Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: blizzard, overwatch

Overwatch Devs Exploring A Permanent Solution To Game Quitters

Published Fri, 09 Jun 2017 10:45:25 -0500

Last updated Fri, 09 Jun 2017 10:48:10 -0500

Nothing, and I mean nothing, ruins a game of Overwatch quicker (especially during Competitive Play) than when someone bails during a match. Unless your team is the Seal Team Six of Overwatch at that given moment, it's an automatic death sentence on your SR score before the match is even finished — because 5 vs. 6 is just unfair. And aside from people losing their own score and possibly being banned for 10-60 minutes, there's no real way to combat serial quitters. So Blizzard is working on one.

Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan recently responded to a player who suggested that they should take a Street Fighter V approach to things by having a blacklist, as well as the red warning list so bad players get paired with fellow bad players. Kaplan had a surprising response:

"We'll definitely take the idea into consideration. Our philosophy has been that we would rather not have leavers playing the game at all (especially in Competitive Play). We keep increasing the penalty for leaving and will continue to do so. We're in the process of implementing a new policy which would take into account how many Competitive Seasons you have been banned from and at a certain point, prevent you from playing Competitive ever again."

That, in a nutshell, would be awesome! However, there's still the lingering fact that there doesn't seem to be a system in place to determine whether a player disconnected on purpose (Alt-F4) or simply lost connection to the Overwatch servers. People who genuinely didn't mean to leave are still being dinged on their system as we speak. Once that little addition is implemented, the new system would be a welcome addition to keeping people in line. Well, except for the fact that said players may just choose not to participate and hang out near the spawn shooting plants. One step at a time…

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