What is the purpose of quitting right before the game ends?

I see a lot of people complain about being slotted in as backfill in a game that’s already over, and I’ve certainly experienced the same myself. I’ve also seen what directly causes that to happen: Seemingly something like 5-10% of players will quit a few seconds before the game is over, creating an empty slot for backfill in non-Competitive modes.

The part I don’t understand is… why? In all this time, I haven’t been able to figure out the logic behind it, and I’m genuinely curious what leads to this behavior.

Is there some statistic I’m not aware of that differentiates between “games lost” and “games quit,” so it somehow looks better if you quit before you lose? Is there some reason to intentionally avoid getting XP for playing? Does the theoretical possibility of getting into another match 2 seconds earlier feel worth it?

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Expressing your anger/frustration.

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Out of the game and into the next slightly faster

Edit: also the Xp you miss out on for losing is so much less than winning your probably not losing all that much by comparison.

Except that isn’t true. Jeff specifically said you don’t actually get queued until the previous match and postgame is over.

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That only applies to competitive.

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Oh. They should apply it uniformly then.

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If you wait until the victory screen the game won’t look for a new game until it’s finished with those menus you get at the end of the game, even if you quit early. That’s a good 20 seconds or something.

If you leave before the victory screen it looks for a new game instantly. This makes it the best option if you don’t want to play with the same people.

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I guess you don’t have to see the chat after the game

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I find it hard to believe that the payoff over time is better or even comparable that way when it’s a matter of a few seconds to get full XP for the loss.

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Actually once the defeat/victory screen appears the matchmaker will litteraly not look for a new match until all the cards and stats are done and you are booted back to the menu.

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That’s only applicable for Competitive. You can definitely get a match faster than that in QP/Arcade by leaving during the post-game.

Edit: Although for the topic it’s valuable to know that people believe this, since it might explain the behavior.

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The payoff is the ego soothing effect of telling the rest of your team that they are so worthless that you’d rather miss out on xp, lose endorsement level, and risk a temporary penalty, than to risk having to play with them again.

When the going gets tough, the weak usually bail. Same in real life, same in video games.

I’m sure a small percentage of QP players who leave games might have some real life emergencies going on and they have to go, but the majority of leavers leave because they are butthurt that they’re team is losing or that they are getting out played. They won’t ever learn how to get out of those tough situations because they run away every time things gets hard.

I’m glad that it’s much less prevalent in competitive and most leavers end up returning after a couple of minutes, proving it was a technical problem or router/modem issue.

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A win is worth 500XP, which is only a fraction of the entire game’s XP bonus. If you leave early you literally get zero experience for the entire match. If the goal was to maximize the amount of XP you gain, you’d absolutely want to stick around until the game ends for every match.

I do recognize the motivations to leave part way through a match. The question is more specifically about the people who quit when the game is already about to end—where they’re not abandoning some difficult job, but rather waiting until the job is done and then leaving without their pay.

As far as I know, this doesn’t happen in Competitive, probably because the penalties are much steeper.

Yep, nobody leaves right before the end in comp because nobody wants that nasty 50sr and 10 min penalty. In QP, people don’t care as much about XP penalties and prolific leavers probably always have XP penalities anyway and don’t care so they’ll keep on leaving as soon as they die in that last team fight with 15 seconds left because in their heads they think “what’s the point”. It’s dumb.

If your losing and not doing well your not gonna get that much XP because you lack medals anyway so why not leave?

Continuing the discussion from Leaving game when seeing defeat or victory:

He doesn’t mention anything about it being exclusive to comp and my experience with quick play tells me that it isn’t exclusive either.

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Right, he didn’t mention it, so I can definitely understand where the assumption would come from. I normally just stay through the post-game myself in QP/Arcade, but when I group with a friend who re-queues earlier, we often get slotted into a match before the post-game would have ended.

The vast majority of your XP comes from time played. The medal bonus is only up to +150XP if you have any gold medals. Leaving 20 seconds early to start a new match is forfeiting upwards of 1500XP. You would pretty much need to have lost a 2CP match in under like 40 seconds for it to be worth your time leaving to try and benefit from XP.