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The Leaver Penalty has got to go...
nixboox
Member Posts: 1,041 Arc User
It never seems to me that the Leaver Penalty ever actually does what it is intended to do. It isn't a deterrent for people to leave a TFO, it just seems to be a vindictive punishment to those of us who stay.
Last night I was doing Khitomer Vortex and the random team was entirely hopeless. After about 30 minutes of watching everyone else blow up, two team members left. The three remaining people struggled along until the assimilated Scimitar showed up and then it was just pointless. The three of us couldn't do enough damage to stop the Scimitar and it would heal completely after every cloak. Now explain to me why someone should get a leaver penalty for that? Not only a nebulous "leaver" penalty but one that stops them from playing ANY other TFOs or, indeed, even queueing for Gamma quadrant missions!
In the olden days, you could join TFOs that were already in progress or invite friends/fleet members to join you in them if a vacancy appeared. Now we cannot do that so we're all stuck in a sinking ship with no hope of rescue.
I've thought about this very carefully and realized that the leaver penalty is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Instead of trying to punish leavers we need to reinstate the ability to join inprogress TFOs. We already have sliding-scale participation rewards in every other battlezone, it can't be hard to implement it in TFOs.
Think of it like this - its better for no one to get the leaver penalty than it is for one person to get it unfairly.
Last night I was doing Khitomer Vortex and the random team was entirely hopeless. After about 30 minutes of watching everyone else blow up, two team members left. The three remaining people struggled along until the assimilated Scimitar showed up and then it was just pointless. The three of us couldn't do enough damage to stop the Scimitar and it would heal completely after every cloak. Now explain to me why someone should get a leaver penalty for that? Not only a nebulous "leaver" penalty but one that stops them from playing ANY other TFOs or, indeed, even queueing for Gamma quadrant missions!
In the olden days, you could join TFOs that were already in progress or invite friends/fleet members to join you in them if a vacancy appeared. Now we cannot do that so we're all stuck in a sinking ship with no hope of rescue.
I've thought about this very carefully and realized that the leaver penalty is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Instead of trying to punish leavers we need to reinstate the ability to join inprogress TFOs. We already have sliding-scale participation rewards in every other battlezone, it can't be hard to implement it in TFOs.
Think of it like this - its better for no one to get the leaver penalty than it is for one person to get it unfairly.
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Comments
So no, the penalty should remain, but the Dev's need to fix it so the system recognises that a player has left the queue by switching and applies an Account-wide penalty to that player.
That's because its actually only the last TWO to leave that don't get the penalty. Not the last three.
You were a little off the rails until that comment.. and now you have gone full blown nonsense.
This idea is as bad as that statement. Maybe the system can use a revision, but removal is a bad idea for reasons so obvious we shouldn't even have to list them out for you. We have all been a victim of it from time to time, it happens.. move on.
There have been times where I was disconnected, and was able to reconnect in time to rejoin the mission. You still have a bit of a grace period to log back in and load your character before it decides to put you back in whatever zone you queued from.
How long that grace period is... I don't know.
This is why the leaver penalty should extend to the entire account.
But they don't need to go.
There are two problems with the penalty pointed out here: sometimes it does punish innocent players, and experienced gamers have found a way around it. Both of this needs to be minimized, sure. But neither of these is "maxed out", permanently happening, as this discussion seems to imply. And yes, I do think that scrapping the mechanic would mean "chaos and anarchy" if people find out. Because right now many people who otherwise would like to leave don't know about the exploit and stay. Not everybody knows everything about this game, and that isn't limited to builds. cf the thread we had about private messages a couple days ago. A simple command to answer and yet more than half of the people in the thread, mostly multi year veterans, didn't know about it. Sure, that one's a mistake in explaining how mechanics work, but I'm pretty certain they don't advertise their glitches either. But if it is obvious that leaving at any time without any repercussions is possible, people will just do that, not out of spite or for optimization, but because they can and probably think it even is what was intended in the first place. Also this is a way of communicating that behavior is not wanted, and some people do care. It's a bit like burglary: some people know how to get away with it. Some get accused of it wrongly (as has happened to me twice, which is why I chose this example). But that doesn't mean that getting rid of punishment would be a good idea.
As for the T'Pau: insinuating that it isn't capable of holding its own is a sign of not having understood it. I will claim that any T6 ship and even any T5-non-U ship can be built without anything too intricate or expensive to hold its own in advanced queues. Not being great, but good enough that 5 ships of this type will win the queue. But if you want to be afraid, don't be afraid of Sci ships, be afraid of escorts being piloted by a Sci captain with a fully blown all-space-magic-no-weapons captain build.
This is a very Star Trek solution as well, as it rewards team play and cooperation while having the in-game excuse of, "We heard a distress call, what do you need us to do?"
This, and in addition like patrickngo said, increase the rewards for the people who try and finish the queue.
I don't know about any dedicated troll communities, but if they exist, isn't this something people should be aware of?