💡 Leaver? Then Freeze a Player ?

Competitive Discussion
21

I agree, but that would make the team comp for every push unstable.
You would miss your main tank for a push at times, or your main heals.
That actually puts the team with a rotating frozen player at a disadvantage compared to the other team, that has a stable team for each fight.

The idea with freezing is to even the playing field. This rotating freeze now becomes a disadvantage for the team that had more players to begin with :smiley:

It’s similar to a coach rotating his players every 3 mins, not giving the entire team a stable unit to play with.

22

Well, how about not locking them to spawn permanently then? It could maybe lift the lock after a certain time, like 30 seconds. Then they would be 5v5 at first but will gain 6v5 back eventually (unless someone dies). If someone new dies after that they’ll get that 30 second spawn penalty again, provided that there are 5 other players still alive and fighting. I don’t know what the fair amount of seconds would be.

23

Wait I have an idea that mixes your rotating freeze idea with the original one.
What if the person is frozen for a round, and then there can be another team vote to form a new team whereby the frozen player in the 1st round can be allowed back into the game in the 2nd round, and someone else takes the frozen spot for that round.

So basically substituting the frozen player after a round.

24

The fundamental problem with this is that people don’t queue for comp so they can sit out of the game.
You cannot rotate who is frozen, as star pointed out the instability is a disadvantage and the team also cannot steadily gain ult charge.
You cannot have one player sit out, unless they volunteer, as it is unfair to deprive them of being able to play the game just because someone on the enemy team left.
Having a leaver sucks, but it’s one game and you can leave if you don’t think they’re coming back. The SR is balanced out, as long as you’re not going to leave the enemy team is more likely to have a leaver than you are.

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25

Like you pointed out later, not every game has leavers. So not every game will end up with this player freezing kicking in. The player freezes are only to take care of those few games were u have leavers, and to make it an even playing field.

The frozen player could leave the game, if he likes after a certain “Wait time”, to check if the leaver returns back. The frozen player if he chose to leave, would lose /gain SR at a smaller scale when the match completes.

26

I’d rather leave and be free to do other things than become frozen and completely waste my time.

Horrible suggestion.

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27

Yes it’s what I though too.

28

No, that’s a terrible idea, it’s not fair on the person frozen, they can’t do anything. That’s boring. It would ruin the MMR of the frozen person

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29

The frozen person is allowed to leave the game after a certain wait time.

30

But if the person joined back, he would join back, but if he’s in a game, he would get kicked out of that game and that’s unfair to them

31

Which is why the frozen player is put in a waiting time before he is allowed to leave the game. This wait time is usually the Rejoin time for a leaver. So in case the leaver gets back within this time, the frozen player just gets put back into the game. How is it unfair on both parties ?

32

That would solve the problem regarding what to do with the frozen player:

  1. The frozen player will be moved to team spectator mode.
  2. If the leaver isn’t able to rejoin anymore, the frozen player will be granted permission to leave the game with no penalty.
    If the leaver rejoins, the frozen player rejoins, too.
  3. The frozen player will get notified when the match is completed and will earn/lose less SR.

How much the frozen player would earn/lose less SR could be either linear (1 SR less each minute) or percentage-wise (50% of match frozen -> 50% of SR granted)

Now we found a fairly acceptable way to freeze a player (can be tweaked if necessary), we just have to find out which method of choosing a player would be the fairest one?

:dragon:

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33

Of all ideas people had regarding the leaver issue, this one currently is the best.

Other Ideas were flawed:

  • A compensation for the leaver’s team would be exploitable
  • A replacement-bot would be either too strong, making the match unfair, or too weak, making it an easy target for farming ult charge. Also, the leaver’s team can’t communicate with the bot.
  • Letting the other team earn/lose less SR would be punishing and exploitable as well.

As long the frozen player has no direct influence by staying in spectators mode, the MMR won’t change.

34

How to select whom to “Freeze / Put on bench” …

Voting System

The general idea of the voting system, is every player gets to cast a vote on whom to freeze / put on bench.

In a voting system, a group of players would have a louder voice unless the group gets 1 vote to cast.

Majority votes cast would pick the frozen player.
It works as long as you have odd number of players in the team to vote.
So in the case of a leaver, when you have to reduce your team down to 5, a majority can be gotten at. But this gets complicated when 2 of the 5 in the team is a group and they get to cast 1 vote, making it 4 possible votes (therefore you could have 2 votes each voting 2 different players, hence a draw!) :frowning:

If a voting ends in draw, the fairest option would be a Roulette. Randomly pick one of the 2 that entered the draw.

35

Yea that makes sense, doing that it probably could work

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36

If a group together has only one vote, then it would eliminate the louder voice problem, which was one reason why I objected to the Idea of a voting system.

The players should be able to vote themselves. It allows the team to cooperate with each other.

Of course, the leaver’s team shouldn’t participate in the voting. Otherwise, they could have an impact on the non-leaver’s team by, for example, voting for the support/tank player.

If there is a draw, one of the tied players will be picked at random.

There still would be a risk of “in-game discrimination”. Players bias towards specific heroes and playstyles will have an impact on their choices.
It might cause complaints by people who play “off meta” or main an accused troll pick (Symmetra?)

Another choice system could be the following:

Priority Roulette

When someone leaves, one of the opposing players will be frozen. During a timeframe, each player of the opposing team can choose to be a “priority”.

If a player chooses “priority”, the system will choose them to be frozen.
However, if multiple players chose “priority”, the system will pick one of them randomly.
And if no player chose “priority”, the system will choose one of the 6 players at random.

Such a system would encourage communication and cooperation among the team. However, it will would also “feel” unfair if the team doesn’t cooperate and one player will be frozen at random, which risks the team to fall apart.

:dragon:

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37

The above ideas are all nice, but they just break the game experience. Imagine your in the middle of battle and a person leaves, suddenly your faced with a Voting screen… I think we could use something more simple in principle.

The Match maker, currently can form teams based on SR / other factors… What if we allow the MM, to pick the top 5 (in case we are trying to make a 5 v 5 team by freezing a player). It’s then up to the MM algorithm to pick the top 5 players that it thinks is a fair match against the other team of 5 ?

What’s cool about this is the simplicity… No complex voting comes into play.
The MM then freezes one player who it thinks isn’t a match for the 5 v 5 fight.

Update: It would be funny though how it plays out when all this happens in a real game… Imagine a Rein standing in front of his team shielding his team, when suddenly the Rein player on the enemy team disconnects, and the Rein that was shielding suddenly disappears too and gets frozen :smiley: , because the MM thought it was best to leave both teams without there primary tanks :stuck_out_tongue:

Hence to give people a sense of what just happened, the game could pause for a second or two and state, that player “Xyz” was frozen / put on bench because of a leaver… The game then resumes were it left off.

38

No matter how much you twist this, it is a bad idea.
1st off it is unfair for someone else to get frozen because “X” left the team.
2nd there is no fair way to choose which player to freeze .
-Voting ( no , for obvious reasons : you lose in game time , can be abused by teams of 2-3 stakcs etc.)

  • Random ( no , can make the winning team lose a key player , or someone who was waiting for the right time to ult etc)
  • Tank for tank, heal for heal etc, still bad for the same reasons above.
  • Random based on mmr nope , it will feel more like a punishment, same goes for the person with the lowest performance in the game, lowest damage dealer etc.
    And there are many more other reasons.
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39

I think the solution to this is do something with the SR won /lost when a disconnect occurs. For example : motivate the team with less people to keep trying to win even tho it is a disadvantage . But even this isn’t a good idea since it can be abused :expressionless:
So something else based on the SR changes when there is a leaver involved.

40

It’s about being fair to the majority of the players in the game. Being fair to the other 5, by freezing 1 player. The greater good of the wider players. The frozen player accordingly gets to gain / loss SR from such a game at a smaller degree.

We spoke about this earlier. Whereby groups only get to cast a single vote.

The internal working of the MM to freeze a player isn’t purely based on Tank for Tank or Heal for Heal. It could be based on trying to form the most balanced teams given it has to knock 1 out. The details of how this algorithm works isn’t something we discussed yet. Perhaps some Machine Learning algorithm that has figured out all the players hero pool can try and create a balanced team by freezing certain player(s).

The solution of freezing one player would be at least more fair to both teams when someone leaves a games. It gives a fighting chance for both sides instead of being a stampede.