xQc Sums Up Overwatch Players’ Fury After Patch Causes Competitive Disconnects
L: Robert Paul for Blizzard EntertainmentCompetitive Overwatch players aren’t happy about the game’s most recent patch, and for once it has nothing to do with the content.
While competitive players have been known to take issue with some of Blizzard’s balance decisions for Overwatch in the past, the latest update seems innocuous enough: a relatively minor patch introducing new cosmetics for the Nano Cola Challenge and a few bug fixes.
Though the content of the patch might not have been an issue, the implementation and timing of it was. Players who were in competitive matches when the compulsory update landed found themselves kicked out of games, taking significant hits to their SR as a result.
While this would be frustrating enough at the best of times, what made it worse in this instance was that the patch arrived mere hours before the end of competitive season 11, a time at which many players were grinding out matches in an effort to end the season with as high a rating as possible.
The issue was only compounded by the subsequent difficulty some players experienced while trying to return to competitive play, as the servers struggled under the weight of all of the active players coming back at the same time.
One of the players affected by the update was Félix ‘xQc’ Lengyel, and he expressed his feelings on the matter in typical fashion.
The sentiment was undoubtedly shared by a lot of the affected players, many of whom took to Reddit to complain about consequences of the patch in a thread with more than 17,000 upvotes and over 1000 comments. Blizzard has yet to respond on the matter.
In the past, Blizzard has sometimes disabled competitive play briefly before an update to prevent players being kicked out of games when it arrives. In this instance, however, there were players in competitive games when the patch hit that suffered as a result.