Early leaving in ranked team matches needs to be seriously rethought

Throughout the past 2 weeks I have intensively played ranked team matches. It’s the mode that I consider most fun and I have had a few really really good matches. However, I am slowly feeling the need to stop myself from investing any more time into the game. Early leaving is just plain broken.

It feels like only 30% of the matches end up being a good investment. Most other matches end because of people leaving early or other trivial things. It’s really ridiculous when 20% of the matches end in the first 10 seconds when I had to wait for 5 minutes in the queue. There needs to be some form of severe punishment for leavers like many other ranked games have. Give them an incremental ban or lower their ELO by 200 or something. Anything.

Leaving a match should be also done by a team vote and not by an individual. It’s a team effort after all. It makes no sense at all to allow any individual to just tank the whole team by leaving whenever they please while penalizing everyone’s rank the same way.

I don’t buy the excuse that external circumstances may necessitate leaving. Even if, the punishment is fair and shouldn’t matter as something else seems to be far more important in their life anyway.

I am done with my rant. These are my feelings after playing ranked for 2 weeks. Unfortunately, they are pretty strong at this point.

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and yet i have had games in the past where despite being a team game, my team literally does nothing to help me while i’m getting 2 on 1ed or worse, and they just keep booming while i’m dieing.

who is to judge when i’m allowed to stop wasting my time on a team that clearly doesn’t care to help me? do i have to wait until i’m completely dead? that doesn’t seem fair or fun to me.

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There are no penalties right now. Not even for leaving in the first minute.

I would argue that your case is still a fair game and you can rebound depending on circumstances. Lots of open variables exist in your scenario and the game may still be winnable. Again, it’s a team game. Booming is a viable strategy.

My point is that every single game I have ever played has an obvious threshold after which the winners and losers are obviously decided. Only then should individuals be allowed to leave. Before that happens, I still insist it has to be a team decision. Early leaving should ESPECIALLY not be allowed in the first 15 minutes. It makes no sense unless someone is AFK or obviously not performing as expected.

I would think that this game could have a very smart system for these things considering that there are scores for each player. Those scores seem to be really good performance indicators imho.

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but it isn’t fun for me in that situation is it? i’m getting killed, meanwhile my TEAM is doing nothing to help me in that situation. so why should i stick around for a TEAM that doesn’t help the TEAM?

yeah well then i INSIST that if such a rule is implemented, team mates be allowed to judge their allies. if i’m gonna have to stay in crappy games because my team mates are booming i insist on being allowed to leave feedback saying they are crappy team mates.

or not. if i’m getting slaughtered by the enemy my score is going to be crap. meanwhile my team mates who are booming are going to have a much better score. but are they actually contributing to the game if they aren’t helping?

if in a 2v2 game i leave my ally to get slaughtered while i ransack undefended bases and we win, does the score really say my ally did nothing because his score is crappy?

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You are bringing up examples that are very distant from what my frustrations are about. It’s in the gray area and a tangential discussion to what my main frustration is about. We have nothing right now.

What’s the argument for allowing people to leave without punishments in the first 15 minutes while everyone performs within 300 score range of each other?

my point is your solution to the problem screws people over.

right now - i’m in a game where my team isn’t contributing and i’m getting steam rolled - i can quit and go play a new game that should be more enjoyable.
post your change - i’m in a game where my team isn’t contributing and i’m getting steam rolled - i can’t quit unless my team quits and i’m stucking playing a game i’m not having fun, that my team isn’t helping in, and that i’m way behind in.

who cares? real life is a thing, and sometimes stuff happens. make them lose ELO like they lost the game, even if their team ends up winning. simple solution.

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I seem to obviously care? As said in the beginning, external circumstances are a bad excuse in my world. I can plan my time for a match, why can’t they? They literally waste the time of 7 other people while getting minimally punished for it. To you that seems fair. Sorry, but I deeply disagree with you and I think you and I can agree on disagreeing at this point.

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what happens if something comes up? 2 years ago i was playing a match and my house caught on fire.
this summer i was playing a match and i got a call that my grandpa died. stuff happens man.

and yet your answer would screw over anyone who gets bad team mates. the answer to a problem is not to make another problem.

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I don’t think you will care about a game punishment when your house is on fire… will you? I am asking this to point out that this kind of argument is not helping this discussion. Will you really care about a 1 day ban in this case? Will you feel screwed over?

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which is why i’m fine with losing ELO. as i said. you could even make it a couple games worth of ELO. but the fact is, that making it so i have to stay in a game is BS

a straight up ban because i had a real life situation is bull crap, unless you actually legitimately do something to deserve a ban.

so according to you, because i’m in a game with terrible team mates who aren’t contributing and helping my choices are staying in a game i’m already dead in, and not having fun in, or leaving and getting a ban?

yeah totally fair and reasonable.

You keep bringing up extreme examples to try to dismiss my frustration about there being nothing in place. This discussion is going nowhere.

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says the guy who thinks people should be BANNED For leaving a game in progress.

In the first minute? Temporary ban? Yes. Again, you transformed my point into something more extreme to defeat my initial arguments. Bad bad.

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internet drops (not all providers are 100% reliable), game not connecting properly (which still happens), yay. banned for a day. seems totally fair.

coming from the guy who refuses to acknowledge that sometimes stuff happens, and sometimes you get bad team mates. but according to you, you’re supposed to just suck it up and keep playing with bad team mates, who get absolutely no punishment.

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Except drops, I have never experienced first-minute leavers. For what reason would people manually give up in the first 10 sec? If you are complaining about 20% disconnection rate, you should ask for fixes for the servers rather than punishments to players.

Ultimate selfishness. 11

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I consider it ultimate selfishness to leave 7 other people out in the rain. There is a reason ranked MOBA games, Overwatch, CSGO etc. have penalties in place. There is also a reason non-ranked games exist.

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Like Pilgrim said, people are leaving games that early because there is some kind of bug in the last update. Or is it the new meta to leave games in 1 minute in-game? It’s happened in almost ALL my TGs and to me myself thrice these days. I went to aoe2.net, downloaded my team mates’ records annnnnnnnnnnnnddddddddddd guess what? It appeared to them I RESIGNED. Do you know what showed to me while I was playing? That I LOST CONNECTION TO THE SERVER. Now, because of the game is unable to put me in the “disconnected” category should I be punished with a 24 hours ban?
Anyway, if you don’t want rage quitters in your team, make a clan and play only with them. It’s unfair to ban every single player who needs to quit for whatever reason just because there are a couple of rage quitters.

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I am not as deeply up to date to know about a bug being the cause of my plight with AOE. If that’s the case, then agreed: The main issue I have with the game is that bug and it impacts me so much that I am ready to abandon the game for good. I have not once encountered the issue of losing connection, but I cannot deny the possibility of such problem existing for others.

That said, ranked games should still enforce something like a 15 minute playtime rule. I am really not sure why this is such a controversial topic for this game. Every ranked game I played has it and it seems sensible to me. I am not too hooked on the draconian idea of a 24h ban on the first violation or anything similar.

Something more along the lines of what I would actually like this game to have: Each player has a counter X – initialized with 0. Every week that counter gets decreased by 1, but not less than 0. Every time you leave a game early, X gets incremented by 1 and you are bared to enter the ranked queue for 5^X minutes.

And again, I do not argue that this should apply for people that lose connection. False positives should be obviously minimized as much as possible. Right now, this problem is totally skewed into one side and it seems like the community here is OK with that. I am not, but that’s okay. I came to write about this because I feel passionate about this game.

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Haha I just figured out what I’m going to tell people I do in my freetime, “Oh, I’m an investor!”

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Well not really, for example there are a lot of viper games on youtube where he ends up having the lowest score in a team game, but it’s because he was fighting 2 opponents while his ally booms and then comes and cleans up.

Also losing a whole bunch of ELO actually just ends up hurting opponents in their next game, when they are facing someone who’s more skilled then their ELO would have you believe. People would abuse this to smurf.

I do think a change needs to be implemented, but I dont think it should be too severe, and obviously bugs that are crashing the game should be priority number 1. Ultimately though I will say that for me atleast DE has still been much better then HD was for team games.

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