Hello, I’ve recently gotten the game and I enjoy it quite a lot. However, I’m really concerned about an issue I’m running into. Recently, my game has begun to crash when entering a competitive match - as in, the match doesn’t even begin, it either crashes on the loading screen, or right when it gets to the hero selection. It has happened for the third time today, and I can’t seem to replicate it in any consistent way. I can deal with the rank point loss, but I am concerned about getting banned. I would very much like to play competitive, so I would like to ask for an answer from the Overwatch team, if possible.
-Can I get permanently banned or punished in some way for this? (Please note that I’m NOT leaving the game early, nor am I pressing “Quit” or “Exit”. The game crashes by itself usually before the gameplay actually even loads.)
-Will the OW system distinguish between crashes and player actually quitting, or am I still in danger of getting punished in some way?
-Is there anything I can do to assume I am not punished or banned from the game?
According to my monitoring tools the hero selection screen seems to be the most GPU intensive part of the game (aside from saving highlights with HW accel).
Your issue might be a hardware problem. Interestingly, a lot of people who suffer from crashes in OW have hardware problems that don’t have symptoms with many other games. Having a cheap/weak PSU that can’t handle the power consumption spikes of the machine in certain cases is a frequent issue. My machine was crashing either because of insufficient cooling or loose cables (I’ll never know).
You are punished in various ways. -50SR for leaving, perhaps some more for losing. You can get banned for a specific duration (the longest competitive ban I know about is ban from the whole competitive season). On top of this there are 11 other angry players in the game who might report you - that can eventually result in other penalties.
You know that your equipment doesn’t work well but you still enter competitive knowing that you might ruin the game for 11 other players. If you crash in the middle of the match then 5 team mates are also losing SR because of your crashy PC.
Leaving the game is punished the same way regardless of the reason. If there were exceptions then people would try to leave by pretending to belong to those exceptions (like unplugging power/network cable to simulate crash or internet problems).
Entering competitive with an equipment that works is the only way to guarantee this.
It’s definitely not a hardware issue. My HW is fine, and my PSU is good. More over, if it was a hardware issue, it would happen in Arcade and Quick Games as well, not just in competitive and almost always during loading (it only crashed in the hero selection window once, iirc). I can take the SR loss, that’s fine. As for the reports, I think you misread my post; the game crashes before the match even begins, before you can even select your heroes. You can’t really simulate that, and why would you, really? I think you can’t even report that - I had games where people quit in the first minute, and I wasn’t able to report that. I’m NOT quitting the game midway through the match, the game never crashes midway thru the match, or anything like that - If that was the case, I would just open up the game again, since it gives you the 1:50 window to reconnect. That’s why I was hoping for a reply from Blizzard directly.
I’ve seen a lot of people saying this until resolving their hardware issues. You can’t exclude that possibility.
This is similar to people claiming that their PC crashes only during OW but not other games so it can’t be a hardware issue. But it often still is.
People would simulate it if crashing would be associated with milder punishments than simply leaving. They’d unplug their power/network cables or would kill of the OW process, or something similar. From the other side of the connection these things look like other kinds of crashes: the game abruptly stops communicating with the server.
If you quit early and they don’t lose SR they are less likely to get angry. If they lose SR then they can simply right click your name in the text chat where it says “[Aladar] has left the game”.
Early leavers might be a bit bigger annoyance for people who play in less populated ranks because their queue times can be longer. Gold and platinum are the most populated ranks where queue times are relatively short especially during peek hours.
A few seconds is enough to lose a match that could otherwise be victory. Even with a theoretically zero second disconnect: you disappear from the battlefield, respawn in the spawn room and it takes 10-20 seconds to run to your team which is a lot of time in a fast paced game. This causes bigger and bigger issues as your rank gets higher because better players are better at capitalising on the fact that the other team has one less players.
Some people who have frequent disconnects due to bad network connections can avoid the -50SR only with very fast reconnect that happens within 10-20 seconds.