Maybe it’s me, but I feel there should be a greater penalty for people that AFK. A 15 minute timer is nothing. People just go do some quick PVE, and then back in it. I feel the penalty timer should be congruent with the instance timer. It should be at least 30 minutes in length.
I’m tired of… oh we didn’t get the hangar, the end of days is here, so I’d better afk out. Oh, someone capped the first flag, clearly it’s a loss… afk time. Etc. etc.
I agree with you 100%. But, I feel as if Blizzard will never change it I guess because you can’t really “force” someone to do something. They need to rework their battlegrounds so they aren’t a loss in the first minute. Although, there still is a chance of winning (happened to me quite a few times) most times its still a loss though. Like, there’s 3 bases in IoC there’s no reason only 1 should be used.
Players shouldnt be punished this severely for first-time one-off things like DC, or an emergency in real life happens and need to step away for 5-10mins.
Though I think the deserter timer should increment by 5-10mins per offence within the same day, and then applied to all alts.
Anyways, play rated bgs if you want teammates that “never” leave - stay out of random bgs (aka playing with random strangers). No on increasing penalties for casual play/random bgs. Pretty dead-horse topic, there isn’t really much to add to it.
As for what you can do personally to reduce the chances of your teammates leaving:
be as geared as you can be (greatly improves/enhances the bg experience for most classes)
don’t be afk (people respond negatively to afkers/leeches)
don’t be bad
#3 is probably the single most important thing, people don’t want to waste their time with bad players (just like on the PvE side of things).
It’s extremely rare for people to leave a winning bg team, that should tell you all you need to know about this topic. People sometimes leave winning Seething Shores and winning Wintergrasps, but that’s probably more due to there being no blacklist option (if I had to guess).
I don’t think punishing people is the solution to fixing the afk problem. Instead I think the BG system should be overhauled to reward varying levels of effort whether you win or lose.
