But it has to be habitual
Having someone on your team quit in the middle of anOverwatchgame can temporarily cripple your side. It throws the balance off until the servers can find another player to backfill, and those precious seconds can lead to a surprisingly important momentum swing. It’s in Blizzard’s best interest to keep players in the game.
Blizzard has a semi-hidden penalty for people who habitually quit games that it recently shared on thebattle.net forums. The developer has an algorithm in place that looks at your last 20 matches. If the ratio of not-completed matches to completed matches hits a certain number (Blizzard didn’t state exactly what this is), a warning pops up in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. If that warning goes unheeded, future matches will be docked 75 percent experience. That will continue until the ratio hits the acceptable threshold of the 20 most recent games played.
This isn’t a huge deterrent for people who just want to playOverwatch. The game is still completely accessible to them, and they’ll have no problem hopping into another match. However, it’ll quadruple the amount of time it takes to level up, meaning that loot boxes are far less frequent. Considering that level and loot boxes areOverwatch‘s only tangible forms of progression, well, that’s incentive enough for most to just stay in the game.
