For those who may have speculated that the disconnect rate may be displaying inaccurate information on some players, you may not be wrong. Katsuhiro Harada, Tekken Project Chief Director confirmed they’ve found a bug in the information displayed, with a fix planned to roll out this April. 

This was confirmed to MP1st in an exclusive interview (done before the February Tekken Talk) with Harada. He also talked about some of the challenges combating those whom players deem as “pluggers,” players who purposely disconnect by unplugging their ethernet cable to avoid a loss in their record.

“Generally, if a disconnection occurs, the disconnection rate increases. The mechanism of displaying the opponent’s disconnection rate before a match, which allows the user to decline the match, is similar to TEKKEN 7. However, as of March 1st, we found a bug that causes the disconnection rate to not function accurately, and these issues are planned to be improved on in April.”

Harada goes on, 

“As mentioned in the TEKKEN TALK program in February, severe pluggers will start to be banned from March 2024 onwards. It also has be noted that the issue of a user physically unplugging the LAN cable itself cannot be prevented, and this is not limited to TEKKEN. Additionally, while the unplugged party can be identified, the current situation does not provide 100% proof of identification for the method known as “uplink unplugging” — which is again, not specific to TEKKEN. Therefore, while there might be desire to penalize the unplugging party, if the unplugging party was using a malicious method such as uplink unplugging, it could inadvertently penalize the victim who was disconnected in error. Hence, caution is necessary in this regard.

With that said, strict measures ranging from temporary bans to permanent bans will be applied to reduce the presence of pluggers for players whose disconnection rates reach a certain threshold. We kindly ask for your patience until the ban enforcement begins, albeit not as straightforward. In the gaming industry, legal preparations, including having solid legal grounds in case a banned player files a lawsuit, are needed. This is also a measure demanded by platforms, so it is important to understand that bans are not as risk-free and easy as imagined. Nevertheless, we plan to execute a significant number of bans soon.”

As Harada mentions, unplugging isn’t exclusive to Tekken 8. Several other fighter games, as well as practically any other online game, experiences the same issue. Just because someone disconnects, it doesn’t always mean they’re unplugging, as several other factors could play into the disconnect, such as temporary loss of internet service. Hopefully whatever system Tekken 8 has implemented, it’s able to calculate rates accordingly and determine certain high users and their disconnect patterns. 

Beyond that, though, we can expect the disconnection rate display to be fixed this April; that way, you can immediately tell if someone will disconnect based on their history. That, along with the penalties implemented in Ranked and the bans that will go out this month, should hopefully limit these types of players.