Just like so many of you, I’m sick and tired of leavers in ranked Solo Shuffle. What’s the problem you’d say? Well, I won 5/5 games (2450 cr and mmr), then at the last round, someone left.
What happened ?
Leaver got 6 games lost instead of 2 wins
Rest got nothing, everyone just lost time
It didn’t even count toward wins for upgrading the gear (though I won 5 rounds)
Yeah, upgrading gear is useless now and DH is OP maybe, but it’s not the topic. Hear me out Blizzard, just hear me. What if, when someone leaves, this happens instead :
Leaver gets 6 games lost
30 min ban from Soloshuffle, doubling each time he leaves for the day (resets daily)
Continuous leaving bans you from the game for 1h, 2h, a day, you choose (it’s ruining the ranked solo shuffled queue so it’s ban material)
Last but not least, the victims don’t even get “compensation”, how about giving them what they won?
Example : There is a leaver on
Round 1 : No one gets anything.
Round 4 : you won 2 rounds, it’s 2 wins out of 3 completed games.
Round 6 : you win 3 rounds, game calculates to give you points for 3 rounds out of 5.
That way, people will think twice before leaving, and those who wasted time would get what they deserved. Imagine people winning 5 rounds at 2k7 cr, isn’t that just unfair when someone at 2k2 cr loses 5 games then decides to leave just to ruin it for them?
What’s the punishment atm, 30 mins of deserter? Is that a punishment? It’s more “here, take time to think about what you did”, and that person can do that 10 times a day.
Thank you for reading, here is a potato.
TL;DR: Sanction is too weak on leavers, frustration is still there for the others. Give people points according to what they won and the number of rounds completed before having a leaver, that way if the leaver is punished or not, others won’t rage for something totally out of their control.
You do realise it needs to award rating gains and losses, right? You can’t have it only count the wins. Or else it becomes a pretty big source of inflation. For every win, there must be a loss. That’s just how it goes.
But yes, they should make it so players get the rating gains and losses, for the already finished rounds when someone else abandons.
The problem as people have pointed out, is that losses aren’t enough to dissuade people from intentionally leaving. While banning people from the game is a tad overboard due to the business model the game is designed around (the core of the business model is making sure people want to keep playing after all), a better way to punish players is to target other stuff that holds value. Like for example currency penalties on top of a proper deserter debuff that locks the group finder for them (both the “LFG” and the automated queues).
It’ll make it feel like a proper punishment that players would have to look elsewhere, like for example at world content, or rely on btag friends, on top of the currency penalties. For example, losing honor and/or conquest would certainly suck while gearing up or ranking up for elite mogs for example. The deserter debuff would also suck for people that wants to keep playing.
The key is to find a good balance where people who didn’t abandon intentionally doesn’t get too harshly punished, while also making it so people don’t think it’s a better choice to intentionally leave instead of just finishing the shuffle normally.
thats too much for me considering youre not losing anything but maybe 10 minutes of your time. Yes, happened to me before, sucks if you won many rounds but i think youre going a bit overboard with your suggestions.
And blizzard already did more for solo shuffe players by implementing these penalties than for m+ players, i remember there was a huge discussion about m+ leavers, blizz did nothing there
Not saying thats a good thing but being realistic I would not expect any more from blizzard regarding penalties for solo shuffle leavers
It’s not just that. There are ripple effects from people leaving, and lost time depends on the time rounds took as well as what the queue times are like, on top of the time you spent in the queue before you got into the shuffle that had a person who abandoned.
As for the ripple effects, it further causes an increased inaccuracy in the rating system. This is something people have complained about as well, that people are noticing others playing on MMRs where they don’t belong, whether it’s gear-wise or skill-wise, and thus causing a horrible shuffle overall where people are just tunneling “the bad one”, instead of it showing a semblance of a proper matchmaking.
This is related not only to people abandoning and no rating gains or losses are provided, but also to the effect of increased rating gains and losses depending on streaks, which is not that hard to get when the game counts each round as a match and then hands out the gains and losses after all rounds are finished.
On top of the fact that it also leads to increased distrust in the system, meaning people are getting turned off from playing because they don’t trust that it’ll have any impact on anything to play. This is caused by having too many people abandoning on top of how the rating system doesn’t give out rating gains and losses from finished rounds when someone else abandons.
CS:GO isn’t exactly a subscription-based service, and their player count is MUCH higher than WoW’s, nor do people need to level characters from 1 to max either, so Valve’s freedom to take action is very different. Meanwhile, Blizzard needs to make sure people want to log back into the game, which means they can’t be overzealous. People can’t exactly go create a new bnet account as easily as they can make a new steam account, since they’d also need to level up a new character, not to mention the gearing as well.
Simply put, they can’t be banning people for abandoning shuffles as easily as companies like Valve and Riot bans people for abandoning in CS:GO and LoL.
Plus, there’s the whole part about how they can’t go too hard on people due to how people can suffer from unforeseen circumstances out of their control, and if Blizzard ends up losing subscribers because people get banned for something small like a disconnect, then you’ll be seeing a pretty quick downturn in popularity.
Another way to put it is that in a game like WoW, you spend months, years, advancing your character(s) and collectibles like achievements, mounts and so on. While a game like CS:GO and LoL are completely isolated matches, where progress in one match doesn’t affect another. There’s nothing else to those games, that’s literally the entire games as they are.
This difference is a fundamental part of why the punishments can’t be the same. Because they have to make sure players want to keep playing in WoW, while CS:GO and LoL have much more freedom and doesn’t wound longterm investments the same way as a ban in WoW would do.