Cancel any obligations you have for the day. This is probably going to get lengthy.
343 probably made this decision in order to lessen the impact of the quitting issue. I’m sure everyone could agree with that. There is probably second motive here of “Let’s get players into games at lightspeed”. Which will no doubt please the CoD fanatics. And whatever, business is business.
Before getting to the matter at hand I will say this… Quitting CAN be an issue. Personally I don’t care because (as any good player will tell you) for me, their team has only two people to kill and we have four. Typically I’m playing against unorganized randoms who travel solo which makes winning a walk in the park. If you out DMR them one by one it’s in the bag. The quitting doesn’t affect them either. If they were smart, they would travel in a group and the win would be simple. It’s not the games fault that they all wandered off by themselves.
That being said, this does not apply to all game modes. This is somewhat of a small issue in team slayer. However, a problem nonetheless. In almost every other playlist you have some kind of objective. This is where the real quitting issue shows its face. Picture BTB CTF on hemorrhage, 8 vs 3. Who’s going to win that one? A rhetorical question by the way.
So the remedy seems obvious right? Let people join mid game. Well on paper, I’m sure that seems logical. But in practice, this is what’s going to happen. We will recycle the last scenario for this example. So the game has about 3-3 1/2 to 4 minutes left and you are losing. So about 2-3 guys jump ship because they see it’s a lost cause. And another two people quit right after that because they don’t want to play without a full roster especially when this battle has basically been lost. Who knows how long it will take for new players to get in. It’s too late for last minute heroics especially down 3 guys. They bail. Now it’s 8v3. So in a world where this join in progress in lightning quick, you manage to get 4 guys in almost immediately. Now you are only down one guy and there is 3 minutes left. That’s enough time to get a cap and tie things up. Again, in theory yes. In practice, no. Why? Because these new players do not have a stake in the outcome. They don’t care. Why should they? All they want to do is ride out the last of this match and start a fresh one. So they customize their loadouts a little and then spawn in a minute later. They just run around aimlessly, without a care in the world. With the news of no 1-50 (and judging by what frank said, I assume nothing even that similar) people have no reason whatsoever to give a single -Yoink- what happens. Especially when they JUST joined. Because it won’t affect them negatively at all. Hell, if it did, THAT would be unfair. So your team was dismantled by rage quiters and replaced by people who aren’t given a reason to care about the outcome.
I think the idea of JIP has patched one hole and created another. I mean really, what’s better? A team missing over half it’s players, or over half the team not giving a -Yoink-. I guess time will tell.
The last thing I want to touch on is the map quit issue that is likely to be introduced. For those of you like me who played CoD once upon a time (or still do) will know exactly what I’m talking about. You pop in MW2. Go to XBL lobby and hit find game. You get sucked into Derail against your will. That map is terrible. So what do you do? Quit of course. You back out and try again. Let’s say you have the fortune of being in the lobby while the vote is taking place. You hate the map that people are voting for…you back out of course. For you, this is great. You are never forced to play a map you don’t like. However, for everyone else it can be a pain. Their team keeps losing people over and over. Never at full strength. And even if they do finally get a new team guess what? Yep the same scenario described earlier plays out. They don’t care how the game finishes. They just showed up.
Just a thought. A very long one at that. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that this post is going to change anything, but perhaps by highlighting some scenarios about where it can go wrong might spark ideas or solutions on how to tweak their system to address the common problem areas when using the JIP system. I have faith that it will be much more robust and balanced than CoD’s JIP system. But it never hurts to point these things out.