The Actual Number #1 Please Stop Winner

That would be a hard sell to two different groups:

1) The developers/publisher who want their servers to feel full and their games to feel full, if they segregate their worst players to shitty games less games happen, less usage can be checked off and their game looks weak.

2) If you have a connection that is bad sometimes, but decent most times you will get "down checked" when the server just boots you for no reason. You might not mean to get booted, but people blame you for leaving when it wasn't you fault.

As with most online interactions, communication can get muddled, we need to be careful about people who rage quit or quit too lose rank form those who just get shafted by the servers or their connections.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice."

if i understand correctly, op isn't advocating that leavers should be punished, but rather that the players that are left sans a full team shouldn't be forced to continue (and likely lose the game and their ranked placement) under unfair circumstances. it's a bizarre system that essentially punishes teams for losing a member through no fault of their own.

i.e. overwatch forces players to wait a bit after someone leaves before they can leave without penalty in a ranked game, which doesn't really work when people generally leave during chokepoints towards the very end of the game.

@bondfish: They aren't always pushing a button to leave. You cant just plan for people who hit a leave button and call it fixed. They can just as easily disable their Internet connection forcing the game to drop them as if it were accidentally interupted. I don't know if you know anything about software development, but they absolutely can't stop people who pull their Internet aside from punishing them with time outs and bans.

There is no way to fix the leaver situation. If you make it so everything in a game where someone leaves no longer matters after they leave (no rank changes etc.) suddenly you will have groups of people with a designated leaver who will leave when the group is losing to keep everyone from losing points. Which will then lead to broken ranks because everyone will get undeserved rank increases by only counting games where they win and having someone leave in games where the team is going to lose.

I like how everyone is justify that this is okay instead of finding a solution to fix a problem, when this is clearly not okay under any circumstances

Please Stop: Treating Your Esteemed Franchise Like Utter Shit

AKA the Capcom award

I don't think a ranking system works if one side gets a draw while the other side gets a win, it has to be a win-lose scenario. People are likely to quit on purpose if they are getting steamrolled. I don't think it would be particularly fair if the cart is 5m away from the end point, there's still 3 minutes left on the timer and someone gets upset and leaves, making the match for the winning team suddenly not matter.

In fact, Overwatch's particular leaver system is lax enough that winning too hard can be a detriment. If within 1 minute of play someone leaves that game gets cancelled. That 1 minute of play is enough time for a steamrolling team to take the first point, letting people who get upset on the losing team cancel the game altogether.

It happens to everyone OP, and there really isn't a fix for this. Leaver's get punished, and repeat offenders get banned for whole seasons. Letting teams that lose a player not suffer a loss opens the gates to collusion so that someone takes the 'loss' of being marked as a leaver in return for ensuring that everyone else doesn't have a rank drop. Trying to differentiate between voluntarily leaving the game and connection drop will just have people yank ethernet cords out of their computers. Just be thankful you're not playing in Korea, where I have read that hacking, primarily enabled through PC Bangs (internet cafe style places), ruins the comp scene, to the point where a known aimbotter got to climb to 5000 before Blizzard took notice and banned them.

Except it's much better than the alternatives. Should the game just end every time someone leaves? Not giving out points to anyone is an even worse solution. Every game has to have a team that wins points and a team that loses points or your ranking system won't work. What exactly is your easy fix?

It's really not that big of a deal. At worse, you waste a couple minutes. The points thing is irrelevant because you'll gain as much as you lose from other people quitting in the long run. The vast majority of the time, the person leaving is on a team that's likely going to lose anyway.

The only solution is to try and punish people who quit repeatedly and DOTA does that. There's not really anything else for them to "Please Stop," it's all in the leavers' hands and that point.

Poor ranked, and non ranked, multiplayer annoys me. Unless the player count is massive, like in a Battlefield 4, I want to be matched based on skill rating. In most shooters, a player's level means nothing other than they play a lot of the game, they did a ton of double XP, etc. I do hate the leaving thing and its even more annoying when there is 0 punishment to a player for it. I also wish there were more modes, even for ranked, that took into account your actual performance. In Overwatch, it really sucks when we lose because most of the team sucks but you were healing, getting assists, and not dying. Also sucks when you're forced to play against people who come in grouped.

The actual fix is to reduce the rating drop you take from deaths or increase the rating ramp you get from kills when a certain amount of people left.

Haven't played Overwatch, but I play shittons of Destiny and it has been a problem there in the past. Though now that matchmaking has been loosened, I'm barely experiencing issues. Even if one or two people leave on my team, we can still floor the opponents.

Rage quitting is a huge problem in online multiplayer that really doesn't get punished enough in most games. Any game I play, its a surprise to get through a match or two without someone on a team quitting the instant they start thinking they won't win. So they quit, hurt the other people on their team, and just get to continue with that attitude. I'm sure it wouldn't be impossible for someone to come up with a system that analyzes match history and find a correlation between the match events and a player leaving/being disconnected. Plenty of people have spotty internet, but no one has internet that goes out only when they're doing poorly.

I dunno. Overwatch does about as good a job as it can with the situation. You need to give a player a solid 60-90 seconds to rejoin on a disconnect for obvious reasons. You can't just immediately assume they rage quit. And after 2 minutes, you can quit without penalty to your SR (nobody really cares about their record). Blizzard pretty strictly enforces season-long bans on people for leaving matches too often. There is the whole dodging problem, but you will get your account banned if they catch you doing it too often.

At some point, it all goes back to having to solve the problem of "the Internet." If you go into competitive modes in any online game, you better be ready to exceed your maximum daily intake of sodium. That said, I think Blizzard has indicated it is going to be shortly implementing new penalties for toxicity that will be most welcome.

With all that said, I'm a moderator over at a Discord for Overwatch with over 25,000 members. There are several others out there which you can use to put together a 6-stack. The games are typically harder as you'll usually be matched against another 6-stack, but that does cut down on the salt (and you will learn the team game better that way than in solo queue). I believe GB also has a thread for grouping up.

I think the Please Stop should be game journalists on Twitter.

Or better yet, practically anybody on Twitter. Twitter is bad enough but when you combine it with the 2016 election it became something entirely more annoying.

I think this perfectly summarised what I was going to post, cheers.

Just make it so that players can't quit the game and install wifi across the planet.

You have to play forever and ever and ever and ever and ev...

It would be nice if they could have a more personal assessment of players. I'm sure it's happened to everyone where you lose a match where you personally killed it and still drop down. For a game that goes out of its way to highlight what players have done well this feels frustratingly against the grain.

That being said people obsessing over the rank they have always seems weird to me, being higher ranked doesn't actually get you anything meaningful. Not to be "that guy" but its just a game. Try to have fun.