The real reason for the quickplay leaver penalty is not to ‘make casual more competitive’ - it is part of what amounts to basically a psychological experiment to test the limits of how much match-manipulation the players are willing to accept. The goal is to better determine where people set the bar for acceptable match quality. And ultimately to find the optimal balance between queue times and match quality.
The goal of the matchmaker and match-balancer in quickplay should be to provide matches that are fun and appropriately challenging for all participants, regardless of skill level, solo/group queue, or platform (PC vs console.) If the player is over- or under-challenged, they will not have fun. A player who is not having fun will over time become dissatisfied, and likely not stick with the game or be inclined to spend any money. Even worse, a player who is repeatedly having a bad time will just close the game and potentially even uninstall.
The rate of leaving the game due to dissatisfaction is called ‘churn’ and the company has incentive to reduce churn as much as possible. The company wants to keep people interested in playing so that they ultimately spend more money. They constantly fine tune and adjust their sales approach (skin prices / bundle structures) to optimize revenue; and constantly influence player-enjoyment via matchmaking to minimize churn.
It can be difficult to quantify churn in casual play, because users have many reasons for stopping their play session that may or may not be related to dissatisfaction. Without a leaver penalty, players are free to leave the match at any time for any reason. Without a leaver penalty, leaving a game provides no data to the company about why the player decided to abandon a given match. The system cannot distinguish between someone leaving because they were upset about the match or because their Grandma just fell down the stairs and needs an ambulance.
Putting leaver penalties in place incentivizes players to stay until the end of the match, which they will in most cases do if they are having fun or are at least not totally miserable (or having an emergency.) From the perspective of the data analysis team, the new ‘leave game’ button now essentially amounts to an “I’m not willing to put up with this” button. People will only click the button when they are totally frustrated and outraged. The distinction between “player is having fun” and “player is not having fun” becomes more clear and easy to detect. They use the leaver rate to figure out where people draw the line with the matchmaking, and then make adjustments so there is less churn.
The adjustments they are currently working on right now seem to be matchmaker and match-balancer (DDA) related. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are seeing lots of forum posts about both ‘broken matchmaker’ and ‘tons of leavers’ - The leavers are a consequence of the poor adjustments to the matchmaking and poor tuning to match-balancing that, together, result in unfun matches. Because players are completely blind to the parameters which are utilized during matchmaking and fully unaware when the matches are being actively balanced, they assume (placing misguided trust into the company) that the match is assembled in a way that provides a fair chance of an equal outcome. The reality in fact is that the match is highly structured by the system to result in a specific and bespoke psychological outcome for each and every player individually.
Let me elaborate a bit on the Matchmaker and Match-balancer mechanics I mentioned.
The arrangement of players into teams is what most players consider to be the job of the matchmaker. This is a concept most players are probably familiar with at a basic level. Although as I already mentioned, they probably naively assume that the matchmaker’s goal is to create two equally matched teams based on skill. As described in the patents, the matchmaker will place ‘marquis’ players on a team with new players, so that the new players see all of the cosmetics and are motivated to spend their money. The matchmaker is putting more emphasis on product placement than it is on fair matchmaking. The patents are easily searchable on Google if you’re interested in a more thorough explanation or some further insight into the capabilities and techniques at work.
The system that the player base is probably much less aware of is the match-balancing system. Because the quickplay lobbies are crossplay enabled, the company needs to have a method of putting both controller players and mouse&keyboard players on a level playing field within the same match. This is done in many potential ways.
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One technique involves adjusting the hit registration tolerance. For players on controller who have an inherent challenge in aiming, (or lower skilled players who have bad aim statistics) they are given a large tolerance to what registers as a hit. For players on PC who have good aim statistics, they are given a low tolerance for what registers as a hit.
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Another technique involves what I will call ‘reverse aim assist’ which, as the name implies, works like aim assist in reverse, making it harder to aim at and focus fire your opponent. If you think of regular aim assist as being like a magnet that draws your crosshair in when you get close enough, reverse aim assist is like the opposition of two similar magnet poles; the crosshair is repelled more strongly when it is closer to the target. The end result is a bit more survivability for the disadvantaged player. They are not unkillable, but the skilled player has more of a challenge to secure the elim. This phenomenon is most evident when studying the crosshair movement and hit registration of weapons that require aim-tracking. This is what is responsible for what many players have described as the sensation of your aim feeling ‘floaty.’
These are just a few of the techniques available to the match balancer to create an advantage to one team or another (or to ostensibly create a fair matchup.) These match balancing parameters can be adjusted on the fly according to individual player performance in realtime. This allows for the system to balance matches regardless if you’re playing your best or having a bad day. Again, there are patents which can be found quite easily that detail these methods.
Together, the matchmaking and match-balancing systems amount to a manipulation engine that transparently (in theory) adjusts the matches in ways that maximize player engagement. This process is known in the industry as EOMM; Engagement Optimized Matchmaking. Because the player is not informed that any of this balancing is taking place, the company is basically gaslighting the players into attributing the outcome of the match to the performance of the team. The players are oblivious to these methods and can only be left to assume they just had a good or bad match for one of many reasons. Usually they just blame it on the supports or say ‘tank diff’ and move on. They don’t go back and watch the replay and realize that their team was basically themselves and 4 bots. The company is taking advantage of people’s aversion (or inability) of thinking too deeply about why things are the way they are.
The reason for the leaver penalty is to provide just enough friction to the leaving process that the players will sit through ‘tolerable’ bad matches. The penalty is not severe enough to prevent a player from leaving a truly bad match. It essentially amounts to a yes/no test to see how heavily-manipulated of a match the system can arrange without generating churn that cuts into the sales numbers. They want to determine exactly how far they can take the manipulation. Or a more optimistic take would be that they want to use the data to continue optimizing their matchmaking and match-balancing in order to produce great and fun games for everyone, regardless of skill level or state of mind.
The optimist in me dares to hope for the latter. But if that’s the case, the truth is they have a long way to go.