How to Fix Kicked Players Instantly Reconnecting to the Server

A player you kick who is back in the match seconds later was only disconnected, not banned. Disconnect closes a socket; a ban must be enforced at the door on every future join. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Persist bans by account identity

Store bans keyed to the authenticated account or device ID, not just IP, since IPs rotate. Include an expiry for temporary bans and a reason for audit logs.

2. Enforce at connection approval

In the connection-approval callback, look up the joining identity against the ban list and reject before spawning the player. Kicking mid-session without this check always allows an immediate rejoin.

3. Kick existing sessions on ban

When you ban someone who is currently connected, also disconnect their live session. Otherwise the ban only takes effect on their next join attempt and they keep playing the current match.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.