Overwatch players are experiencing unexpected seasonal bans

A rare bug in Overwatch is causing some players to lose skill rating by a distinctively large margain and receive an immediate season ban. Signs of the bug have arisen since earlier this month and seem to be picking up pace.

It is unknown what causes the bug, but Redditor Chromega1231 has shared images detailing extreme loses of skill rating in an impossible time frame. He is not alone, with many posting on the Battle.net forums of the same or similar occurences.

“I had been in a loop for about 10-15 minutes of joining games where the first splash screen showed all 12 players but, after joining to the character select screen, there were only 11 (including myself). The match would go into ‘Waiting for Players' and, eventually, would close. I would then, immediately, be thrown back into queue despite repeatedly clicking the ‘Cancel Queue” button,' wrote Battle.net user wowItsaSquad.

“I had left one game to see if it would fix itself (admittedly, I accidentally hit the rejoin button but the game failed shortly there after), but then I tried to alt-F4 out of the game. I let the game stay closed for a few minutes then loaded it back up, only to be immediately thrown into another competitive match after loading the game. After that match failed, I alt-F4 the game again and took a break. After an hour or two, I loaded up the game to see that I had lost 250SR and received a 20+ hour suspension.”

This doesn't bode well for players with Blizzard's new punishment system becomes active tomorrow, resulting in anyone that has received three seasonal bans being eligible for a permanent ban from competitive play.

Players subjected to the bug likely have little to worry about as perma-bans are at the discretion of Blizzard but in the current and upcoming systems, seasonal bans don't fade meaning that a player's records would be stained for the foreseeable future.

From the perspective of official support channels, these incidents look like the player has legitimately been leaving matches despite that not being the case. Blizzard has addressed the problem directly stating that it is aware of the situation and are working to fix the issue.

KitGuru Says: Blizzard is likely to address the issue promptly given that it's priming Overwatch into a standard eSport but it's still a shame that some players have experienced bugs that lock them out of their favourite game modes. Have you experienced any issues with Overwatch?

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