'Overwatch' Competitive Play Tweaked To Discourage AFKs and Trolls

Overwatch developers are doing everything they can to fix matchmaking in Competitive Play. Right now, the game doesn't punish people who leave mid-game enough, so players have been going AFK without fear of retribution. Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch ’s game director, has been constantly posting on the forums about his team’s solutions for this problem.

Overwatch had a system in place capable of figuring out if you had a higher chance of winning or losing. If you had a better chance of winning, you’d gain less experience from winning, but would lose more if you lost and vice versa. When a player would go AFK, the system would reevaluate who had the higher chance of winning, going with the team that had less AFKs. This resulted in players losing tons of XP on losses and barely getting anything when they won.

Jeff Kaplan posted on the Blizz.net forums : “Despite being more accurate, we received a lot of feedback that this recalculation just didn’t feel great and that it incentivized bad leaver behavior—which is last thing we want to do in Competitive Play. As a result, the game will no longer recalculate each team’s probability of winning whenever one or more people leave.”

When playing Competitive Play in Overwatch , AFKs will no longer affect how much experience you earn. The game figures out your team’s chances of winning in the beginning of the game and that’s it. Will this get rid of the AFK problem in competitive Overwatch? Most likely not, but it’s a great step in the right direction.