Sometimes during a game in Overwatch, no matter the hero (except Reinhardt and Mech D.Va) when I have fired a few shots and hit the R button to reload, my hero will not reload.
This usually goes away after a short while (Around 5-10 second or so, but sometimes longer), and occasionally the hero will begin to reload, then stop, and refuse to reload for the duration of this glitch. It doesn't impact my character automatically reloading on an empty clip, but it is very inconvenient when trying to keep my clip topped up between fights.
I do have some performance lag sometimes on my machine, but my connection is fairly stable. Could my performance lag be the problem, or is this a known bug?
Best Answer
This is definitely due to packet loss.
Overwatch handles everything server-side, and has to make sure that happens on its server is consistent with what happens on everyone's client. The server keeps track of every player's health, ammo, shots fired, ult charge, and so on, for various reasons, such as preventing cheating. When you want to reload, your client announces that to the server, which updates its ammo count for you; meanwhile, the client is playing the reload animation and only actually reloads when it receives confirmation from the server.
Now I'm not exactly sure what kind of information loss prevention mechanisms Overwatch uses, but if enough messages are lost, any action such as firing your weapon, activating an ability, or indeed reloading can be lost, and for some reason it seems to happen most often with reloading.