The thing that makes me quit playing competitive overwatch more than anything is this scenario. Your playing comp and win a match.m, you go into the next match with a positive attitude and the game is close. Out of no where someone on your team leaves in the middle of a match. The game goes on and I would guess that close to 100% of the time your team ends up losing because your a man down every single fight and what happens? You lose every single bit of sr that you worked so hard to gain not because you didnt play well, or because the other team was just that much better then you but because someone for whatever decided to leave the match. It doesn’t seem fair to those who stick out the match and tried their hardest to win despite the strong disadvantage. What I would love is that if someone on the losing team left the game you wouldn’t lose anything and it wouldn’t count as a match but the person who left would have a sever sr lose but I understand that’s kind of unrealistic. I do believe there should be stricter punishments for those who leave comp games besides a few hours of banned competitive play. Just a thought.
Comp at the beginning and end of season is absolute garbage. Middle of the season there is a peak where it’s actually really good.
I feel like I’m the odd man out
My best games always happen at the start and end of the season!
The end of the season is always bad for me. I climbed back to plat after dropping 500 SR. I’m not touching comp for the rest of the season.
inb4 generic post about belonging in a rank, MMR system working fine, pros can rank up so everything is fine and so on.
Highly relevant post right here.
Some people want severe punishments for those who leave, while at the same time those who leave or disconnect want lighter punishments.
Overwatch Paradox #12
We found our thrower! 
I kid! 
I think blizzard should be able to tell a difference in hose who leave and those who get disconnected shouldn’t they? Besides most people who get disconnected try to get back in The game maybe only missing a few fights while those who leave miss half a match or more.
My reply is purely speculation but;
I would say that it is unlikely that they can discern the difference between internet disruption or an intentional leave. According to their servers, it would only record “______ has left the game”. They cannot detect why. It’d involve them having knowledge of your ISP and what is occurring on their end or with your network at your domain.
Not all who disconnect from a game can attempt to return. There are times someone’s internet can blackout for a while. So therefore, attempting to separate who quit from who disconnected is a near impossible task from just that information alone.
Software engineer with lots of experience in data communications protocols and networking here: They absolutely can. In fact, Blizzard have not one but two clients running on your PC that they can use for all kinds of diagnostics. They can look at both SYN, ICMP and ARP traffic to multiple hosts and hops within the clients internal network, and they can do the same again at the remote end from multiple sites. They can do this at multiple OSI layers - for example, it’s trivial to detect if you’re using a wireless device to detect that it’s lost its physical link.
When the client picks back up again, it can report that data back to the or a server responsible for collecting such data.
The only excuse for them not doing this is laziness - it’s been thrown in the too-hard basket. On a technical basis, it’s not at all difficult to do.
People want harsher punishments for those who leave because people are typically vengeful - moreso when it has negative effects on themselves. I think you would find that if the other people in the game weren’t so negatively effected, they likely wouldn’t care at all what happens to the person who left, regardless of whether it was in their control or not.
I think in reality you’ll find that 80 to 90% of people leaving games are through no fault of their own. But people don’t want or care to hear that.
It makes utterly no sense to punish other players in a game when they matchmaker has been the one responsible for putting them in that game. In a group, sure, I can see some argument. But effectively forcing a loss on a player who the matchmaker paired you with, and them then leaving for whatever the reason - there’s no fairness in that. The other five people on a team can’t influence the matchmaker to choose to have that person on their team, so why should they be punished by it?
The flipside could also be used an you could say that if your team wins a match while at the disadvantage of being a player down, you could more greatly reward them. Finally, there’s no reason they couldn’t have a two-minute pause while it waits for a player to re-connect.
None of these are technically difficult things to implement. Blizzard just, unfortunately, have come up with some insane and flawed rationale to continue doing things the way they are, which is making noone happy.
Thank you for the insight! It does just make me want a solution to this even more however lol
You’re definitely not alone. We all suffer from the cancer that comes from Leavers…especially at the end of the year. If you could view all the posts on this new forum, and the old version, you might find hundreds, if not a thousand, posts similar to yours…and here we are, 2 years later, still complaining to Blizzard about Leavers.
You have good points.
If they can in fact differentiate between an intentional leave or a disconnect…what if one simply disconnects the internet intentionally?
Simply put; Can they know when someone pulls the plug?
Leaver’s are an unfortunate thing. It almost always means a loss. I’ve won some 5v6 games and the effort involved is not rewarded as you obtain the same SR regardless. I do suppose a match delay while waiting for them to return is an interesting idea.
That is the main scenario it would be most difficult to determine fault is when the external interface to the ISP drops at layer 2 or 1 or below. A connection that a most routers think is still active will result in a lack of any SYN/ACK or ICMP responses whatsoever, but a device that knows its link has dropped will generally be configured to respond with an appropriate response - and generally send with a TCP reset or Reject. The receipt of a Reject in the short-term window (ie, first 120 seconds or less) would suggest either the ISP or the client has gracefully terminated the connection. You’ll see something similar on the server side.
Blizzard need to get better at basically looking at trace and TTL data from every hop back to the player from the server side.
Where they need to be more forgiving is when the connections fails much further upstream - for instance, at any hop say 5 hops or above.
It will never be perfect - but it can be a hell of a lot better than it currently is. Ultimately while I’ve given a high-level explanation, getting in to the low-level details is I think a bit trickier than can be easily conveyed on this forum. Admittedly this isn’t an implementation you throw the fresh graduate at, but it’s certainly one I’d expect a senior dev worthy of being called that to be able to handle if given the task.
The real question would be “Is it worth $100,000 to fix this problem”, and that’s why it won’t get done. Because you’re probably going to have a quite senior and technical expert working on the problem for a couple of months in addition to testers and probably BAs - and when you’re paying a senior dev in the region of $120-140k, with BAs earning similar salaries (testers will tend to earn substantially less), the cost of implementing features can quickly add up.
Hmm, very interesting. I appreciate your informative reply. The leaver/disconnect issue will likely be unsolved as you suggested, though I think Blizzard will have to do something about it eventually. Meet the players halfway with some system implementation within the game itself perhaps.
I find it hard for them to make a system that cannot be either abused or still inflict some sort of wrongful punishment for those who disconnect. There will always be this injustice to those who lost connection/server drop-out blended within the justice designed to punish the intentional leavers.
They really have to differentiate between the leaver and disconnect to solve this issue. The cost and time investment may be too great as you stated, and that’s unfortunate.
If you choose to leave, and then click the button to confirm that you are going to leave early (malicious leaving) then you should get banned for the remainder of the season and the entire next season too.
If you leave on purpose, then you should suffer horribly.
I doubt laziness or cost are the deciding factor here. More likely the complexity of relating such a system to the public and the high risk of hack/mods that exploit it (I’m sure you could envision a hack that would generate a report that pointed to a server drop rather than a client).
For there to be any point to this detection it would have to result in different actions taken against their drop vs player’s drop and then folks would lose their minds when they were penalized but their friend was not.
As for folks leaving game through no fault of their own, no one cares because the result for their team is the same. For many it’s a frustrating grind to gain SR, the system’s encouragement of 50% win rates means that probable wins which turn into losses due to drops can wreak havoc on a player’s progress.
I switched DSL speeds recently, now it’s faster but it flakes out so I’m not playing comp until I sort that. Sadly most players aren’t that responsible or considerate, they’ll play despite knowing their internet is shoddy (or they just leave because they play unlimited alt accounts on console and Mom called dinner).
One thing Blizzard could most certainly do without much work or risk is impose very high penalties on those who rage quit via the leave match option, or perhaps better yet, just remove/disable the leave match option while in a comp game.