Since we seem to have a nightmare epidemic of people being intimidated by the spectre of actual competition in their never-ending drive to boost their KD rating, I propose the following deterrent measure.

First time you leave battle in a day: no penalty. this is to account for the fact that some people DC and some squads legit lose a member every so often.

Second offense: -30 kills from your weekly/monthly/lifetime KDR ratings.
Third Offense: -50 from your weekly/monthly/lifetime KDR ratings.
Fourth offense: -70 from your weekly/monthly/lifetime KDR ratings.

and so on and so forth.

Fight like the rest of us.

The game is becoming ******** because people won't stay and fight at all.

Health of the game FIRST, New Eden is SECOND.

New Eden doesn't mean "perfectly mechanically identical to EVE."

Changing mechanics and conventions to make sense in infantry operations is not "Pushing new eden to the back"

It's not using naval warfare as a baseline example how infantry and ground vehicles should operate.

the spirit of new eden is to kill anyone that enter null sec and most of the time even those in low and high sec, so lets just terminate their clones so they have to start all over or they lose sp unless they buy insurance for their clones

fair enough? that's how it works is it not?

With the changes to the squad sizes in pubs, Squad stomping should be reduced. It's also much easier for the team balancing logic to fill 2 sides comprising of 4 groups of 4 rather than 2 groups of 6 and a few randoms.

Also, not everyone has a massive friends list and can easily fill a squad of 6. So currently squad creation isn't very high, further compounding the problem and contributing to the OP'ness of a 6 man squad running riot in Pub matches. Hopefully we'll see a rise in squad creation and participation of such squads in Pubs.

For persistent quitters, the problem with punitive action against them (as much as I want their precious epeen KDR to get knackered for quitting all the time) is that is can penalise those that have legitimate reason to leave a game. So its logical to assume that if they have a legitimate reason to leave a game, it's unlikely they'll be trying to get into another one straight away.

One idea that I've heard mentioned and I've asked the team to look at the technical feasibility of doing this, is to have anyone leaving a battle be flagged for a set time, say 10 minutes, so while flagged they will be put back into the same match they've left. They are contractually obliged to fight after all. If that match gets filled while they are being unsporting then they have to wait in the queue till the flag timer is completed. They'll be free to join another queue, say FW, but for the queue they just quit from, its fight the battle you were contracted for or wait till that battle is resolved.

Now my way of thinking is that this would be a very New Eden way of addressing the problem. Your choices will have consequences.