Overwatch 2 devs to add harsher penalties for serial leavers as punishment is too “lenient”

Overwatch 2 devs say penalties on Quick Play leavers are too “lenient” and plan to make them harsher in Season 8. 

If there’s one thing every single competitive multiplayer gamer has to deal with, it’s leavers, and Overwatch is no exception. Most games has policies in place to punish leaver, and so does Overwatch. 

In Season 7, the devs implemented a new change that now leavers would not only get a 75% penalty for their Battle Pass XP, but if they leave too much, they’d receive a 10-minute suspension from queuing. 

However, despite saying this has reduced the leave rate considerably, the devs feel there is still too many serial leavers and plans to tighten their policies.

In a recent Director’s Take by Aaron Keller touching on Season 8’s upcoming balance changes, he touched on incoming leaver penalties coming into the game. 

“In regard to penalties for leaving Quick Play matches – the reasoning behind this is that frequent leavers do have an effect on the other people in the match, degrading its quality,” wrote Keller on leaver in Quick Play. 

“There are some players that literally leave over 90% of their matches, and we could no longer stick to a black-and-white policy because of this,”

The policy is still very lenient—probably too lenient—where players need to leave almost a quarter of their most recent matches to trigger a light penalty. We’ll continue to look at this and tweak these policies in an attempt to promote better match quality but without the harsher restrictions of Ranked Play.”

However, Keller does point out that Quick Play is host to varying ways of playing the game, as it’s a place where some players may genuinely be try-hard-ing whilst others treat it as a just-for-fun version of the game which makes it hard to balance penalties for it.