Early Leavers Are Ruining Epic BG's (We Need Real Penalities)

PVP Battlegrounds
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Hey everyone,

I wanted to open a discussion about a growing issue in Epic Battlegrounds—players leaving the match within the first 5 minutes, especially after losing the initial fight.

We’ve all seen it: you start Alterac Valley, Ashran, or Isle of Conquest, lose the first skirmish, and suddenly your team goes from 40 players to 30. The remaining group is now hopelessly outnumbered, morale tanks, and the snowball effect begins. The result? A game that could have been turned around ends in an inevitable loss.

Let me be clear: losing the first fight is a bad sign, BUT doesn’t ALWAYS mean it’s over.
Just the other day in Alterac Valley, we lost both initial towers and a graveyard. Half the team bailed instantly. I stuck around as a Tank, managed to regroup with a few determined players, back-capped two towers and a graveyard, and eventually we made it to the enemy boss. We won and it was a hell of a fight—and fun, even tho we had lost a lot of players.

Now, I understand the frustration around premade groups. Yes, it sucks to queue solo and get rolled by a highly coordinated Discord squad. That’s a separate problem Blizzard should address more directly. But let’s be honest: not every loss is due to a premade.

The 15-minute Deserter debuff is simply not enough of a deterrent. People eat it and requeue later, while the rest of us are left fighting uphill with a skeleton crew. This system punishes the players who actually want to fight it out and try creative strategies.

This is my own opinion, but I think we we need a progressive Penalty System – Like Other Competitive Games: The more often you leave early, the harsher the penalty.
Something like : First offense? 15 minutes. Second? 30 minutes. Third? 1 hour, etc.
Continue scaling up if you consistently leave early. Not every loss is a premade stomp.
This would maybe discourage chronic leavers while giving grace to occasional exits.

A capitulate vote system would be interesting too. So if a team truly feels the match is hopeless—maybe due to a clear premade stomp—implement a vote-to-surrender system. Require a 70% majority to end the match early. This gives agency to the players without forcing ragequits. Either everyone fight, or nobody… but that actual 20v40 Is not possible.

Early exits are becoming too normalized

What do you all think? Have you had matches where perseverance turned things around?

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Ok, if people cant leave, then they can stay afk and waiting end bg

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To that, I say 2 things
1st) in blitz people say that they afk, but because they are more forced to stay, they end up rejoining the combat.
2nd) one could sharpen the inactive timer. If you haven’t done meaningful dps/heal in 3 minutes, the kick timer is activated. If it is too stressful to leech, people will either /afk and take the penalty or play

the main issue is, that blizzard and the ebg community is not willing to have such changes. EBG is for leeching

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Whenever i see premade insta quit and relog another charr

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Many people do. It’s surely the main source of quitting/afk’ing in BGs.
& it’s completely understandable tbh, what’s the point of playing an unwinnable game? You leave demotivated, frustrated & know that if you queue again, theres a good chance it’ll be another unwinnable game. So why bother?
(personally I never quit, it’s just outsourcing your loss onto someone else, but I appreciate why people do).

I just find it weird, that when something gives a team a massive (even sometimes minor) advantage, it gets nerfed pretty quickly.
But when it’s a fully stacked queue-syncing pre-made that players have ~zero chance of beating, Blizz stops giving a f about fairness / balance / competitive integrity.

Whilst true, I don’t think many people quit because of a loss, that’s too simplistic.
Close games that could swing either way are some of the most enjoyable. I’d go out on a limb & claim most players don’t mind losing if it’s a hard fought battle with at least the potential of winning.
It’s the pointless peeing in the wind for 30mins that people will (understandably) try to avoid.

The most frustrating part of ebg’s for me, I’ve decided, is the first 60secs.
IoC
“All go Hangar!”
…5 go docks, 5 go mid, 10 stay in Keep, 10 take an extra 30secs to leave the keep. The 10 that actually go Hangar -wipe, as do the 10 following 100yds behind them, the Demos insta suicide at gate…

Ashran
“All Mid for 1st fight!”
3 go Solar, 10 go PvE, 3 think they can solo the boss, 5 spread out & don’t seem to know where they’re going, 5 still haven’t left the keep again, 10-15 wipe in mid.

So between clown shows & joining the last 60 secs of lost games, facing back-to-back q-syncs & being stuck in disconnect-limbo or dropping to 1fps in teamfights, it’s becoming less & less appealing to queue up.

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If blizzard make new some system with progress, for example get 1million honor for season and you can get mount or something. you can be sure that people will fight all bg and dont leave bcs even if they lose they have + honor point to progress 1million. But now everyone have gear and everyone play random bgs for nothing. Even people cant get litle bit conquest point for lose. So why people should stay on lose bg and lost time? For nothing.
So need just make some progress system every season, but ofc blizzard dont care and do nothing.

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There is no point to stay in lost bg.
There are rare occasions where the bg can be turned around but they are o rare that your chance for invincible drop is higher.

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Almost every epic bg can be turned around by recapturing key objectives. It just requires some communication with your team.
In IoC for example, the team that won hangar will leave it lightly defended in most cases, no more than 8 defenders. You can regroup in your base or at workshop and make a concentrated push with 30 players and take it back.

All the time.

I recommend asking for the raid leader and calling for a regroup per /rw after losing an important fight. Players are more likely to stick around if they see someone in the team has a plan worth trying.

I am in favor of this under the condition that it isn’t available at the start of the match and only becomes available no sooner than 20 minutes into the round.
Players would immediately vote to forfeit once they lose the hangar zerg or the sunken ring fight at the beginning. They should be encouraged to try out tactics to see if they can get a comeback. If they still didn’t get anywhere after 20 min, they can surrender.

In a failed Wintergrasp offense that would be something like the first fight failed, the attacking team can still try to push sunken again or try something via broken, but once they lose all their towers and workshops and it’s really just 15 min of pointless baserape left, they can vote to capitulate, but not immediately after they lose one fight.

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They should perma ban AI posts

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Sounds good tho ._.

Gates open you see certain Groups vote for forfeit do this long enough and every issue would solve itself.

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It would only encourage a culture of immediately giving up and never trying for a comeback. The rounds where you recover from a setback and win are the most interesting ones. There are better solutions to prevent syncing.

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Whilst I agree that an epic BG forfeit system available right out of the gate would cause its own issues, one of which you mention, I’d rather go through an era where synch premades don’t get to play any more because everyone that comes up against them instantly forfeits the match. Oh, how satisfying that would be!

That could lead to another sub-system where if your account is flagged as getting forfeited against a lot (i.e. you are so ‘strong’ in epic BGs that people don’t want to play against you…which really means that you play in pre-mades all the time) then you get bumped up to only be able to queue against others with that flag. Yes, that would likely mean very long queues for those players. And no, I don’t care about that.

It would leave the rest of us free to just play exciting, fair, epic BGs

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Giving people the ability to forfeit at the start is a bad route to begin with. Most BGs would end after one fight once such an option is added.

A deserter penalty for declining invites to make syncing harder would be all it takes, possibly mixing the factions.
But forfeiting, if it is ever introduced, should never be available from the start.

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Disagree.

As I said, even if it did lead to an era where most epic BGs would end after one fight, as long as it destroyed pre-mades, I’d be happy to live through that era.

I also disagree with you because I don’t think 70% of people would quit after the first fight of an epic BG was lost.

We have differing views of human nature, evidently.

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U can be sure ppl play a lot of premades to farm it like they did since the begining of the Honor lvl system.

As you do, btw.

3 Likes