Bans for quitting do not work. Negative reinforcement as a rule rarely works, especially when it’s for a spur of the moment emotional reaction rather than a premeditated act.
Quitting is an emotional reaction.
Despite what people think, it is not a reaction to losing. It is a reaction to being made to feel foolish.
Banning people is merely giving people distance from the source of their anxiety, frustration and anger. Eventually tempers cool and the draw of the core gameplay loop in Halo 5 will draw players back. But when those same feelings of anger mount, they’ll quit again. Maybe after getting banned enough they’ll leave the game entirely. Probably not. I’ve been banned a ton, and I keep coming back, because there’s a great experience in there, buried beneath all the raw contempt for the paying customer.
1) Fix your godawful matchmaking.
I’m a Platinum. Stop feeding me to Diamonds and Onyxs (let alone TEAMS of them) so they can pad their stats. Thanks to quitting, I’m not even a HIGH platinum, and I’m still seeing Diamonds and Onyxs.
If your CSR system is completely detached from your MMR system, then - newsflash - your CSR system is ****ing useless. It’s the equivalent of telling somebody they’re a B student and then throwing them into the advanced stream taking 2nd year college courses, and then wondering why they’re frustrated when they fail. The only outcome is making the B student feel stupid and driving them to take up liberal arts or something… and nobody wants that.
There is truth to the notion that ‘you only get better playing people better than you’, but this is an upper limit on HOW MUCH BETTER that competition can be. Throwing a bunch of pee-wee hockey players up against NHL players with orders to run up the score will not teach said pee-wee players a damn thing about the game… other than how to hate hockey entirely and try soccer instead.
If 343i’s paranoid fear of systemic deranking abuse (which, at it’s height, barely registered as an annoyance for 90% of the Halo2 population) is really going to hold up the obvious answer, then the least they can do is institute up and lower limits on what ranks of players you can encounter within each tier. If you’re a rank 5 platinum for example, you can start encountering diamonds. NOT ONYXS. Diamonds. If you drop to a level 2 Platinum, you can start seeing Golds. And this standard applies to each rank up to Onyx, at which point you have to hit a certain numerical value to see Champions anyway.
2) Account for Teams, for the love of god.
If I am a single player, and I encounter a team of 4 on the other side, your matchmaking is trash. Period. That is a BASELINE.
Frankly, unless my team includes a party of 2 or 3, I shouldn’t see parties of 2 or 3 on the other team either, but I think most players are willing to let that slide in the name of efficiency.
Ideally, your system would take parties into account and reason that 4 Diamond players in one party, communication, are probably at least as effective as 4 individual, solo Onyx players (OR, depending on their rank, maybe you get more granular and say a team of Diamond 1s is equivalent to 4 solo Diamond4s).
You spent so much damn time tuning the game based on the opinions of pros in a LAN setup, you forgot about the significant chunk of your audience that plays solo here or there when their work, family, social lives allow. And, shockingly, the idea of hopping online to get curb-stomped by highly communicative teams of 4 is NOT how they’d prefer to spend their hour or two a night of free time. Crazy, I know.
I understand not making a lonewolves playlist. Your refusal to display population numbers belies the issue. But even if you don’t want to split your limited population (which, for the record, would probably grow with better matchmaking by virtue of sheer enhanced accessibility), you can still do more to ensure that players aren’t driven to a) leave the game or b) head to Reddit or their community of choice to seek out teams in hopes of mitigating the tube-sockings.
3) Positive Reinforcement
Positive reinforcement works better than negative reinforcement.
Any 343i employees, I want you to sit down before reading this. Cause this idea may take a very small percentage of your micro-transaction money away.
Instead of banning people after quitting 3 or 5 games, or whatever the hell you do, how about rewarding players that continue to stick out matches. Like, you just introduced those win packs for the first win in Arena and Warzone, and those give out basically nothing. Use those as a unit of worth. They get a pack equivalent to one win pack if they stick in matchmaking without quitting/leaving for 3. Games. A pack worth 2 for sticking through 5. 3 for sticking through 10. 4 for sticking through 15 etc.
Obviously, in Arena I’d weight the pack towards skins, helmets and armors.
4) Let users hide their stats
We live in the age of progression and persistence. This understanding is what allowed COD to pants Halo to begin with, and Microsoft’s failure to come to grips with this is what has allowed Halo to slip into the category of B-tier niche shooters.
The ONLY elements of persistence in Halo 5 are the permanent unlocks (certs) in Warzone, and their ongoing stats page. Their K/D, W/L, etc.
For arena players, the Warzone certs are essentially worthless.
As such, players are going to take steps to preserve and enhance the sole persistent record. This includes quitting matches when it’s clear their K/D and/or W/L will take a hit. Because it’s one thing to be tube-socked. It’s another to have a lasting, online record of it for everybody to see. Given that option, obviously you take the temporary ban over the permanent record.
The solution is simple. Let players choose to hide their stats. Settings as simple as public, friends, private would do.
Those who want to show off their stats can. Those who would prefer to hide them until they improve can.
Ideally this wouldn’t be necessary, but the absolutely legendary level of ball-dropping on the matchmaking end has made it a worthwhile consideration.