

I’ve long said Competitive needs backfill, and that it should be opt in.

I think it’s needed in Comp now, more than ever, thanks to Role Queue.

this is what we need to get rid of leavers

stop subjugating us to the whims of the auto-matchmaker and let us choose our own destiny!

Again, for the 100th time - backfill isn’t the solution here.


“Zenyattas hate him” - 𝓐𝓵𝓮𝔁𝓞𝓷𝓮

I actually like this idea. The not losing SR might be too much. However I like the idea not losing the SR and maybe the backfiller would gain let’s say +5…+10 SR if they win.

And for the 100th time I disagree with you. I firmly believe it is.

Oh, don’t get me wrong … I don’t mean to imply that leavers are the only/sole thing ‘wrong’ or disliked about comp. I think it would be naive to think there is only a single thing that if magically fixed would suddenly cure everyone’s ill-feelings about comp.

I think there are sufficient people who complain about it here on these forums that certainly some percentage of the OW community feel that leavers lower their enjoyment for competitive play. Fixing that in a way that doesn’t break anything else yields a net positive. But, I agree, does not address other issues that others may have with comp … things like balanced matches, cheating, toxicity, etc., but those are harder things to brainstorm fixes on (as, presumably, there is already code etc. in place to try to catch this stuff, but obviously doesn’t succeed 100% of the time).