Leaverbuster is broken

Skateboard B··1 votes·295 views

I was just in a game in which, for no apparent reason, my ping shot up to above 3k and floated around there for a while before settling at 500 and saying it was attempting to reconnect. Seeing that this wasn't working, I left the game in an attempt to come back; naturally, the client was frozen. I closed the client and reopened it and it said I couldn't connect to the login queue. I tried a different computer and had the same issue.

Note that the internet connection was working fine.

Got back on the original computer and I was allowed to log in, but this time it told me that my client was broken so it rolled me back and had to patch again. This happened quickly as I have a good internet connection. Finally got back in game and lost, obviously, because I'd been dealing with this for about 10 minutes. When the game was over, I was put in leaverbuster because of "recent activity".

The thing is, I never intentionally leave my games. The only time this happens is when something goes wrong and I get shut out like what just happened. There needs to be some way to differentiate people who just had some bad luck from those who ragequit etc. If the client is intelligent enough to tell me that it needs to repair itself, it should be able to determine when something went wrong that was beyond a player's control that we shouldn't be punished for. I already had a miserable in-game experience because of this, and now I don't even really want to play anymore for quite some time because I'll have a 20 minute wait ahead of me just to get into a match.

Edit: I just checked and the wait is only 5 minutes. A bit less of an inconvenience, but still completely unjustified as there is nothing I could've done to prevent this.

3 Comments

RallerenP2 votes

You only get punished if you frequently go AFK.

While a system to detect crashes, internet issues or electricity issues would be nice, people would start developing programs to simulate crashes or DC's to exploit said system.

This is why players are expected to keep a stable connection, and why they can't make special cases for crashes.

Hope it cleared things up a bit :)

Skateboard B1 votes

{quoted}

You only get punished if you frequently go AFK.

While a system to detect crashes, internet issues or electricity issues would be nice, people would start developing programs to simulate crashes or DC's to exploit said system.

This is why players are expected to keep a stable connection, and why they can't make special cases for crashes.

Hope it cleared things up a bit :)

So what of those who typically have stable connections? Inexplicable declines in performance can occur at any time, to anyone. Like I said, my internet is fine.. I just had some issues today. But I guess any time something strange happens I should just say "oh, well, I guess I can't play league for the forseeable future." There's no way to test this kind of stability without playing a game.. In the instance here, I played a normal game before going into ranked just to make sure everything was fine. I experienced nothing amiss in that 30 minutes or so, but the next game I played was fucked. This after I thought (and reasonably so) that I had fixed the problem that I was having. I'm sorry, but I understand how and why the system works as it does.. and I still think it's broken in favor of unjust punishment to avoid helping out that minority of players that would abuse a more forgiving system.

Silent Gravity1 votes

It's not an unjust punishment.

It's a gentle reminder that leaving the game for any reason isn't kind to the other people in the game.

It has this nice scaling where one-off events have almost no effect. I can go put out the fire, I can go pick up my child from <event>, whatever and still be fine. But if I make a habit of it, gotta go - dinner's ready, I'm thirsty - need a drink, I don't like my team, then it will scale up the reminder till I understand that leaving is no good.

Computer/internet/patching troubles are included in this. One off events will essentially be ignored. But if my internet goes out every team fight, the game will gently nudge you to greater understanding that leaving the game for any reason isn't kind to the other people. Some people may have to switch internet providers, or upgrade their computers, or get an anti-malware program (that one was a joke. Everyone should always have some protection.)

But, leavebuster is not a punishment. It has no effect on your account standing.

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