I write this to say that ELO problems continue and that there are still players abusively exploiting the game engine system to trash the gameplay and the experience of honest players. I am specifically talking about early quitters who :
i) either quit on game start;
ii) quit soon after 5 min (malicioulsy to avoid ban on games, for all bans that take place before x time);
iii) quit on mid game (before everyone starts to battle) with any valid reason or quit without fighting as soon as enemy team starts attacking.
The last one is not immediate to find, but under quick game review you can still find it easily. If the player never fought and was just waiting for everyone to go imp (especially in the case of BF games), and then suddenly quits you know it’s deliberately done on purpose to hurt his team. If everyone goes imp, all players being expected to do their fair share in their team’s fight.
Should a player drop exactly before or as soon as fight starts without giving any fight, you know he’s betraying and trashing the team. Or, as soon as at least one of the enemy team goes imp, for a player to quit without having given a single fight, that too is team trashing.
For those who claim the early quitter - especially i) and ii) - “is not that very common”, a “satatiscal abnormailty” or “most games happen to go well”, those comments are a clear denial of ELO ladder rigging taking place. It happens, it is real and it happens too often. So often that we need to post it here to signal that.
Early quitting or quitting done under malice circumstances is the worst problem in team game plays, the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. Most of times a 4vs4, ending a 3vs4 the team of 3 will loose, and even on the scarce times it wins, the experience of wining under unequal team players fight is not interesting and just frustrating (which is also the purpose of early quitting, to trash and frustrate players on the targetted team).
This is a game I just played today. With ii) situation. Clear. Objective. Straight and crystal-clear. Early quittting is early quitting, let’s stop sugar coating it: in my case, -20 elo points trashed thanks to malicious early quitting. And victories in competitive normal RM team play generally come with sweat and not efortlessly… so it’s far more difficult to win 15 points than to loose 20 elo points due to early quitting…
MP Replay v101.102.5558.0 #(71094) @2022.11.02 143937 (1).aoe2record (1.5 MB)
I have dozens of such Team RM games with either i) or ii) done on a regular basis. It’s important to report these situations but I think it’s even more important to signal in these forums the extent of this problem, due to how many times it tends to happens. It’s not one game in 100, in every 5 or 10 games at least, expect an early quit treason.
There are matches with good players and interesting games to be found, but there also are matches done with dishonest players whose main enjoyment is just to trash game user’s experience and rig the ELO ladder doing so, which obviously ruins most of teamplay experience.