Matchmaking timeout for quitters must be improved

I play a lot of 4v4. Quitters are a problem. There are different types.

  • People, who quit during matchmaking, and the game never starts. Its annoying, but I get it. He does not like the map. Or the teammates.
  • People, who quit in the first minute of the game. Maybe because they started 20 seconds AFK. Maybe boar killed a villager. Maybe just doesn’t like the map. But those people not only annoy the rest of the players, but also make them loose (or gain, for the enemy team) ELO.
  • People, who quit, because they were raided in Feudal. Or Castle. Or his niche all-in castle age rush tactic that he just saw in a youtube video was not working well for him, and he lost all his army. But the team could still win. He could still reboom. But no, he rather quits. Not only annoying the other 7 players, not only making them loose ELO, but also wasting their precious time.

Now the current (recently changed?) punishment system is clearly broken. Just happened to me in the last 2 days:

  • Due to some bug (or a quitter?) the game stuck after matchmaking 1 minute has passed, but before the loading screen. After 3-4 minutes, it times out. Guess what? 10 minute matchmaking timeout…
  • Quitter quits at the first minute. Clearly, there is no point playing it in 3v4, so the whole team quits. Guess what? 10 minute timout for everyone! Not just the first quitter, who ruined the game for the rest. Insane.

Why cannot the devs make rules to punish only the real quitters? Why cannot they make it so that the rest of the players dont loose or gain ELO if the match is less than 1 (or 3 or 5) minutes long?

My suggestion:

  • Voting mechainsm for team surrender. If majority of the team votes yes, the game ends. If someone quits (or deletes everything) before a team surrender or before the end of the game, or before 1 hour game time has passed, he gets matchmaking ban for a while. It could be an increasing amount. After 1 quit, 10 minutes. After 3 quits, 1 hour. After 6 quits, 1 day, etc…
  • If a game was ruined by a quitter, the rest of the players can freely quit without any consequences.
  • ELO is not changed for too short games (less than 1/3/5 minutes).
  • quitters during matchmaking can get a silent 5-10 minute matchmaking timeout (they don’t see it, just that matchmaking takes too long), but that is considered a different kind of quitting.

While your other suggestions make sense, those two do not.

No ELO change for short games just means that you can go for very risky early stuff and surrender if it didnt work, eg laming. Basicially what happend in pro play when restarts were still a thing. Not a fun thing.

Silent bans are the worst. Bans are intended to show players “nope, not like this. your behaviour is intolerable”. But if you just give them higher q times, all you do is make them frustrated. They never learn what they did that wasn’t in line, they just see long queue times and get more and more frustrated.

2 Likes

What about remove punishments at all, create ranked lobbies and let the match making for the casuals, on team games ladder the match making has never worked as intended and it will never do, the reasons have been seen during the last 3 years so instead of explaining it all over again i guess everyone acknowledges the issue with the team game ladder with the match making.

These suggestions doesnt make sense at all. None will work.

Who do i want to stick into a game which is lost after 20-25 minutes, but some allies doesnt want to give up? It really happens a lot that team games end early. 1h TGs are pretty rare. Maybe they just go to 1h, but 1.5h and times like that are pretty unusual.

Note: The current bans are already increasing in length, so that isnt something new at all.

Pretty exploitable by premades. Just quit one by one as first. Solos will get punished after their 2nd quit, but a premade of 4 can have 4 freebees before the first penalty.

Also you dont really seem to understand the math behind Elo. If you win, then you gain elo. It doesnt really matter if you win quickly or slowly. So there is no need to differentiate between that.

What will silent timeouts accompliment? It doesnt really serve a purpose to me…