Overwatch crashed for me mid-placement game in competitive. I was unable to reconnect to any Blizzard game for a minute or two following the kick, but was still able to access all public websites that I normally visit (indicating it wasn’t an issue on my end). I tried Googling the policy for how Blizzard resolves these kind of issues and didn’t get any results – how will this competitive match resolve? Is there a way Blizzard can improve detection of server issues to mitigate bans during server errors ?
I also have a link to reddit of people experiencing this issue and a link to the other 11 people in my competitive game getting disconnected at the exact same time as me. I totally understand that mistakes and server blips happen, just want to understand how it will be resolved with my account.
Hello there. Unfortunately all disconnections and game crashes counts as leaving the match and will be penalized appropriately. The game server has no way to discern a legitimate disconnection or game crash from one that is forcefully caused by a dishonest player to bypass leaver penalties. You can learn about this policy here:
Remember if you see the message, “Lost Connection to the Server” in the title screen or the message “Failed to Connect to Server” in yellow text in the text chat box, this means there is something that disrupted your connection to the game server and not a problem with the game server itself. There can be a variety of reasons this happens including those that don’t disconnect your computer from the Internet. There is great troubleshooting to start with that can most likely resolve most issues and I encourage you to check them out here:
As always if nothing in that guide works, please reply saying you completed these steps and additional advice can be provided. Good luck!
If you look in the forums and on reddit for this time period there was a huge spike of people that suddenly got disconnected which points strongly to an issue on the game server’s side, not on the client’s side. The chat box won’t let me post links here but I’d be happy to post a ton of links to other people who all experienced this exact same issue at the exact same time if there’s a way I can send those to you.
Its more likely something inbetween. Nothing that Blizzard can do about it, but if it is happening frequently, you can investigate it through a WinMTR test: