Is Valve giving CSGO players fake matchmaking ban notices?

Valve’s known to have plenty of problems with Counter-Strike’s matchmaking, including requiring a third party to stabilize the matchmaking experience. However, a new issue may be rearing its head, with players rejoining matches after supposedly abandoning said match.

Despite the chat announcing the player’s cooldown, they appear to immediately be reseeded into the game despite their alleged cooldown.

In a recent Reddit post, a fan highlighted an interesting scenario that came up in one of their competitive matches. In the middle of a gunfight, a player leaft the lobby and the automated lobby alert said they’ve abandoned the match. Theoretically, since the player has allegedly abandoned the match, they should be locked out without the ability to rejoin. This is doubly true given the competitive matchmaking cooldown that the chat message says has been applied.

This turns out not to be the case, however. This isn’t the first time fans have been confused by this, however, and it will likely keep happening since it’s a very niche circumstance.

Rejoining after having abandoned – can someone explain this?
by u/splasherino in GlobalOffensive

Can players rejoin after abandoning a match?

Allegedly one mere round later, the same player who had just abandoned the match is announced as joining the Counter-Terrorist force in the lobby. This happens despite the chat notification upon their departure, leading to an understandable surprise from both teams.

While there’s an in-built grace period for failing to reconnect, it’s unusual for a player to be able to rejoin after the full matchmaking ban notification has been given.

The answer seems to be that if a player’s grace period expires while they are loading back into the game, they are given the matchmaking ban but are still allowed to rejoin the lobby. So while the grace period for rejoining the lobby may have gone, the player was still already in the process of loading in. The reason this is so uncommon is that by the time the abandonment ban kicks in, most players will be long gone or already reconnected.