Penalty For Abandonment!

@DeAtHaDDiCtiOn5I don't think there's been another post on this, though I remember @dwooten77 mentioning the idea in a more general discussion somewhere else 👍

It's a good subject to bring up. A number of other games have an automatic time penalty of 10 minutes if players quit mid-match, preventing them from entering a new game & it might not be a bad thing.

Speaking for myself, if I know I'm going to have to take a break or stop playing soon, I only enter a match if I'm sure I have enough time for it to go full length.

If I had to stop for some unforseen emergency, then incurring a time penalty wouldn't bother me.

I don't believe in quitting mid-game myself. It's a game - you win some, you lose some. I don't believe in bailing out on my team & have stuck through some awful matches for that reason - but if a game was so toxic I was tempted to rage-quit, then a time penalty is good thing to allow you to cool off.

Interested in knowing what others think! 

ADDED: I do think though that if any such system was introduced, that the time between one game ending & another beginning should possibly be extended, to allow people enough time to make a decision & exit.

And maybe the idea of a team-vote to concede the match could be investigated in extreme cases.

@DeAtHaDDiCtiOn5  People leaving in a lobby can become very frustrating, and there is no punishment for doing so, unlike some other games. However, some people may get disconnected, the game may crash for them or they desperately need to leave or AFK for something. So, perhaps if this was a feature, you only would get punished if you deliberately leave or rage quit, rather than get disconnected, or the game crashing, or it's unfair to you! 🤔

That’s where I’ve seen this subject brought up! @ToastedSarnie I also don’t jump into a new game unless I know I set enough time aside to complete it. Of course, with 4 kids running around and no spouse, there’s time family calls and I need to step away. Like you stated, if I received a time penalty for leaving, I’d be fine with that. Honestly, I think 10 minutes is not long enough and it should be a bit more substantial. I understand this could discourage people from playing the game but if they are habitual quitters anyway and get penalized for it, we don’t need them in the PvZ community anyway!

My boys play Rainbow Six Siege and in Multiplayer Modes, you can vote to kick out a player for friendly fire, misconduct or any immature actions (or anything else for that matter) and I think that system in PvZ could thrive. For example: If we notice someone taunting and it’s happened to more than one player in the match, casting a vote to remove that player and possibly a reason for the removal would be beneficial. Just some ideas and I’ll respond to the other messages above when I get on my break. 😁

@ToastedSarnie For players that need to abandon the game and do so on rare occasions, there should be no repercussions. Since PopCap is fantastic at tracking stats for everything you do in the game, there must be a way to track how many times a player leaves a match prematurely, right? Those are the players I’m referring to when I say stiffer penalties should be given to the habitual quitters. 

I agree that the voting system could be abused by the very people we are talking about but I’d be willing to bet it would work a lot more than it would be abused. 12v12 would be an ideal match for a voting system but even with 8v8, having the ability to expose one of these immature players, or multiple players, is a definite plus in my book!

Unfortunately it's not really possible for to program solutions to penalize for certain human behaviors or use patterns, although it's certainly tempting to suggest such attempts.

To play Devil's Advocate it you were to program in a substantial penalty for quitting a game mid-match, ostensibly in an effort to force continued participation, rather than seeing those quitting players continue to actively play you would likely either encourage those players to simply abandon the game for a time or you would promote "AFK" behavior where characters sit wherever they spawn until the match ends.

In one scenario you wind up reducing the number of players in the lobby and in the other you have a player who selects a character but then doesn't contribute, just passively collecting a win or a token amount of XP, depending on the game mode. On one hand you wind up with smaller team sizes overall since slots could be left empty or you could wind up with full teams where some members aren't contributing, and therefore unbalancing each match, until they can leave "safely".

Rather than penalize the behavior it works better to investigate why people are leaving mid-match and then seeing if that reason is something fixable- you can't fix when life gets in the way and you can't fix frustration due to a disparity in skill levels in the lobby but frustration over an unbalanced game mode or mechanic is something which could, and should, be looked into for fixing.

For example, I myself steer clear of Turf Takeover currently because the combination of 8v8, reduced TTK and accelerated capturing of stationary objectives leads to a lot of frustration during certain sessions when playing as the defending team. I'd rather not play at all than feel obligated to stay in a match where the attacking team is clearly just sprinting through the map and we have no chance to stop them or properly defend.

@realitysquared I kinda figured it wouldn’t be possible but maybe I was rubbing the invisible genie lamp and hoping it could get done. First of all, off topic, you are a fantastic writer! The entire piece was grammatically correct and was written almost exactly as I would write it so bravo my friend, from an aspiring writer!

I completely get that players would find ways to either manipulate or alter the system in some way and that’s unfortunate. And the “AFK” thing or non contributing players is too real, even now, I see players just dancing around the map with contributing at all to swing the team balancing the following round, followed by a complete butt stomping. 

And to your point about researching why players are leaving mid-match, that’s a great proactive approach to address the problem. I personally try to play all different modes since my PS4 friends are quite the eclectic group and force me to play with them. Maybe someday there will be a fix to this. Thanks for all the input and for your detailed explanation regarding this issue.

I think that some sort of rewarding/incentive to win the match could been  implemented too. Sometimes its just feel so empty  the win because I gain coins and xp only based on my own performance...