Overwatch 2 player falls for the internet’s oldest trick & it cost them ranking

An Overwatch player ended up being hilariously tricked into leaving a competitive match with a classic prank.

Alt+F4 is one of the oldest tricks in the book when it comes to online tomfoolery. Many people have fallen victim to the prank, which became popular in the early 2000s.

If you’re not familiar, or perhaps weren’t around at the time, Alt+F4 is one of the internet’s oldest, most widely used pranks. Essentially, when you press Alt+F4 on a keyboard of a Windows PC, the operating system will shut down the active window or program. 

How this works is someone will ask a question about how to do something in a program, and a devious joker will then instruct them to press Alt+F4 closing it. This can lead to a ton of mean-spirited, albeit funny instances of people being set back a little bit.

The problem these days is most people are now aware of the prank, so it’s hard to pull off. However, one Overwatch player kept the spirit alive recently with a cruel prank on an unsuspecting mark.

Don’t fall for this trick in your Overwatch games

In a Reddit thread that has 4k upvotes at the time of writing, a player shared a picture of a chatlog of a recent game. In it, one player typed the message: “[SYSTEM]: You have been reported in a recent competitive play match. To review your report type “/log” and press enter. 

What player Goobster, who ended up leaving the game, didn’t know is that typing “/log” in Overwatch 2 chat is a shorthand way to log off the game. This is because the in-game chat also works as a terminal for commands. 

This happened at the start of a game as a notice about a competitive match being shut down is seen. This happens when a player leaves right at the start of the game, a measure to stop one team from having an early leaver and then playing the whole game with four players.

For everyone else in the game, nothing happens to their SR, so there is no benefit in this. However, for the person who leaves, it does adversely affect their ranking, so it’s quite mean to pull this on an unsuspecting player. On top of that, you shouldn’t do it as this likely constitutes as ‘gameplay sabotage’, a reportable offense. 

Still, now you know. Don’t fall victim to one of the internet’s oldest tricks. It can be a costly move as the losses for leaving a game are very harsh.