There should be a happy medium on deserting matches.
For instance - if you dessert a match within the first say, 2, 3, or 4 minutes (maybe even lessen the penalty on a grading scale) - then you don’t take much of a penalty (whatever that is) the longer you stay in the match.
The penalty could be anything from being harsh: a forced negative XP marker on the next match - to, what it is now, where you actually get xp on the match, but just not much. A penalty could be that, if you leave a match within the first minute, you can’t play that faction until you play another faction. Whatever.
My main point here is that despite what the chronic deserters want to tell you - there IS a penalty that they are imposing on the players that remain. Unless of course, you think so little of your own skill that a bot is a better player than you. In which case, by all means, leave every match.
Let’s assume for a second your leaving a match is justified - there are times back on some of the old Normandy maps where I got fed up as the Americans and left - for instance. It still meant that those who stayed (all four of them) had an even harder go of it than had I fought it out with them.
In that regard - yes, fixing the game would be ideal - fixing that map (and other unfair maps) would be ideal. But good grief, people this is attempting to be a somewhat historically accurate game, and very few actual battles (or tiny sections of battles) were exactly even. And in the mean time, until the game is more balanced, people who desert are making it worse for those who stay.
One other major point - MOST people tend to desert, if they are going to, in the first 30 seconds - or, after the first cap, particularly in a steam roll. Though, I can imagine a lot of players have played games that, after the first punch in the mouth, their side came back and won the game. (A lot of that has to do with randomness of spawn points, map design, whatever).
So, “forcing” some of the better players to gut it out for a couple minutes would be beneficial to more players than just those who scream for the desire to desert without penalty at all times.