Analysis - Disconnections

Disconnecting from a game sucks, but how much does it suck? How much is your winrate impacted based on the length of your disconnection? Let's take a look at the Houou players.

The rate of disconnection is about 2% in Houou. Out of roughly five million seats, around a hundred thousand disconnected from the game. For this data, I counted the number of tiles discarded after they disconnected. If it was 0, I didn't count it as a disconnect. Otherwise, the number was divided by 4 and rounded up to get a number of turns. Then, their final placement was checked and added to the dataset.

Some of these disconnections might be intentional. If people have a tendency to rage quit while in fourth, then that would inflate the "fourth" column.

Let's look at the placements by the round that the player first disconnected from.

The numbers are relatively stable, but then in South 3 and South 4, the 4th rate climbs drastically. These are probably from people rage quitting, or disconnecting and then not having the motivation to go back in.

As we can see, disconnecting has a large negative impact on your winrate, as can be expected. However, the impact may be less apparent on other platforms. On Tenhou, you can't win while disconnected, so other players could discard dangerous tiles if they saw you disconnected, or you could end up discarding your winning tile. Even without that, the lost turns for hand progression and possible furiten will still be present.

Now, for some fun bonus facts.

What's the average length of a disconnect? Seven turns.

What's the most turns a player has been disconnected for? 232, and they came in fourth.

What's the most turns a player has been disconnected and come in not-fourth? A player came in third after 204 turns disconnected, another came in second after being disconnected for 168 turns, and one came in first after being disconnected for 115 turns.

How do Tenhou replays mark that a player disconnected? It adds a tag to the replay titled "BYE".

The spreadsheet is here if you want the data.