The Science of Quitting

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

Hello Spartans,

Here is my Theory of why I believe people quit more frequently in H5 then any other Halo. The feeling of ‘self-reward’ is powerful and the way H5 is now, pretty much none exists. You might say, oh it only takes 3 games of Warzone to unlock a silver pack. While yes that is true, think about many of the people playing the game that do not have that time and can only play 1-2 Warzone games or maybe 3 arena games a night because…you know…they have a life, family, friends, etc. Anyways, with the amount of content, it is already self explanatory it would take many many MANY hours to unlock the good stuff. Too much content for ones own good. So let me get into why this relates to quitting. The way I see it, this is one of two main reasons why people quite. There just is not enough of an incentive to finish a match. The amount of REQ points needed to buy a useful REQ pack is just too high, plus with all the duplicates you spend 1 Arena game to earn 1/5th of a Silver pack which may unlock the same helmet 5 times. How many people have ever gone “WOOO! I JUST UNLOCKED THE SAME HELMET AGAIN! YES! FINALLY!”…If you answer yes to this question, you are very special and rare breed. When I ask people why they quit Halo 5, 90% of the time its because they got bored. They get bored because they don’t feel like they are getting anywhere, or just are not having fun.

Now compare the rate of quitting to a game such as Rocket League. The rate is much lower because people know they will be rewarded with something despite of winning or losing, thus try to enjoy the match. H5 should learn from this model, and with the amount of unlocks, this would work really well. Unlock perm unlocks (1 or 2 depending on rarity) after each game and buy REQ packs with the REQ points for Warzone restocks. For people who dont play Rocket League, you unlock something to customize your car after every game, despite winning or loosing. Here is a though, if you were offered 50 Million Dollars in 50 years or 1 Million every year, which one would you choose? Oh, and you have to live to be 50 or you don’t get a cent, just as the game will eventually also die or be replaced.

Now for the second point of why people quit. Frustration. DUH right? With the addition of sprint and long range starting weapons such as the H5 magnum, 343 has brought the speed of gameplay to a whole new level. While we still move at the same relative pace as previous Halo games in the franchise, now we spend 80% of our time sprinting and we fell…you guess it…faster. And while you sprint your more likely to come into a unrecoverable situation…and die. Compare the average life span of any slayer game in H1-4 to H5. You’ll see that H5 you die more frequently. I am not saying more deaths, just less time between them. This of course makes the game environment more stressful and less tolerable, hence more frustrating. The inclusion of magnums as a powerful long range starting weapons is a major reason of why deaths are more frequency. Sure it will make you feel better if you can rack up more kills faster, but think of little Jimmy on the other side, he is probably not having as much fun as you. If little Jimmy gets killed over and over again, little Jimmy wont want to come back and thus H5 just lost little Jimmy as a social player.

When combined, the lack of self-reward and ever high frustration levels, it is not surprising that people quit. Rather then bash people for quitting I think we should find out why people are quitting and resolve the issue. It would make for a more positive experience all around. While this is MY theory, I would love to hear your opinion on why people quit and get more people to enjoy the game.

2

Quitting has been rampant in Halo since the dawn of H2 and XBL. People will keep quitting and there is no one solution to fix this issue. Providing incentive to stay in the game did not work in H3 and Reach.You were penalized a win point for quitting any game in H3 and had a credit multiplayer for X amount of consecutive games finished in Reach. This has been tried before and people quit at a steady pace.

Really it boils down to if this person is having fun or not. Fun is subjective and it’s impossible to provide fun for everyone.

3

> 2533274800383882;2:
> Quitting has been rampant in Halo since the dawn of H2 and XBL. People will keep quitting and there is no one solution to fix this issue. Providing incentive to stay in the game did not work in H3 and Reach.You were penalized a win point for quitting any game in H3 and had a credit multiplayer for X amount of consecutive games finished in Reach. This has been tried before and people quit at a steady pace.
>
> Really it boils down to if this person is having fun or not. Fun is subjective and it’s impossible to provide fun for everyone.

4

> 2533274800383882;2:
> Quitting has been rampant in Halo since the dawn of H2 and XBL. People will keep quitting and there is no one solution to fix this issue. Providing incentive to stay in the game did not work in H3 and Reach.You were penalized a win point for quitting any game in H3 and had a credit multiplayer for X amount of consecutive games finished in Reach. This has been tried before and people quit at a steady pace.
>
> Really it boils down to if this person is having fun or not. Fun is subjective and it’s impossible to provide fun for everyone.

I completely agree that fun is subjective, but that doesn’t mean we should stop exploring to find a better system.

5

> 2533274797303698;4:
> > 2533274800383882;2:
> > Quitting has been rampant in Halo since the dawn of H2 and XBL. People will keep quitting and there is no one solution to fix this issue. Providing incentive to stay in the game did not work in H3 and Reach.You were penalized a win point for quitting any game in H3 and had a credit multiplayer for X amount of consecutive games finished in Reach. This has been tried before and people quit at a steady pace.
> >
> > Really it boils down to if this person is having fun or not. Fun is subjective and it’s impossible to provide fun for everyone.
>
>
> I completely agree that fun is subjective, but that doesn’t mean we should stop exploring to find a better system.

you are not going to find a better system then this one or the previous versions. It does not exist, quitters will always exist and there is literally no possible way to prevent them.

6

In my experience, people quit for two main reasons…rage quitting and to protect their stats. I admit to rage quitting from time to time (being spawn killed, being down to 2v4), and have quit for lag (on my provider’s end, not 343). I have been hit with the banhammer a few times, and have deserved it every time. I’ve never understood people who quit to protect their K/D ratio.

7

How do you unlock a permanent unlock multiple times? There are different skinned versions of helmets so I wouldn’t say you’re getting the same helmet 5 times.

8

If I quit one of 4 things most likely happened.

  1. I got kicked from the server
  2. Req server is not working
  3. My friends finally got onto halo or just got back in the lobby and I want to join up with them…
  4. My ISP DIED

and every once in a while my GF comes into the office and starts trolling until I put the game down and give her my undivided attention.

9

Yesterday I had a TM like " little Jimmy". Through no fault of his or my own 2 players on our team quit. Who knows why, right? I didn’t realize it at first but it was his 1st placement match, lol.
Anyhoo, he decided to quit about 1/2 way through the match after going neg at 2/15. I totally understood his reason for doing it too. But heres the difference between him and I, I stuck around. I dunno why I mean I had every reason to quit but I didn’t. Guess we’re just wired differently.

10

Maybe they should introduce either a heavy ban hammer 3hrs for the first match and day plus for the second.

We all have bad games but people quit so often in my placement matches for slayer I didn’t finish one game with a full team. One match I even ended up on my own.

I also feel that a season change monthly is too much, for the first couple of weeks people quit until they get the CSR that ‘they feel they Deserve’
Quitting happens a lot less at the end of the month as you know, it doesn’t really matter so perhaps a season that is three months long would be better.

11

The current system while not perfect works fine. I agree that quitters gonna quit, but if I were implementing a system:
If you have a pattern of quitting/disconnects. No Halo for you for 24 hours, after you quit, and try to play again. The clock on the penalty would began once you tried to log in again. I would also add a % of dnf’s stat to the carnage report.

12

As an inveterate and unrepentent quitter I can tell you that there are two things which make me quit. They’re more or less the same thing, and neither has anything to do with reqs, rewards, boredom, or even directly with winning or losing.

The first is when matchmaking, having failed to accurately assess my skill, places me in matches against people who are better than me, usually significantly better. Which is not hard to do. “Take it like a man” is an acceptable retort only if it’s one match in ten. That would be what might happen if the system knew how bad I was, but needed to throw me to the wolves once in a while just to get a match going. Sadly, it’s ten out of ten matches, and that’s what happens when the system just simply fails to understand skill at all.

The second is when events take place which either defy explanation, or which can only be attributed to the most outrageous amounts of luck, and yet which keep repeating. Now this is obviously a case of the above noted scenario where the players I’m facing are simply significantly better than me. But in this game, as in life, it all comes down to perception. I’ve had plenty of matches where I’ve died multiple times and every time I said to myself, “recon, you had the coming,” or “Yup, that was fair.” And then there are other matches where each death is not just mysterious or curious or suspect - they just plain feel like cheating. When a guy throws a frag and caroms it off of two different walls in four different directions, clearly defying game physics as well as the fuse timer, and then manages finally to lodge it in the visor of a moving target? And that target is me, in case you didn’t put that one together on your own. Anyway, call it luck, call it skill, call it whatever you want. I have a word for it, but I won’t even bother typing it since it will only be censored.

I’m not saying that highly-skilled players are cheaters. But I am saying that after fifteen years of this game, a lot of what they do looks an awful lot like cheating to an average player. And appearances are everything. And the simple solution is for matchmaking to ensure that players of differing skill levels are appropriately segregated. Halo 5 arena fails miserably at this, and while I don’t play many arena matches, I still try it once in a while just to see if it’s any better than it was. And it never is. And I’m such an average person that I have a hard time imagining that there aren’t a lot of other people who react in exactly the same way.

13

> 2533274840624875;5:
> > 2533274797303698;4:
> > > 2533274800383882;2:
> > > Quitting has been rampant in Halo since the dawn of H2 and XBL. People will keep quitting and there is no one solution to fix this issue. Providing incentive to stay in the game did not work in H3 and Reach.You were penalized a win point for quitting any game in H3 and had a credit multiplayer for X amount of consecutive games finished in Reach. This has been tried before and people quit at a steady pace.
> > >
> > > Really it boils down to if this person is having fun or not. Fun is subjective and it’s impossible to provide fun for everyone.
> >
> >
> > I completely agree that fun is subjective, but that doesn’t mean we should stop exploring to find a better system.
>
>
> you are not going to find a better system then this one or the previous versions. It does not exist, quitters will always exist and there is literally no possible way to prevent them.

False. Batteries deplete into a electric shock when someone quits. Hurts a lot. 343, plz incorporate.

14

Constant Stat Tracking probably makes it a bit worse too since quiting doesn’t affect W/L ratio.

I’d personally just remove stat tracking altogether.

15

I’ve been playing Rocket League on PS4 since the day it came out on PS Plus for free and I can tell you that you’re wrong about the quitters. The quitting rate for people in Rocker League tend to be triple the amount than what I experience in this game. At least!

Also, I don’t understand the complaint about starting with the pistol? Almost every Halo game has a standard medium-long range weapon on spawning or starting a match. The only difference is movement is quicker. I personally love the mobility in this game and wouldn’t change a thing. Also, keep getting into trouble by sprinting into danger? Here’s an idea: don’t sprint everywhere! Learn to use it properly.

We’ve all had bad matches and have been really frustrated with this game. But that’s pretty much any game you play online, especially shooters. Sometimes it just seems like the game is out to get you. Maybe take a break or try a different game mode? There’s plenty of options. Good luck.