Why am I being penalized for DC in comp?

[Suff-1370]

Make it skill based like in any other esport. Anyone can make it to GM purely by getting matched with the right people.

[Maverick-24296]

they are not able to tell the difference when somebody leaves a game or DCs

[Kaedi-11739]

@Calypso-12720

Long time player, first time poster. I have been playing OW since release, have purchased four copies of the game on PS4, Xbox, and 2 PC accounts. I am currently living at college and thus, my internet is out of my hands

Unfortunately your internet connection is not in the hands of Blizzard’s hands either, so from their perspective they have to set a policy that is going to benefit the majority of the community.

@Calypso-12720

I was just playing a comp game and my internet went out twice in a row. Because of this, I was unable to rejoin the game, lost 50sr and have been suspended from competitive play. Is there really no way to differentiate between leavers and people DCing?

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. In other words they can’t tell when a player does this:

You can learn about this policy here:

Overwatch Technical Issues, SR Loss, and Leaver Penalties

Hey everybody, I wanted to take some time today to discuss Leaver Penalties and how they relate to Technical issues. We understand that leaver penalties are an annoying thing to experience. Technical issues can be complicated to troubleshoot. To add penalties to your account can seem like adding insult to injury. This isn’t our intent. The competitive penalty system may not be perfect, but there is reason behind it. When we created the leaver penalty system, we took in a lot of player feedbac…

@Calypso-12720

I understand an angry toxic individual could manually remove their internet connection, but as a person with level 4 endorsements, no reports, and a generally positive response to being on someone’s team, I’m not sure why I’m being penalized for something out of my control.

Jeff Kaplan has specifically stated:

@Game Director Jeff Kaplan

Hi ChapterFive,

We’re really sorry you had a bad experience due to a disconnect. Personally, I hate when that happens myself so I can relate.

Unfortunately, we’re in a really tricky spot with Competitive Play in regards to players leaving matches. If you read through these forums, we get a lot of complaints that players leaving matches is a huge point of frustration for our players.

There is no reliable way that we can discern if you disconnected because of a connection issue, or you forced a disconnect. Because of that, we need to treat anyone who leaves a match in the same way.

We’re way more lenient in quick play. And it feels like we’re generally in a good spot in Quick Play. However, in Competitive Play, if anything, we hear from our player base that we should be increasing the leaver penalties and making them more harsh.

For Season 2, we added a 10 minute delay to your first “leave” to make you aware that leaving is bad and there are in fact penalties for leaving. We also wanted to put in increasing penalties to help dissuade people who were having connection issues from repeatedly trying to reconnect to Competitive Play games. We know that sometimes the connection issues are not your fault. And that really is a shame. But also, when those moments are happening, it’s not a good time to jump into a team game and subject your teammates to the mercy of an unstable internet connection.

My advice for people who are having connection issues is to play modes like the Brawl or Play vs. AI until their connection stabilizes. Again, I know this isn’t the answer you want to hear, but hopefully you can understand the situation from the other side. It’s very likely that someone who was on your team in that match posted in one of the many angry “leaver” threads on these forums.

Hopefully this sheds some light on our thought process.

Again, apologies you had a bad experience.

-jeffrey

Source: Overwatch Forums

@Edsoulman-2692

Was it Blizzards fault? If not. -SR

To clarify on this, 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. Only the message “Server Closed due to an unexpected error” is a crash on the server end and should result in no penalty or loss of SR (and usually restarts the match with all players on a different map).

@Calypso-12720

I understand what you’re saying, but this has never once happened previously. If I was in a position where I had access to my router I would agree with you, however, I do not. My ability to access the internet is entirely dependent upon my university and the accessibility it entails.

Blizzard does not know your specific story though. Besides this is why the penalty is only 10 minutes long and the SR is easily recovered through consistent play once your disconnection issues are resolved.

@Matsy-21502

That’s not an excuse though…
You have the option of well…not playing comp. You KNOW your internet connectivity is unstable but you choose to play anyway. You accept the risk if you play with unstable net.
I get that its not in your control, but it doesn’t really matter.

Exactly. We are all responsible for our choices.

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To conclude, I do wish to point out that even in a situation of playing in a college/university network (which I STRONGLY do not recommend in general), you can often find out where an why a disconnection is occuring by running a WinMTR test. The information from that test can often pinpoint common issues.

Running WinMTR

That being said, a large-scale local area network such as that of College Dormitories are very subjected to high amount of high network traffic, interference, security firewalls, and other factors common to cause disconnections. I often recommend if possible, see if a LAN cafe is available in your area or visit back home (if you live in the same town locally) to play when you have free time.

[Dasaries-11327]

I got pulled out of RANk because a LARGE majority of DC’ers from 2 seasons ago. TBH it doesn’t feel too good to drop that fast. I was just on the edge of Gold, slightly above and played in there for most of my seasons. I never thought I would see what Silver’s ELO “hell” was. until I was put into it from DC’ers. crawling out of that mess is NOT something fun and I am still working my way OUT of the DC’ers and rage-quits from Competitive play in Silver.

I kinda wish Blizzard would take the initiative for an OFFICIAL message screen that displays for anyone chosing the mode, NOT to play on Wifi .

I also blame windows 10 forced updates for alot of what causes Dc’s too. So yeah… Its a rough deal…