Low priority matchmaking - appeal process?

[tylermilner]

I've been having stability issues on my PC that primarily only manifested themselves when playing Deadlock. Basically, my PC would freeze and immediately hard restart in the middle of a match (no BSOD). Sometimes this would happen at the beginning of the match on the zipline, sometimes in the middle of a fight, etc. Every time this happened, I would rejoin the match ASAP. More often than not, my team would end up winning the match anyway. Is there any way to appeal this low priority matchmaking assignment?

I feel like Deadlock is doing something that would cause my PC to crash more than other games as I only saw similar hard crashes 1-2 other times in other games. This led me down a rabbit hole of testing all components individually - CPU, RAM, GPU, RAM slots, etc. - but everything was passing. Eventually, I even did a fresh Windows install with minimal apps/games and all the latest drivers, but that didn't seem to help.

Finally, I saw that the PSU Cultists Tier list had a note next to my PSU about "tripping issues with high transient power draw GPUs". Annoying that my "titanium" rated PSU has started to develop this issue after just a few years and Deadlock seemed to be the only "stress test" that would reliably cause the issue to surface. I even tried spectating several games to test without going into a match, but that was a crapshoot due to the current spectating bug and no way to continuously auto-spectate another match after the current match ends. I saw on Discord some other users suspect running on low settings for max FPS gain can lead to crashes as well, which is how I had my settings setup.

I've since replaced my PSU, but now stuck in this low priority matchmaking with no way to appeal it or reliably continue to test my hardware. I get being placed here if I was rage quitting constantly, but I would always join back into the game. Actually, one of the last times my internet service (Spectrum) crapped out as a crash happened and I was unable to rejoin, which seemed like it might have finally triggered the behavior flag.

Also, it's not like my teammates were angry/upset with me and I wasn't queuing the "extra competitive" mode either. It seems like there should be some way to appeal this process due to factors outside the player's control. Another idea would be to offer some sort of stress testing benchmark or continuous spectating mode so that players with hardware issues that are primarily triggered by Deadlock can safely test the stability of their systems before joining a game.

 

[tylermilner]

Also, maybe some sort of warning before the ban/low priority matchmaking placement could be extremely helpful. Maybe something like "You've abruptly left 3 of your last 5 matches and will be placed in a low priority matchmaking queue if you continue to leave games that are in progress. If you're having computer or internet stability issues, consider playing against bots until your issues are resolved".

That would have saved me as I didn't ever think to play against bots at the time. I've since played several bot matches and haven't seen any more crashes, but I'm still not 100% certain I won't see a crash when playing a "real" match as that's the only time I would ever see them previously.