Blizzard has decided to take things seriously and implement heavier penalties for those who leave matches mid-game in Overwatch 2. Good. Mid-game leavers are the smelly pits of the world.
Starting with the Season 10 launch on April 16th, leaving a match while it’s still underway will earn you some major ban points in both unranked and competitive modes. Leaving just one game in the unranked ladder will reward you with a warning. Leaving more games, though, and you will start accumulating longer timeouts from the ladder, starting from a five-minute ban to a whopping 48 hours.
The competitive ladder, on the other hand, is harsher.
Leaving a game will result in a 15-minute ban, and leaving five games will result in a whole-season suspension. What’s more, these game leave counts are tallied off of your last 20 games played, but the competitive ladder has an added restriction that kicks in if a player has left ten games across the season in total. Doing so will also result in a whole-season ban.
Blizzard hopes that these changes to the system will help deter mid-game leavers, but it’s not the only thing they’re adding to create a less toxic online environment.
The Avoid a Teammate system is being expanded from three players to ten. This system allows you to add someone to a list, which tells Overwatch who you don’t want to be partnered with in future matches. If you add an eleventh player to the avoid list, Overwatch will replace the person who has been on your list the longest. You can pin three players on the list who will never be replaced.
To try to eliminate the need for alt accounts, Blizzard is also adding Wide Groups. This will grant players who are five skill tiers apart from their friends the ability to still team up with them for games. Wide Groups will be matched with other Wide Groups of similar skill levels, and lower-tier players will be rewarded, or not, appropriately when in Wide Groups so as not to condone level boosting. Solo players need not worry as they will only ever be matched with other solo players to keep things as fair as possible.
Head on over to the official Blizzard webpage to see what other changes are coming in the seasons beyond, and always remember, don’t be kak, be lekker.