Many community members don’t like deserters. The devs don’t like deserters.
Both for the same reason, this causes imbalanced matches that then cause frustration to the remaining players.
The typical reaction is to demand drastic punishments which i think is kinda lame and dumb. I’ll explain why:
You can divide desertions into two categories:
A. Real-life related
These are things which happen particularly to those of us who are not 17yo neets, but who just have real life obligations. Sometimes you need to go for a good reason - punishment or reward will not change this, punishment will only piss you off.
B. Not fun game experience related
This is the main thing. There are various reasons for this, which are too numerous to itemize but somehow demoralise, annoy or frustrate players. I would like the devs to trial a system which rather incentivizes players to stick around and reduces the experienced annoyance.
Some ideas below:
1.) Finish a streak of 10 completed games to unlock a random daily login reward box. Gives players a concrete task and incentive to not quit matches, with a low theoretical chance to even be rewarded with gold orders.
2.) Frustration source: late connects to a losing game, usually because others quit. Fix: offer a free booster of 50-100% exp to the player you connect late to the match to encourage them to stick around.
3.) Frustration source: i hate this map. Fix: Allow players to select 1-3 disliked maps and take this into account as a soft rule when regulating the map rotation of these players to make sure they are not getting repeated games with hated maps back to back.
4.) Frustration source: i hate this map. Fix: Get player feedback to improve maps / modes with highest desertion rates. Example: Berlin armoured train has lower point yield because capping is not rewarded → reward capping like in any other map.
There are couple of simple ideas on how to potentially reduce the desertion rate without punishments, but rather via rewards and reduction of player frustration.
