Epic Deserter debuff for Epic Battlegrounds?

PVP Battlegrounds
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My good friend Gdtroll and I are currently debating the merits of the deserter debuff for Epic Battlegrounds, and I wanted to open up discussion for more thoughts.

Currently: the deserter debuff lasts 15 minutes regardless of if you abandon a regular battleground (15m average game length) or an epic battleground (35m average duration)

This means that for deserting a regular battleground, you are locked out of one game. For deserting an epic battleground, you’re locked out of half of one match, and have the ability to queue again before that match is over. If the game is longer than 30 minutes (and there have been 45m Wintergrasp and 1hr+ Alterac Valley matches), your debuff can expire 3 or 4 times before that single match is over.

What do people think of an Epic Deserter debuff, only for abandoning an Epic Battleground? I imagine this would be 30 minutes, so you’re locked out of at least a single Epic game.

Gdtroll suggests that people will still leave. He’s right, they will, however I feel they will at least think twice if the debuff is at least as long as one of the matches they are ditching. Right now you can leave and be back in a game before the one you left is even over. That means there is absolutely no penalty for leaving a losing game.

Thoughts?

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Why not have the deserter debuff be double the average length?

If you want people to think twice, a 1:1 ratio isn’t very compelling imo.

30m for normal, 1.5 for epic?

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The problem with this is people will just pretend to afk in 1 spot. its better they just afk out of the bg then have people pretend to afk

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I would be happy with this however am aware that this will have a larger impact on queue times. You don’t want the penalty to be too high that it impacts other players - perhaps 45m for epic? 1.5 hours is definitely too long, sadly.

I appreciate this concern. Players still have the ability to remove them, however I get that even that is too much to ask of some people.

I feel like there needs to be a secondary step to the whole system. Either people that leave frequently get their account flagged (idk about what punishment they should get) or I’m a big fan of the idea of queuing frequent deserters together. I would watch live streams for that to see how quick a team disbands.

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Well the magic bullet here, or rather the search for one is always gonna be complicated.

My thoughts are if you pick a solution that has potential to change the way things go and the way people think, some things would even out. Perceptions shift and player behavior follows. Desertion was never quite this bad before, for example. So people and behavior can change.

Plus there’s mystery figures, such as “people who take deserter but log out or switch to other content for the rest of their night”

Is it possible to lock people out for too long when they’re not even playing.

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The most important step is making it account wide.

It’s nonsense that people who have alts are punished less severely than people who don’t. Playing multiple characters has nothing to do with desertion and neither should the deserter debuff.

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Just make deserter buff 30 mins and account wide so people can’t hop on an alt like it’s no big deal.

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This. :+1:

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How about this: Separate the deserter debuff to apply only to the type of game they leave but make each one longer and account wide on an escalating basis?

So first desertion for regular randoms: Account wide 20 minute penalty but only applies to the random queue.

First desertion for epic: Account wide 30 minute but only applies to to the epic queue.

Add 5 minutes each time someone leaves resetting back to the initial penalties at 6 am server time each day.

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so you want to force players to play on losing games with highly toxic players in chat upset about not being able to leave that $hit show?

there are plenty of times i leave becuase i don’t like my team mates. yes it sucks for backfills and it sucks to get backfilled into bad teams, however forcing players to stay will only increase the toxic behavior and nastygrams. IMO they should leave it as is and stop backfilling.

if people don’t want to play with you, you shouldn’t force them, nor should others be forced to play with you.

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It would be a mistake to give more consideration to the one person who has to backfill than the nine who would have to finish out a game down a man imo

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All of which sounds great in principle but is overall very bad for the game. Especially the no backfill idea. I hate being backfill but so many games would end in minutes. Soon as people see someone leave and know that no replacement is coming then they all leave. Games end. PvP dies.

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thats the idea.

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I honestly can’t remember the last battleground I was in where not a single person deserted. I don’t think we’d ever finish a match again!

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Yeah but do you really want most of your games just ending in minutes in what is basically a forfeit? All it would take is one person leaving. Just one and the other 9 will see no point in staying. That would end PvP in this game. Especially the epics.

imo ofc

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forcing your enemy to surrender/forfeit is a valid strat. a threshold could be setup so that once a team loses too many players the game ends and the other team wins. if it cascades oh well. but its better than still losing 45 minutes later with a constant stream of “X has left”, “X has joined”

from what i have seen alliance seems to have the main issue of players bg shopping, horde has players leave over strat/teammate disagreements. perhaps alliance should get an hour long debuff and horde’s should remain the same, horde already has a 10-20 minute wait just to get into a bg, so they are already waiting at least 25 minutes when they leave.

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But you wouldn’t be forcing that really. All it would take is one person on your team not liking the bg, getting disconnected, trolling and the list goes on and on. Then another person decides they don’t want to play down one. Then another decides they don’t want to play down two and before the first fight even begins the game is essentially over. I know I wouldn’t bother anymore with even playing the game since bgs is all I enjoy at this point.

I don’t trust the current player base to complete 90% of bgs under such conditions.

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what about a reserve pool of backfills, say 2 for normals and 5 for epics, once that pool is exhausted no more backfills.

the problem with forcing people to play is that you will only make players more toxic, if im stuck in a bg with someone for 45 minutes unable to leave, im going to do my best to make sure they are just as miserable as me.

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Any changes or increases to the deserter penalty would be moot anyways, as far as the stated goal of “stopping people from leaving losses” goes :thinking: We would definitely see negative side-effects though (due to people adapting).

No matter what, you guys would not get what you want out of casuals (ex. “trying harder to win”, “toughing it out”, “people would learn to work better as a team”, “people would be nicer to each other”, etc).

Ahem…

SCENARIO #1: deserter timer is increased, such as 1 hour deserter

I would still leave losses and bad/dumb/toxic teams, as would most casuals. So nothing would change here :ok_hand:

SCENARIO #2: deserter is made account-wide, or similar change

I would actively try to sabotage my team to make the loss happen faster, or if that is not possible I would find a safe spot on the map to AFK or “pretend to be busy” until the loss is finished. Once again, nothing would change since the team would still pretty much be “missing” or down 1 person (due to me not participating/hiding off in a corner)

SCENARIO #3: deserter is made into a “stacking” debuff

Same as #2 pretty much, most likely I would look for creative ways to cause my team to lose so I can get out of there faster - and thus cheat/defeat the “stacking” mechanism. Or AFK in a safe spot, tab out and watch some Youtube, etc.

And those are just a few examples off the top of my head. You guys are idealistic and I commend you for that, but we have to be REALISTIC here - let’s not be so naive about these randoms/casuals :joy:

imo you guys greatly over-estimate the patience and ability of your average WoW casual, and greatly UNDERESTIMATE their laziness. People are not gonna magically “get better” just because you threaten them with a bigger stick, human nature being what it is.

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It’s all one big damned if we do damned if we don’t proposition. It’s just a matter of figuring out which way of being damned is less damning.