Overwatch crashes specific computer wifi

Technical Support
1

So I recently moved temporarily to another country (from NA to Europe), and ever since, I’ve been having this very very very annoying problem with Overwatch. As said in the title, whenever I click “Play” in the BattleNet app, the game starts, screen shows “Entering game”, then poof, Wi-Fi crashes (or the Router simply disappears from the Wi-Fi list), and the game says “Lost Connection to servers”.

Worst thing is (I run the game in windowed borderless), if I press the Windows button (that shows the taskbar) when the game starts (I can then see the game screen as well as the Wi-Fi icon), the Wi-Fi doesn’t crash or disconnect until I get into the game. If I use mobile data from a phone, I can play, but I have very limited data, so that’s not a plausible solution. Problem comes from how Overwatch handles that specific Wi-Fi, because any other one works.

The rest of my computer works fine, when I connect back to the Wi-Fi, everything works fine except the internet is slightly slower than usual for a good 30 seconds, then back to normal. If I try to play again, same thing happens, over and over and over.

The router itself and the Wi-Fi broadcast both work perfectly, this issue is only on my computer (anyone else using it doesn’t notice anything, and yes I’ve tried when no one is connected, still nothing). I would use an Ethernet cable, but the router is too far, and I don’t really have a way of connecting it to my computer.

I’ve been trying to solve this for the past week, to no avail, I’ve been googling, troubleshooting, nothing. My firewall and antivirus are off, no software on the computer other than Overwatch, BattleNet, and Windows are running that could use up the internet and make it crash. Also I’d like to point out the first 2 days Overwatch worked fine, and as far as I know there hasn’t been an update since.

Here are my specs:
Windows 10 x64
Intel Core i5-7600HQ 2.50GHz
Nvidia GTX 1050 4GB VRAM
8GB Ram
250GB SSD
2TB HDD

I hope someone can help me solve this, as I’ve gotten a warning that I might get punished for leaving too many games early (I never leave games early) while trying to solve this, and I don’t wanna risk it.

I’ve already posted once about this, Blizz support was, to say the least, worthless. After replying once, nothing more. At the time I posted it, I didn’t have a “trust level” so I couldn’t post links, but now I can. I hope the next help I get is gonna be useful, because this is the most absurd bug I’ve encountered in a game.

2

It sounds like your wifi router is possibly being overloaded by the amount of data that Overwatch is sending and receiving. Not all routers are created equal, so some may have a hard time keeping up with a constant heavy data flow that Overwatch requires by default.

However, there is a setting in-game that you can change that may help out in a situation like this.

  1. Open Overwatch and go to the Options menu.
  2. Click the Gameplay tab at the top
  3. Turn ON “Limit client send rate” and “Limit server send rate”.

Having both of these options turned on will reduce the data that is sent/received while you are playing, which should reduce the strain put on the wifi router.

Beyond that you may also want to make sure that the router’s firmware is fully up to date. If you aren’t familiar with how to check or update the firmware I would recommend contacting the router manufacturer or checking the manual.

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1 Like
3

I’ve experienced Router overload before, and it didn’t look like this. Usually when a router is overloaded, it restarts. In my case, the router is fine (didn’t notice any internet outage on other devices), but my computer is freaking out as I explained. Still though I will give it a try, and see if it changes anything. But I have a question: Does activating those options raise the latency I get in the game, or have any other effect on the gameplay ? Or is it just a background task that isn’t noticeable ? Thank you for your time.

4

It shouldn’t negatively impact your latency.

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