Shadowbans.
You don’t get any notifications or warning, and your friends list is still there and you can interact with people in the world, but if you use the LFG tool, you can only see “fake” groups that use an AI in order to create believable group names and notes, and all party members other than you are AI bots (which will have fake armory profiles created and deleted just for the purpose by an AI that can create millions of false profiles in minutes). They will have achievements, statistics, unique equipment loadouts, and a falsified history, and be indistinguishable from human players. The AI will even respond to you if you whisper or talk to them.
They will perform in M+ exactly as well as you’d expect an AI to perform, leading to the shadowbanned player immediately ditching group and finding another, never knowing every group he finds will continue to be populated with AI bots.
As much as I have hated someone leaving in a key that would time/was going okay… there are legit reasons people leave
Some people know real life comes before a game. If I join a key and my dog starts throwing up, or my kid calls me, or someone is knocking at my door, yes, I will get out of my chair in a key because a M+ isn’t going to come before life. And life has unexpected things.
Back in WoD, I had to leave a raid after a knock on my door to say my cat was hit by a car, I mean, things happen.
I’m actually pretty active on the Overwatch forums and I always point to the consequences that abandoned players experience and how changing those consequences is better than trying to just punish people for leaving.
People who have this old-school gamer notion that leaving a group is a terrible thing to do are always quick to tear me down for going for an adjustment to the consequences but I think they’re naive for expecting people to just NEVER leave a group if they’re not having fun. Plus in OW, Blizzard has openly admitted to greatly compromising their matchmaking algorithm for the sake of queue times. So in that case, I only really champion adjusting the consquences for the people who were abandoned and less on punishing the leavers.
In this game, there are variables that I think we can reasonably agree shoudl be enforced if a penalty goes into effect AND that keyholders who get abandoned should not be punished for that happening. The key should NOT deplete if their team bails on them and the group was listed as just completion. So far, I’m not seeing too much pushback against that.
I do think if you list a key as beat timer, you have to accept the risk that it can get depleted if the group’s synergy just isn’t there.
I mean, at that point just make the key never deplete. Because then that system will just get abused as well. People will just intentionally leave right before the end if they dont time it.
But thats a moot point to me within the context of this thread.
My point for this thread is that trying to force people to stay, I just dont see a system that will work. Punishing people that leave is typically open to abuse.
Does it suck when a person leaves? Sure. But I feel creating a system to punish a person that leaves will make it worse for everyone involved. Unless some brand new suggestion comes up, but I dont expect it to happen.
I’ts hard for me to take a serious stand on this only b/c as a tank who only pugs and hardly EVER runs his own keys, I don’t feel this as much. In fact, I’ve often been the one to leave groups but only when there is SEVERE toxicity or if I’m getting back-seated rudely by someone in the group. That doesn’t happen a lot, but it’s definitely happened enough that I have no qualms about doing it since it doesn’t punish me. Is that fair? Probably not, but then don’t be so rude and I won’t do it.
Still, if I join a group that says COMPLETION, I’m always asking people/checking in with them if they want to continue if it’s going roughly as I think that’s fair. I don’t just leave, that’s freakin rude.
To appease the people who would rather waste people’s time and abandon a key, let them. If someone leaves the key buff everyone’s damage by 40% and allow a talent change if someone has to fill a tank/healer role. This should only activate if someone leaves the group and not kicked, to avoid abuse.
I’m standing by my idea; I don’t think the abuse you speak of would be something people would pull long term.
At the very least,
Remove the penalty to the keyholder of losing their key’s value if a non-key-holder leaves. Problem solved. Leaver gets no penalty and the KH isn’t punished for it.
Seems to me the easiest thing to do is to simply delete the key depletion mechanic and the timer. Bam. No more “dead keys”. Now everyone can afk for an hour in the dungeon without issue.
Will this make m+ a lot easier? Sure. Do I care? No. No I do not.
Then make the key deplete automatically if someone leaves. The key right now is dead as is. Add this buff and it lets the group continue if they want.
If you’re then going to say “oh well people will just troll and leave for fun” they can do that now if they wanted. It wouldn’t be a thing, but at least the group could continue.
problem of scale.
a) Millions of keys get run per week at the start of a patch.
This (even if it were in any way feasible) would catch so few of the people GD likes to complain about, that it wouldn’t be noticeable here.
It would also likely end up with a high false positive rate.
So this idea would spend a lot of resources and time to accomplish basically nothing, except punishing people who left keys for legit reasons (I’m only here for score, and this key isn’t going to be timed is a legit reason to leave)
And that would make it impossible for blizz to properly monitor these things and it would lead to possible wrong bans etc which would clog up the system even more.
The only thing I’d like to see is a tracker. How many dungeons has X person left first, uncompleted. If you’re the 1st to jump ship often, your # will stack, then if nobody wants to invite you to groups, that’s on you. I’d say to be fair, this # can reset each season. If you leave the odd bad group, fine. But if your leaving a lot of groups, that’s not the “norm”. I think it’s fair to see how much risk you have inviting a player if they’ll stay or not.
Talking about solo shuffle? Where blizzard puts the group together? Then (and only then) is it blizzard’s job to ensure that the group completes the activity it signed up for. You signed up for 6 rounds. Whether you win or loose them is in your control, but leaving the group (and all other forms of AFKing) simply guarantee losses for you and whoever ends up on your team that round.
Yes. If you are not at the keyboard, it is the generally accepted wisdom that you will loose all matches you play. The rating loss isn’t just because it’s a leave, it’s because leaving is you surrendering.
But, as this is a matchmade competitive system, it is irrelevant to manually formed groups for cooperative content.