One of the heroes in Overwatch is called Bastion, a robot that has the nifty ability to turn into a turret with a shield.
That’s fine — annoying to play against sometimes, but in principle it’s fine. Overwatch isn’t totally cool with it though, for one very ancient reason.
You would have thought someone would have realised this earlier, but as it turns out Overwatch kicks players for inactivity. The inactivity, unfortunately, happens to be tied to movement.
That’s understandable. It’s an old-school trick that stops players from sitting in a single corner for too long and it also allows for players who are genuinely AFK to be removed from the server without completely ruining the entire experience for their team.
The problem is: Bastion often has moments where he’s not moving, because that’s his job. That’s what a turret does, after all, and when you’re defending the last point and you’re sitting in a cheeky corner — well, you tend to stay put a lot.
User codeninja came across this oversight recently and pointed out that not only was he kicked for spending too much time in Bastion’s turret mode — which is an entirely acceptable way to play, especially if you’re the last line of defence — but that the game didn’t bring up any warning prompts.
“To be fair, I had not fired a shot in a while, no one had broken though. But I was definitely active … scanning entrances, watching … waiting like a happy little killing machine,” the user wrote.
A member of Blizzard’s community team welcomed and noted the feedback, so it’s likely that a response or a change might be included in the next patch to correct an issue where Bastion players are remaining idle for too long.
One suggestion is to log mouse movement so that the game knows the difference between a player that’s genuinely AFK and one that’s just sitting in the same spot, although that also opens the door to other players who just want to sit in a corner and not move. I can’t imagine there’s a great army of players who just want to sit in a corner without moving or firing (since firing staves off the idle timer) though, so Blizzard might just correct things specifically when Bastion is in turret mode.
Comments
5 responses to “Overwatch Can’t Tell The Difference Between An AFK Player And Bastion”
It surprises me that when it comes to AFK defense measures they don’t actually have anything that checks if you’re away from your keyboard and not making inputs. As annoying as campers are, I’m not sure if punishing a person’s style of play is ever a good option, besides, can’t they just make small movements to defeat the AFK defenses?
I haven’t played this game, so I don’t know, but is it possible for a player to look around by moving the mouse when in this mode? If so, surely that would be sufficient to defeat the AFK timer?
Yes, but that doesn’t defeat the AFK timer which is the issue.
The issue was that the afk timer only detects locational movement of the player (and not whether the mouse is active), which is sort of impossible when you stick to turret mode
I would think the best way to do it would be by tracking both mouse and keyboard (or controller) input. If there is none for a certain time a warning pops up and if you ignore that you are kicked shortly after.
Obviously this allows intentional AFK’ers to keep AFK’ing but that’ll always happen anyway, only way to lower that is with moderating/reporting.
I just found this article after looking it up after being kicked for being Bastion and getting kicked WHILE FIRING CONSTANTLY. What the HELL. I mean, I hadn’t let my finger off the trigger for a minute, but … seriously.