In my initial post, I also suggest 30 minutes, which is in line with how Counter-Strike does it. I don’t think we disagree here – the punishment starts with a nominal amount and then gets increasingly harsher.
You can be banned from a game for violating community standards, which includes abuse of the matchmaking system. Match abandonment falls under that. That’s how it works in other games (and is why you sign Terms and Conditions).
Yup, saw this. Basically the same as my proposal, just with different cooldown times. I think it’s a totally fine implementation. Or they can just copy how Counter-Strike does it. I do think there should be harsher punishments for ranked vs unranked matches though.
As I said, the times matter less – the fact that this need to be implemented is, in my experience, a critical issue. For example, I think water maps seem to have an abandonment rate close to 100%.
Have you considered that CS:GO can do this because it’s so popular? Excluding people from matchmaking for two hours isn’t going to affect queue times.
This isn’t me saying AoE IV is doing badly, it’s more that only games that are that exceptionally active that do harsh things to the availability of people in the matchmaking queue. It has an exponential impact the more are excluded at once.
Absolutely have thought about that and I think that’s the most likely reason this hasn’t been implemented yet; however, I also think it’s the wrong call.
Basically, I’d much rather search for a game for 10-15 min that I can actually complete than have something like my recent experiences, which is to search for games for 5-10 min, have someone quit the match, and then repeat that process ad nauseam until I decide that I’ll just play some other game having spent an hour to actually try to start one match successfully.
In short, I take your point that this is related to player count, I just think the status quo is more likely to bleed player count.
I think at a minimum, this functionality should apply to ranked play, especially if AoE4 wants to be viewed as an eSports contender. What do you think @GorbMort ?
Edit: As a counter-point, there are a few games that have fewer players than AoE4 that nevertheless punish match abandonment somewhat harshly: For Honor is an example.
While u r not exactly wrong about ToS when it comes down signing and it getting banned, but no company will ever intentionally ban you for abandoning match if it was caused by completely random event and it would be completely unreasonable, because anyone who knows anything about PC’s and softwares knows that nothing isn’t guaranteed.
Yup im not against punishments at all. All I care its fair towards those who do not abandon game intentionally. Because I can tell U rn I would have personally quit this game moment I got blocked from playing MP for 2 hours if I had something unfortunate to happen during the match. While I got good PC, stable internet and I live in country where power shortages just dont happen unless there is some other random events going on like blizzard. I might get crash once every 100 games or disconnect and I would almost always be back to game after 1-2 mins, but because no reconnect feature I would be blocked from playing for 2hours and while I got lot of free time and I can play 16 hours day if I wanted, It would still be enough for me to quit the game and spend my times on something else, because I simply hate getting punishments on things that are out of my power to solve.
Also what you’re experiencing regarding water maps. This system wouldn’t help ppl to play them at all. Sure you could get into match that has water, but what would happen if the person doesn’t want to play it? They gonna afk / troll and try their best to lose it fast. So your experience would be much worse, because you would be wasting your time on pointless map so you getting leaver even tho you cant get to play the map you want to is actually better than the alternative and having punishment system makes this issue much worse.
So having leaver penalty won’t exactly solve this and improve your experience with water maps. The reason is because most water maps are dog shit and so is water. It leaves very little for you to do if you hate water thats why they rework water, but even that is just copypasta for every civ nothing unique about it and dull and boring so nothing changes
Would this just be for people quitting in the first 5-10 minutes? Because while that’s annoying, it’s not that big of a time loss. People randomly quitting 15-20 minutes into a game is what really irks me. But I don’t think you would be able to enforce a penalty on that because it’s natural for a loser to emerge by 20 minutes and it should be okay for them to quit if it’s felt like they won’t win.
Also this game is maybe too punishing on APM. If people make one mistake, their scout dies or they neglect villager production, suddenly they don’t want to play a whole match at a disadvantage. This game is a huge snowball where mistakes last forever. It would be better if mistakes had a more temporary punishment, people would be more inclined to fight it out.