Overwatch devs finally explain why Competitive doesn’t have backfilling or pauses

Since the dawn of Overwatch’s Competitive Mode, players have wondered why the game doesn’t take steps to fix the problem of leavers. Now, five years after the game’s release, the devs have finally provided an answer.

No one likes it when a player on your team leaves a game of Competitive. It creates an incredibly difficult position with one team needing to take every single fight down a hero.

Whether it’s a support, tank or DPS who leaves, one thing is for certain, winning a game five versus six is incredibly difficult. That said, with Quick Play, whenever someone leaves a game, someone else can pop in and “backfill.”

This has led many players to wonder: why isn’t this the case for ranked play? Backfilling itself isn’t necessarily fun for the person doing it and in ranked where SR is on the line, there would be some sort of reward system in play to at least encourage it.

Now, the Overwatch devs have addressed the issue and why there aren’t any backfills or pauses in Competitive in the event someone leaves or disconnects.

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Replying to a question in a Reddit AMA, Principal Designer Scott Mercer explained that the negative perspective of backfilling is why it was never considered to ranked.

“There’s no backfilling because we’re pretty sure no one would want to do it. If you ever backfill in a game and lose shortly afterwards, you’re not happy,” he said. “If we allowed players to backfill without consequences to their SR, it’s giving them a license to throw or act negatively. There’s simply not a lot of great options there.”

It’s definitely an interesting point. No one likes having a thrower on their team, but it’s unclear how it’s much better than having a leaver. Even if it opens up the possibility for throwers, it also opens up the door for having someone who actually tries.

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On the topic of pauses, it all comes down to time and not wanting to waste it. “We have to consider cases where players might abuse the rules in an attempt to harass someone or waste people’s time,” Mercer explained.

“The best way to try and minimize leaves is to not provide any kind of outside motivation for them to occur. We’re never going to be completely leave free, due to internet outages, personal emergencies, random acts of chaos by cat, we just want to make sure and minimize them as much as possible,” he added.

What will be interesting, however, is if the team ever considers rethinking this philosophy with Overwatch 2 and the potential of a new tournament system. Overwatch League implements pauses in the event of internet or hardware issues, so seeing something similar apply to in-game team tournaments would be a nice touch.

That said, for the time being, don’t expect to see pauses or players backfilling your ranked games for the foreseeable future.