Overwatch Plagued by Unusually Harsh Inactivity Rules

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Overwatch fans likely understand the pain of being disconnected mid-match. Whether it's a casual or competitive Overwatch game, being removed mid-match feels like being stolen from. It robs the player of the work they've put in, preventing them from the opportunity of victory. It's all the more frustrating when it's Overwatch itself that disconnects players for an unfair reason. That's what's happening to a wave of Overwatch players lately, as the game is dealing with a bug tied to its AFK detection.

On paper, AFK detection is an extremely important thing for online multiplayer games. If a teammate goes AFK, the system will remove them from the game so that they are punished and don't receive any benefit for taking advantage of their team. In practice, fine-tuning AFK detection is very challenging. For example, players need to be able to go to the bathroom without being kicked. It's a bug in that fine-tuning that's currently punishing undeserving Overwatch players.

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The bug was first introduced in Overwatch's most recent update, which went live on September 7. Players began being kicked not for being AFK, but for being in what Overwatch describes as the match spawn room. The spawn room is where players begin a match and where they respawn after a death. With the patch, if players linger in this area, even if they're actively moving or shooting, they can be disconnected via Overwatch's AFK detection.

To be clear, this issue is genuinely a bug and not Blizzard taking a more aggressive stance on punishing toxic behavior. Community manager AndyB has confirmed that Blizzard is aware of the issue and is working to fix it, but a timeframe for the fix is not yet available.

The biggest problem with the bug is that certain map types in Overwatch can end with one team being pushed all the way back into their spawn room. These teams are then at risk of being kicked due to the bug, even though they're just playing the match normally. Just because they may lose one map persuasively doesn't mean that they wouldn't have a chance to win the match overall, so the bug is taking away a lot of players' opportunities.

All in all, it's an unfortunate situation for Overwatch players to deal with, but it's entirely due to an unfortunate bug and not due to any actual decision on Blizzard's part. Overwatch players should be aware that they need to get out of the spawn area as soon as possible, which should protect players from getting disconnected.

Overwatch is available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.

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