Leavers are ruining Overwatch and Blizzard is doing nothing about it

I loved the game, but now Leavers are ruining Overwatch. Why Blizzard won't solve these problems when there are so many ways to actually do it? Let's take a closer look at the current situation.

[This article is cross-posted from the author's personal website, www.fortunovi.com]

There are so many awesome things about it and especially the fact that a game session can be as short as a couple of minutes, makes it the perfect game for an afterwork chillout at home.

So what could possibly go wrong? Well - a lot!

The amount of griefing*, trolling and cancer plays in Overwatch as of lately has been skyrocketing and it looks like Blizzard couldn’t care less about it, which is really what can piss you even more than the players who are actually doing this. The community cry-out is enormous, you can easily double-check this with a simple google search.

What are the reasons behind this?

First of all the penalties for leaving a match. Yes, you guessed just right - those are pathetic. 10 minutes of ban! No, this is not a joke, this is the actual penalty. If you don’t put forth a meaningful punishment for leaving a match why wouldn’t people be doing it? One of the reasons for these penalties to not be as harsh as those should be is because sometimes people are leaving matches because of a bad internet connection. But if you actually think a bit more on the reasoning behind this it doesn’t really make sense.

Why?

Because regardless of the actual reason for somebody to leave a match the end result doesn’t change - the match is most probably ruined and the team with less players is losing in 99% of the cases (according to my personal experience). And if somebody has a bad connection this is even a stronger reason to ban them from ruining even more games, right? I know that on a conscious level there is a huge difference between leaving a match on purpose and doing this because of electricity/connection/hardware problems, but on a game and user-experience level there is no real difference.

Let’s go through a couple of measures which can address these problems:

And I really have a hard time finding a meaningful explanation as to why Blizzard are not taking any effective measures to deal with these issues. Me and most of my friends has stopped playing Overwatch and will definitely wait for the problem to be addressed. Please, Blizzard, please!

* Griefer/Griefing - A griefer is a player in a multiplayer video game who deliberately irritates and angers other players within the game, using aspects of the game in unintended ways.