So, I’ve been banned in arena twice now, the second time for an hour just now. This effectively ends my gaming for the night. Now, before everyone comes in here with the “how hard is it not to cheat or quit” -Yoink- posts, let me explain the two occurences
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I play arena with a full fireteam of friends, people I know in real life. We aren’t screwing each other over, but things happen. First ban was for two betrayals in a match. One was with a stray grenade at the beginning of a match. We played the rest of the match and were winning solidly. Somewhere around 40ish kills, I was shooting a rocket when a teammate strafed in front of me. We were up by about 15 kills and both started laughing…then two seconds later banhammer, kicked from game. Well that sucks. Not only do I not get the win, but then my teammates had to fight off a mean comeback 3v4. No one gave a -Yoink- that I accidentally betrayed them, because it was a frickin’ accident. I’ve also had a couple of buddies get kicked out of Swat games (yes, the game with no shields), in the same manner, and subsequently lost the games.
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Fast forward 2 days later. We were playing a warzone game as a warmup. I get disconnected actually first time ever for me. I jump back in to a FFA game while they are finishing out warzone. I then got booted from the FFA game. Okay, something -Yoinked!- up with the internet. I reset my router. Came back online and jumped into Team Arena, once again with my full fireteam of friends, and got disconnected again towards the end of the match. Boom, banhammer for over an hour. Refuses to reconnect me to the game because I’m banned and they end up losing. This concerns me because my 2nd ban was way longer than the first, so what happens a month from now if I run into connection issues again or a week from now when I’m playing swat with some buddies and have a couple of unlucky shots?
Without going off on a rant and -Yoinking!- about how angry I am with this system (which I am), I’d like to suggest some possible tweaks that could help.
A.) Instead of auto-banning, bring back the “Boot” button for betrayals. This -Yoink- happens, especially in fast paced matches or low shield games like swat and breakout. If you are all on the mic and communicating, people know it is an accident and won’t “boot” you, and it won’t count towards your ban. If you are an -Yoink- that is running around betraying people then you can still get booted and banned.
B.) Take a look at team damage dealt instead of actual betrayals. Your ban system doesn’t account for the jerks that run behind you AR’ing you and dropping your shields constantly, or the ridiculously sloppy warthog gunner, as long as the enemy team is the one that finishes you off. Those are WAYYY more of a problem than the incidental grenade or rocket.
C.) Lighten up the threshold when in a full fireteam. If I was allowed to rejoin the slayer match in example two my team would have one. The ban system screwed us over a lot more than it helped because it wouldn’t let me back in. Same goes for betrayals. A sloppy grenading team member is the business of our fireteam, if he is bothering us we can boot him, we don’t need 343 to do it automatically. What hurts us a lot more than two random accidents is playing the rest of the -Yoinking!- match 3v4.
Anyone else have any thoughts on this?