If a Player Leaves

Give SR Gain/Loss according to when they left the game. If they leave 3min in that obviously doesn’t reflect a lost game and doesn’t deserve a full SR drop.

There was a period a few months ago where something like this was implemented and it was great? Was it just a bug? This should be obvious and can be tailored differently at high ELO if needed.

Especially with these server issues today… If a player leaves 5sec after the time limit for the game to end the players shouldn’t be punished.

Sounds like something the community could easily exploit

I think leavers should not be losing sr at all, but have more serious time bans.

I just lost 25SR because two people left before the halfway point and didn’t return. Fix your sh*t blizzard! That’s not fair to me when I can’t even get out of spawn because it’s 4v6!

The goal(s) of most non-incidental leaving is typically:

  1. Lose sr in the hopes that they will achieve easier matches.
  2. Lose sr to play/boost friends or gain faster queues.
  3. Abdicate difficult or uncomfortable match situations (rage quit or cba/fold).
  4. Grief the current in-match players.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of <500 matches (where I live) are significantly harder than gold at this point. So 1. isn’t really going to work. It’s a swamp where smurfs are pooled with/vs. other smurfs because of mmr historics and what not. Losing won’t make things that much easier in the long run.

As suspension times increase, 1. and 2. also become inefficient. Queue times are also relatively consistent inside the extreme tails of the ladder so that logic doesn’t make sense. Reason 3. can make some sense, as a lot of matches are utter trash, unfair, boring af, rigged, and just not worth sticking around for. 4. is just unsportsmanlike.

The best way to fix all this nonsense is to rework PBSR and bias heavily towards it (in a way that circumvents stat-padding). The other best way to fix it is to periodically renormalize the ladder, as this disincentivizes sabotage, abuse, griefing, and deranking all at once.

This was implemented when role queue went live. See How Competitive Matchmaking and Rating Works (Season 21) → Leaver penalty for more details.