#punish leavers
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You'll need to define a leaver first. The guy who left after his base got destroyed? The guy who left before game start? The guy who left at 50 mins cause he ran out of time?
Leaving after game start is sad
Just make it so leaving a game without voting resign gives a 15m time out penalty on joining new game; make it 1hr the second time he does so in a 24hr period. Most other games have similar punishment for leavers
We track people leaving and have occasionally referenced it but right now there is nothing formal in place (nor plans to put anything formal in place).
normally games have it like if you leave before x amount of time
worth noting leaving itself is completely fine since there's always /take, we've only ever done anything (even then I think it was just a warning) when it was a consistent pattern
yeah, make it like 10m game time or something lenient
I think it depends on what for. If my base has been wiped and I want to resign, I should be allowed to. So id be afraid this would slippery slope.
Even if you have 2-players worth of metal it's hard to fight 2 players
A very good example of why we don't punish it
A backliner having 2 backliner bases would be over the moon
not to mention our client crash rate is high. i would agree to a degree for afking with okay ping/fps
have a once-per-24-hour leave forgiveness, so if something comes up IRL you don't have to feel bad about it
allow a leave if your economy (and/or perhaps unit count) is less than a threshold, like <10% of the next-worst-off guy on your team-- with a check on if you self-destructed your way there to cut that off
this issue is more down to the fact that there are 16 people in the player state
its best that players who dont have time to compl;ete a match, leave the match
instead of being afk which is undesireable as they now control a portion of what the team has
and that now affects the teams ablility to continue playing
i think we dont need to involve moderation in a static policy sense
i think that will just create more work for the mod team to get through at any time(im not a mod so i dont really know the work load)
i personally see any attempt to have static moderation lead to players just being afk being a bigger issue
On one hand, I'm all for this in concept. Have spoke my mind on early quitters plenty by now.
But how to actually apply this in practical terms, sounds difficult and certainly not without risk of collateral.
tbh someone who has such a terrible connection (temporarily or otherwise) should refrain from public games, if they cannot avoid disconnecting from a game 2-3 times a day maybe they ought to fix their connection or just play with friends in private games instead of joining public 8v8s and ruin other people's games
so I think that part of the side effect isn't really unfair; after all, if you are a chronic disconnector, your effect on ruining games is no different from a chronic quitter
it's unfortunate for those people, but I think the amount of people who are unfairly treated this way is far lower than the amount of people punished for behaving intentionally badly
we can also probably discount client crashes
you could say that the bad actors could just crash their client artificially to avoid punishment, but that'd still filter out a lot of bad actors who don't know any better than manually quitting a game
the client disconnects me sometimes for no reason, while i still have internet, i have to restart the game and reload 
I would have no problem with being timed out for 15m, for example, in that case, it is still a rather infrequent occurrence
compared to someone who just tries to ruin games by being toxic, like quitting a game because they can't get the spot they wanted at the start
so 15 min timeout so i can't return to the game i got disconnected from ? i don't understand 
just saying this is a slippery slop especially when this is an opensource project with no revenue / income to speak of
u need a bigger community and a full time ops team be4 you can even thinking of doing this (my 1 cent worth)
you can be given a chance to return to the game you dc'ed from, the timer would be put on someone if they join a new game instead
ah so like you can't join new games, gotcha
yeah, that's the whole allure of quitting a game, these leavers go join new games just to be toxic all over again
they try to get the spot they want at the start, if they don't, they quit again
I think not entertaining a mechanism like this is actually a slippery slope, it's giving toxic people the impression that the devs give this kind of thing no thought and no priority and they will be encouraged to go to the next step of toxicity
with more people onboarding the game this is something to worry about sooner or later, not at least considering a punishment might end up making people who suffer from leavers quit the game instead
(of course we have to consider how rampant this phenomenon is in the first place, people complaining about it here is a sign it's at least relevant already to some people)
Worth bearing in mind, events which cause an emotional reaction for better or worse (in this case worse) are more likely to be remembered and will stick out. We do track some stats on how often people leave early.
having an automatic punishment system will also reduce the amount of reports generated from these types of event (the mere existence of the punishment can make the victims of this type of leaving feel less grievance), so there's less manual moderation to go through
Hmm. If an automatic timeout only stopped you from joining new lobbies, that wouldn't be such an issue for crashes and accidental disconnects.
It would also punish people leaving lobbies for legitimate reasons (e.g. they are dead and the game is dragging on, in that case it's perfectly okay to leave).
It could even have a subtle non-accusatory message.
"You are already in a game. Please rejoin that one before beginning another."
Hmm...
yeah if im dead I should be able to leave.
Well perhaps combined with only applying if the quit is before x minutes of the game. Like was mentioned some other games have?
If you have little to no units
I dunno if trying to detect for the players income or unit would be practical to code in or not, but that would help too.
And you didn't just detonate them all intentionally (could be hard to check)
Income might be a better check?
the more i read here
the more non solutions i see
the main issue is who is going to do the work
and how many unintended cases occur
That way to leave intentionally you have to at least pass out all your income to other players
Well self detonated quits would be more obvious, and potentially reportable if it were a recurring enough behaviour. So doesn't have to flawlessly catch everything.
In just open lobby play yeh idk if it can be moderated, when matchmaking is added and you can que for ranked games
1v1 is simple, but team matchmaking could be a doozy of drama
Ideally I would only propose this if a fully automated system could be implemented. No active moderation required.
The goal would be to gently discourage selfish rage quit behaviour, rather than to apply any serious or lasting punishment.
thats the worst kind of system to do
Anything more serious shouldn't usually be needed, and is already covered by existing moderation.
An automated system working correctly would reduce man hours needed rather than increase, by incentivising better sportsmanship.
I had a player in a game the other day, that noped out and quit at 12min in.
His base hadn't even been touched. Was backline. Left literally because the front player ahead of him was new and suffered a raid. Wasn't dead. The backline player seemingly just wanted a safe solo punching bag so he could eco, and instantly went to find another game when he realised he'd have to help fight instead.
If selfish players like that simply had to wait 15 minutes before joining another lobby, disguised as a "oops did you disconnect? Don't worry you can rejoin."
That might make them reconsider throwing a game for 15 people just to pursue their calamity speed run ambitions.
actually I see a clear solution already formed: give each player a 10m server wide timeout on joining a new game (one that is different from the current one) as soon as game is loaded.
This way the player can:
- Reconnect if he simply DCs within the 10m and not suffer any consequence at all
- Leave the game after 10m if they feel victory is impossible and they just want to leave and find a new game
- Will never suffer from a penalty assuming they don't get wiped out in the first 10m
This way the toxic early leaver will: - Be unable to join a new game for 10m if he leaves right at the start, be discouraged to do this often
on the technical level it's also easy to implement: just assign each player a game ID that expires after 10m upon game start, check against that ID when they try to join any game
on the technical level it's also easy to implement:
I look forwards to the PR which can handle all the edge cases:
The most obvious is a team game at 8 mins in, it's okay. P1 leaves and the rest of their team leaves a few seconds later. How do we determine if the game was meant to end at that stage or if they abandoned their team?
that said, I have to say I'm not against the idea if we can find a good solution
if you're worried that these people wait 2m to find a new game, you can just lower the time to 8m, or however long time you think is reasonable to assume a team should persist in a team 8v8 game
personally I'm not worried that they simply have to wait 2m to join a new game in that already edge case
I think it would definitely be hard to only get people who leave games early because they're mad, and not those whose bases are destroyed etc, over the course of a whole game.
That said, I think a system that automatically restricts people who leave say in the first 5% of the game would be reasonable
actually nvm this probably wouldn't work because you dont know how long 5% is unitl game ends
a team abandoning the entire game because 1 player left to ruin the game for the opposite team is kind of toxic too, maybe they ought to suffer a 2m timeout penalty
if not longer, actually
I think if you get killed within 10m, maybe you should sit in game and watch how others play
instead of immediately join another game just to likely do the same
I think 10m is reasonable time out tbh, if not you could say 8m, or even 5m, which still deters early leavers who are simply toxic over not being able to start at the position they want to
but anyway in my experience anyway, most ragequitters and leavers do their thing early in the game, and it might be possible to have an automatic system to try and catch them
if you get killed within 5m and think this system is unfairly punishing you because you want to reliably find a new game after every 5m defeat, I don't know what to say
I'd say it's quite common to have your base destroyed in the first 10 minutes and want to leave, think about it that's after t2 arrives and front players without t2 support often get blown up then.
5 minutes though... I generally agree most people who leave pre 5 mins are ragequitting or trolling
On the other hand there's pretty consistent crashing issues in this game and pre 5 mins its also common to stop and wait for them. that would be impossible under this proposed system of punishing people who leave
why would it punish them? they can rejoin the same game within the 5m
they just can't join a different game and abandon the game they crashed from
mm i see, didn't read all of your idea up there
it's rather simple, just assign game ID when game starts, so you have to at least play 5m of this game; if you crash or DC, just get back in the same game and stay for 5m
tbh I really like 10m, it's enough punishment for leavers, and it really is a reasonable amount of time for team games to restrict people from leaving.
if you set the time too low, the leaver isn't punished enough, it wouldn't matter to them anyway
there's no perfect system, even a very good system can be abused or will fail on very edgey cases, I don't think this proposed system will be causing too much (or any) grievance for legit players in the vast majority of situations, and it should act as a strong deterrence for early leaving
and being able to find a special edge case for which the system doesn't work perfectly is not reason to flat out reject it
Might be a good topic to bring up for the next contributor discussion too
I think Errrrr lays out a pretty good design for it. 👍
Honestly at ten minutes, the timeout remaining would be over so quick that many early quitters might not even notice it before selecting a new lobby. It's a very safe number.
But would stop the people who quit due to not getting their desired start spot, and at least slightly disencentvise the absolute worst of the rage quiters.
And heck, if someone suffers a 100% total wipeout at 9 min, it might be worth spending 30 seconds to consider what went wrong, or take a look at allied/enemy bases.
that's exactly my point - the person who gets wiped out early isn't punished so much as reminded that this kind of loss isn't normal and they should probably reflect on it a bit before continuing like normal
and if the whole team leaves because this one guy left because he got wiped out, then there's something wrong here
I don't think it's fair that they could just go on to another game without being reminded that this shouldn't happen
Agreed, though I still think it would make a good topic of discussion for the contributor team.
Of course. I just meant it's a good reference for the discussion.
I'd be slightly inclined to up it to 15m, but then I'm also the kind of player who will happily try to micro a single pawn like a moba character, or play a rez bot like a it's in a stealth game, if that's the only unit I have left. ^ ^;
So I guess walk before run.
"An under 10 min loss isn't normal"
Me after winning 6 games in 45 mins: surprised face
mhhh so I find it difficult punishment for leavers. One day I started a game and I think minute 6 or 8 nothing worked ... Why my Internet provider had a major Incident and in our region was no Internet available. For this getting a penalty would not be so nice but I agree with you of course that it is a bit annoying when players simply leave the game
please handle false positive scrnarios as those will blow up in the discord if this was ever push into productions
Thing is, there are thousands of legitimate reasons to leave game early, the /take system allows game to continue on in more or less uninterrupted state
what's a legitimate reason to leave the game within 10m to join another game?
Cuz I already got my entire army /take'en while I had to go to bathroom lmao
you go to the bathroom to join another game?
if you have to afk right at the start of a game long enough for others to vote to take your units, you're being irresponsibly afk
the start is the most important time for the game and you abandon your teammates, when you could have gone to bathroom during load, lobby or before, that's toxic
Yeah, that's far from a legitimate reason. That's the most critical period of the match and very likely game ruining for everyone else.
There could be other emergency circumstances that might force a player AFK, but the usual etiquette is to simply ask for a pause. "Sry emergency brb" would normally suffice.
And failing that, if you come back to a game to find your units taken, why would you leave? Just ask for them back.
Any more significant emergency is going to last more than 10 minutes anyway, and thus would out last the timeout.
OPMan is indeed right that we should try and consider any possible false positive scenarios. But that's not one of them.
@fast stone giving actual irl example, I lost my power just as I was joining the game and it was back after 5 mins
They didn't want to give the units back? : (
I suppose even if you didn't ask that would be a possibility that they wouldn't. But I feel like this situation would surely be rare enough to not be a significant problem.
I couldn't find the lobby I was playing in, forgot the name xd
Ah. That sucks.
Well, it would at least only be less than 5 min of timeout in that scenario. And would theoretically encourage or even maybe help to find the correct lobby again.
Would be nice if the system were able to provide a "rejoin" button to the relevant lobby, as part of the package.
U Can rejoin or wdym?
True, I wish I could just press button to rejoin lobby that I left.
You can rejoin but you need to find the lobby.
Not very hard is it?
(Oops, wrong reply sry. Ignore this bit Goopy.)
Eh, not massively, but the list can be pretty big sometimes.
I can understand thinking, "ah heck, I'll just join a new one" in that specific circumstance.
(Here's the one actually meant for you...)
I'm guessing this must have been in 1v1s right?
Since that's 7.5 minutes each, minus lobby and loading times.
It'd probably be a relevant point that 1v1s, and maybe smaller team games, might need to be exempt.
i mean in 8v8, players are allowed to resign, a person who lost all their con, lab and mex <10min. tell team gl i dont have the ability to play untilted.
leaves and ally take over whats left. thats a valid reason
we are not moba, where there is no indiviual resign option. Afker? sure if you want to punish them but whats the requirement to remove the false positive? one guy droning his way at backline with 10min worth of q-up eco work?
that could be fixed tbh, and should be, the last lobby you quit from should be highlighted in the game list
can just make the timeout scale with player size
8v8 = 15m for example, that would make 4v4 8 minutes, 1v1 2m
or however you want to set the scaling
in fact, someone with actual statistics can just hardcode the timeout to be the 5 percentile or so game length
or even lower percentile, depending on the game type
that's too harsh
sometimes someone leaves when he's completely destroyed
so I'd say just punish leavers who get reported
This keeps popping up, so I just would like to remind everyone that it is probably of great interest to have mechanics that encourage players to try not to leave the game, since someone who is wiped out can still play the game by asking for units from allies and helping microing them. That kind of "repurposing" of player actions is both conducive to helping the defeated player improve (by at least participating in the game longer) and overall community cohesion (teamwork in the sense of helping each other out). If a player (and their team) know that they cannot join a new game for at least 10/15m, it is much more likely that they (and their team) would allow this kind of teamwork to happen. I have seen plenty of games where a completely wiped out player coming back to help the team win by microing important units, building back an eco base on the back, or in general contributing. On top of all that, if a player knows he cannot join a new game immediately, they can at least observe what happens in this game for a while, and that can be tremendous learning for them as opposed to just going to a new game (and likely resulting in a similar defeat). Being completely wiped out in 10m is not at all normal as many have agreed and the least the player could do to help his current (and future) team is to devote some time to learning after that.
I do agree that staying is a big help to your team, however one thing for me is when I am destroyed I would rather resign than get units given to me and go on to win because it makes my opponents feel like it was an unfair game for me to get gifted a lot of things.
Most people it's very good for them to get more units to practice with though
It's mostly just a me problem
I think there's a difference between being destroyed after a proper struggle and getting destroyed in the first 10m
You don't improve by continuing to play once your base is gone and rebuilding, you aren't practicing how to stop from losing your base to begin with which is the major issue here.
They already watch out for people that routinely leave games early.
Punitive measures in this case are not going to help anything. You're basically just throwing people at a brick wall by doing this instead of just giving them the autonomy to stay and watch or leave and join another game if they want, and having people be unallowed to join another game for 24 hours after 3 leaves will just kill the playerbase.
This is a bad idea that takes way to much effort to implement with any semblance of nuance and is comparable to the "removing team resign" idea.
The only way punishing leavers is enforced with any nuance is by taking it at a case by case basis.
Throwing a blanket over it is going to lead to more frustration and a lower player count.
is that why virtually ALL major MP titles in existence employ some automatic punitive measures for leavers?
your argument hinges on the very premise that manual enforcement is sufficient, which it clearly isn't judging by the existence of this post
Most don't actually. The ones that do are very competitive like LoL.
The existence of this thread doesn't prove anything. I can make a thread right now about how you eat diapers, that clearly does not mean it's true.
that's not true, almost all semi competitive RTS titles and Moba have auto leaver punishment
in the exact form of time out for joining new games
Errr is correct, most games that have competetive ranked matchmaking would employ a leave penalty. Tbh i dont know any popular game that dont
also, the idea that someone will be hugely negatively impacted by a measure that only punishes complete wipeouts within 10m is preposterous and hyperbole, even the mere experience of such defeat will be rare; suffering from the punitive measure will be even rarer
especially if it is a known mechanic and the team and player compensate on that knowldge, as I previously pointed out
a lack of an automatic punitive measure is in fact an encouragement of abandoning a game no matter the circumstance as soon as the player is wiped out, which is punitive on the entire team
I will just add that with current climate and meta, you can pretty easily get wiped in 10 mins, with rampant com drops etc. So yeah the system would need to determine if you actually have 0 units on the field, punishing players that actually lost feels bad imho.
you can change it to 5m if you feel that's the case, the point isn't about the strict setting of 10m, the point is an automatic deterrence for extremely early leavers
relying on moderation enforcement has one clear downside: someone will have caused considerable grievance first before their impact is reduced
i just watched game end in 13 mins in the highest average ts lobby. Sometimes games really go badly for the team 😛
but if a game ends, it will unlock the timeout for everyone under this mechanic, it only locks the players in if the game is in progress
I dont know how rampant is the leavers problem in the other lobbies, i would imagine it happends a lot - people just dont care prop and leave.
ah well yeah sure why not sounds good
You said "all major mp titles in existence" Which is a totally fallacious and all encompassing phrase. Semantics. Most MP games don't, many mobas and rts games do. That is not an argument to have one here. Argue by the merit, not by the bandwagoning of said idea. We also aren't in actual ranked matchmaking of any official capacity, everyone plays custom games.
Damn it's almost like the 10m thing isn't even the only situation in where this would punish a totally non-malicious player with a perfectly justifiable reason to leave.
Sinking more money into someone that is already dead isn't always the move to make. Someone leaving at start can be a total boon to some teams they can get more money per person and 7v8 is not that bad.
I am in game so I will have to reply to the rest later but tbh these are weak points to make.
doesn't matter if we have no ranked matchmaking, our current custom games is where players get ranking, and therefore it's the ranked mode for our game, so it's entirely competitive and comparative to the matchmaking system of other games
"Sinking more money into someone that is already dead isn't always the move to make. Someone leaving at start can be a total boon to some teams they can get more money per person and 7v8 is not that bad. "
I didn't say it is "always the move to make". I said it is a viable solution to providing more opportunity for a player who is completely wiped out. And there are a lot of situations where this solution is both helpful to the team (in the form of increased micro capacity due to an extra player being present and controlling some units), and helpful to the player (in the form of allowing them to participate in the game longer to experience more)
"You said "all major mp titles in existence" Which is a totally fallacious and all encompassing phrase. Semantics. Most MP games don't, many mobas and rts games do. That is not an argument to have one here. Argue by the merit, not by the bandwagoning of said idea. We also aren't in actual ranked matchmaking of any official capacity, everyone plays custom games. "
It's true in essence: all major MP titles with competitive elements punish leavers automatically. That's not fallacious. What's fallacious is claiming that isn't the case based on strict semantics, because that's hairsplitting for the sake of argument. Also, I didn't want to be bandwagoning, I merely pointed out that it can't be such a terrible idea if so many other popular, established and competitive games use the mechanism, when you clearly insinuated that a timeout mechanism is just straight out bad design, no qualifiers attached.
"Damn it's almost like the 10m thing isn't even the only situation in where this would punish a totally non-malicious player with a perfectly justifiable reason to leave. "
A player with a perfectly justifiable reason to leave is extremely rarely punished by this system, as with any other system that punishes automatically. That's not excuse to not consider something that prevents abuses in tons of other more frequently occurring events.
If someone has justifiable reason to just leave the game, he prop shouldnt have reason to start new one again immediately after leaving
How would they be extremely rarely punished if it is automatic.
you cannot have both.
Also competitive elements =/= ranked matchmaking.
Nor does LoL have a function to take over a teammates champion, or many other rts games iirc.
Whats justifiable reason to leave a game and start another one immediately ?
question why do we want to automate punishing early game resign or leaver? the count is not high enough it need to be automated. afk in game sure..
we cannot have allow indiviual resign and telling ppl its okay to resign and then say you are to be punish if its not a team resign
nothing proposed is to punish earl resign; the proposal merely punishes people who leave the team's ongoing game early
we allow a lot of things to be done that players can potentially get punished from, if we don't we would impose all kinds of censorship in chat
merely allowing something to happen isn't a good reason to justify the behavior, players are allowed to make mistakes but the overall design of the game mechanics and moderation process should encourage players not to make mistakes
all your shit is gone, net neutral to stay or leave.
All your shit is gone and team is in a sincere losing scenario but refuses to quit.
You aren't interested in carrying out the game anymore and are resigning, giving your stuff away to the team. Maybe it's been particularly long or exhaustive match and you're finished with it, want to go next, whatever.
You have to go do something that may take longer than 10 minutes but less than 15 minutes to an hour(like maybe taking a phone call or taking a shit, idk.)
idk? They want to go play with friends or something who gives a fuck.
I don't think we are going to have 8v8 matchmaking. But In 2v2+ matchmaking it makes sense to have some kind of wait time to requeue if you leave a game early.
There is no such precedent that is or should be set for custom games, nor should one be set when the player base is this low.
aren't we discussing a leave system for people leaving at the start of the game?
No, as far as I can tell it is at any point in the game.
@blissful crest is this for the early game quitters or quitters in general?
OP's post does not really indicate when.
If that is what Err is arguing for, I still don't really see the point.
If it's less than 5 minutes, you can just rehost. If it's between 5-10, consider rehost but more likely just take. +10 minutes just take.
Not everything you disagree with deserves to be punished, the versatility afforded by both individual and team resign allows the best options for everyone involved.
wdym rehost ? the game should continue lmao, and the person leaving the lobby should be punished. sounds good to me.
if you ragequit at 3 min mark and want to just go to another lobby to do the same, yeah you shouldnt be able to do that. maybe u need some cooldown.
Thankfully what sounds good to you isn't immediately implemented 
Especially since you're just ignoring all the other reasons I potentially gave because uuuuooohhhnnnoo dis guy, DIS GUY rage quit at 27 pico seconds into the game, please chop his balls off.
If someone goes into lobbies and constantly leaves early without a good reason, moderation will do something about it.
/thread.
I'm not really that invested in whether or not you apply any of the specific forms of punishment suggested previously but I think there is a case to have more tools that incentivize a player to stay in the game.
Regardless of the validity of the person quitting's reason, the game's matchmaking is balanced around the relative apm/decision making contribution each player has, and it presumes that you are making your team worse off by resigning early. (In reality, if you're the worse person on the team it's almost always best for the team for you to leave asap and for the best player to take everything on the team since the added apm cost becomes irrelevant if the best player is of a certain skill level but that's not really something we should be promoting imho).
Given that according to the game's balance logic, leaving presumably puts your team at a disadvantage in all scenarios, is there an argument for you to lose more TS than the rest of your team as a punishment for leaving?
I understand that losing everything early sucks but more players should learn to function on low economy anyway, and in most cases there's bound to be something for you to micro on the map if you ask your team.
There does arise a problem of forcing people to stay in games where their team refuses to give them anything to do, while they sit there afk because they don't want to lose more TS than normal. In these situations I'm not really sure how to better incentivize people to give their dead teammates something to do but I guess this is what a thread is for anyway
I do wonder if punishing people for leaving before 10 minutes might have a bad impact... like if someone decides they don't want to play at 3 mins in, instead of quitting, they just afk troll until 10 mins
At that point it's probably too late to remake game
There is no matchmaking, right now the only way to gain rating is through custom games, so the point about matchmaking is entirely moot. The reason other games enforce the punishment in their matchmaking mode is precisely because that's the competitive mode where players gain rating (i.e. account progression). Custom games current IS that mode, it is how players progress their account. It is only fitting to have this enforcement for this mode right now. When in the future we move rating gain into a formal matchmaking system, you could reasonably remove the punishment here and instead apply to that matchmaking mode.
You talk about not "bandwagoning" onto other designs blindly, and yet you seem to have a didactic rhetoric about "precedence" in the literal sense. The spirit of those designs in matchmaking format is to discourage players ruining games (and therefore ruining other people's account progression effort). The spirit is entirely the same here. Talking about precedence in the literal sense is not at all suitable.
That's a valid point. However it's much easier to moderate that player who obviously afks for 7 min - more players would be reporting him, it is much less possible to argue that it is an "accident" (such as in the case of quitting the game, one could easily argue it's a DC or crash), and therefore it'll create a much easier moderation process for the mods on that player.
also, from that player's pov, it's less effort for them to just leave the game anyway and wait 7m outside of the game, than to stay in, which can create more backlash from the team
maybe, but creating an explicit punishment for leaving effectively rewards people for staying, (even if it's effectively the same punishment). i think psychologically humans generally aren't able to objectively analyze expected outcomes, being hardwired to be risk-averse
and besides, leaving 8 mins in the game isn't moderatable, but trolling for 2 minutes in, so while it might be easy for moderation team to see if someone is trolling, it's still added work
but it's effective work; someone leaving 8min into the game to abandon the team when they could easily stay is also toxic, and without a punishment, that person can go unmoderated
what I'm saying is, if someone is willing to troll the team because they "want to leave at 8m but gets punished by game design", then that person is toxic just the same
I don't agree with how resign works, if I become toxic due to how people resigned, I should be moderated
same with a design that locks people into an MP game for at least 10m
i do think that there is a problem where people can come and go in matches as they please without any punishment for ruining several 16 person lobbies, I'm just trying to point out any sort of perverse incentives that may arise
Btw, I think the issue of comdrop and how it is creating wipeout situations more now is clouding people's assessment of this issue. I don't have data to say whether these things happen frequently enough right now but I do know that that kind of wipeout so quickly into a game isn't desirable to the vast majority of players, and if that's the problem, we should address comdrop separately, but nevertheless entertain the idea of punitive measure for early leaving here
It's not entirely moot because you can be in a lobby with a ts 50 and a ts 5 in the same game. Unless you only play in lobbies around your skill level your game experience is going to vary wildly,
On top of that - This game is not any of those other games so it doesn't matter what they do, saying it over and over and over again why they do it doesn't make it apply anymore here.
It's the same reason saying "Well, BA/TA/ZK/ whatever balanced the game like this.
Okay, and? This game has a system where if someone resigns at all, you can take their stuff. If they do it continually, then they get punished.
There is no formal system in place right now. There is no reason to punish people leaving except out of spite tbh. It'll probably only hurt the player base rn
"On top of that - This game is not any of those other games so it doesn't matter what they do, saying it over and over and over again why they do it doesn't make it apply anymore here."
You're the one that brought up the precedence issue with how this kind of enforcement isn't in custom games in those other games as a retort to my point. I was merely responding to you. If you don't want to harp on about other games maybe you ought not to use that line of argument yourself.
That is valid point but that either means we do or don't in one direction or the other.
There's plenty of reasons to punish people for leaving so early as to ruin games for others. Which is the entirety of the point brought up.
If it is that early remake.
that's a punishment to all the rest of the lobby
No, that's like a couple of minutes. Not "punishment."
so a couple of minutes for 15 people isn't punishment, but for one person it is?
Between 15 minutes and a whole day is a lot longer than take maybe not even 30 seconds to remake if there are people in queue.
waiting 10 minutes to join a new game is less punishment for the entire lobby and proper punishment for the player who decides to abandon the lobby
Nah
the degree to which you can enlarge or shrink this timeout punishment is subject to discussion, I'm bringing it up as a concept, not as a strict requirement
you can leave out the "repeat offense" part which some people may find extra punishing and not fitting, my stance is that it isn't, because an actual false positive in that case is going to be even more rare
if someone repeatedly leaves a game early, it's even less likely that it's an accident, and more likely that that player is just toxic in general
I don't see how any of what has been discussed here would be conductive to a better experience for anyone involved. Except for the Rejoin button. That would be SO awesome.
If you don't want players who get destroyed within the first 10 minutes, you set a minimum skill boundary for the game. If you don't want ragequitters, you report them. The report system is the best tool for this job IMO.
One thing that could possibly work for "serious" games (you know, the ones with "Lobster" in the title :D) is an "activate leaver's penalty" room command, such that it can be voted as a way of ensuring a higher stakes, no bullshit game of sorts. And even then I believe there should be some sort of post-game player interaction, like an automated "punish $player behavior?" vote once the game ends.
The idea of a fully automated punishment system in this game feels almost repulsive to me.
You can rejoin a battle if you were a player in it
Just have o remember what room you were in
Hover over the room to see the players in it
And when you see yours, join it and click rejoin
Yeah, I know, but adding a rejoin button would be more than a QoL improvement. It would let the game track the room.
Sometimes, your room will spontaneously combust for no reason. Then you will spend 5 minutes searching for something that no longer exists.
Sometimes, the room you're about to click will swap its position with another, and you won't realize. In this case you will be joining the wrong room, and won't know it until you've already loaded.
There may be other edge cases that such a button would solve.
Room which you could rejoin to continue playing should be color coded somehow so you can quickly find it after the crash imho.
The only real edge case if when some gets wiped and immediately wants to start in another lobby. Make a check if he has any units before resign. Normally people dont do this tho, they resign and wait for the next round to start. I think the most common early game toxic behaviour is people actually not placing their commander if their favourite backline position is taken, forcing !stop.
Teifon already said that this is good topic for discussion during contrib meeting, dunno why continue arguing with people that will not change their stance on this.
My bad, I didn't read everything. Now I see very good suggestions around the comment you're referencing, like the thing about tracking a player's ID.
adding a "rejoin" or highlight the game you previously joined is definitely a major QoL feature
Allow specs to take over prbably
its already a bit questionable to allow spec to join before the game start. after game start its basically cheating
**Proposal: **Leaver Penalty and Team Compensation Mechanism
To improve fairness and competitive integrity in Beyond All Reason, especially in team-based matches, I propose an enhancement to the handling of "leavers" — players who exit matches early — in a way that aligns with the principles of the OpenSkill ranking system.
Core Idea
Implement a system that detects when a player leaves a match early (regardless of reason or the specific game minute) and triggers conditional rating mitigation for the remaining teammates — but only if they choose to continue playing and meet certain criteria.
Suggested Mechanism
If a player leaves and does not return, and their exit time constitutes more than 50% of the match duration, the system flags them as a leaver.
If the team continues playing despite being handicapped, and ultimately loses the match, their OpenSkill rating loss is reduced by 20–30% (for example)
The leaver receives a full loss impact, potentially with additional penalties (e.g., temporary queue timeout, leaver flagging, etc.).
This reduction would not apply if:
The team surrenders prematurely.
Other players from the same team also leave.
Rationale
Motivates teamwork and perseverance: Players are encouraged to keep playing and adapting, even with a disadvantage (e.g., microing units of the disconnected player, adjusting strategy).
Reduces unjust punishment: Committed players are not penalized as harshly when a loss is clearly caused by a teammate’s early exit.
Discourages rage quitting: Leavers still receive full ranking consequences, making it an unattractive option.
Aligns with OpenSkill principles: OpenSkill is designed to model uncertainty and performance. By factoring in severe team imbalance due to a leaver, the system maintains more accurate skill modeling over time.