Larkson Crazy Eye wrote:Eh I can't say with how the game is right now the penalty would fly. It's bad enough trying to get into a match right now. Forcing people to stay in the match won't solve any problems, it would just make more people camp in the MCC or stay in the redline because they are forced to stay but gave up. Some times their perfectly valid reasons too. Join a match in progress, why should you stick around for the rest of the 5-10 min of the match when the enemy team is spawn camping the redzone? Just to feed the KDR of the other team?
It's also not uncommon to push the objective, fight a bit and die and find out just how few people your team has when you get to see the numbers on the deployment screen. Wasting your time in a 3 vs 12 or worse match is no fun. People who don't leave those extremely unbalanced matches usually just sit in the red line and snipe anyways. It's about all you can do against those odds other than die horribly.
Plus you have to consider the player base is already shrinking and matchmaking can take forever as it is if you pick anything but public Dom matches. FW can be a joke for certain factions at various times of day and your chances of getting into a Skirm, Aqu and Ambush battle are almost non existent at times. If you applied the most obvious penalty most games would have for leaving, aka unable to deploy to another battle for some timed penalty it would drive people away.
It's not people leaving battle that is causing the problem. It's the fact the player base is so small that not only are matches half empty most of the time with 10-12 people to a team instead of a full 16, but there is rarely any players available to fill in partial teams. Outside of the first minutes of a match rarely do you see any one join a battle in progress. Claiming that they should stick around and take up space is stupid. I would rather people leave than stay and not contribute in any meaningful way.
There is already a penalty for leaving battle btw if you think about it. First off you get no rewards at all. No isk, no SP and none of your kills, hacks, etc seem to count towards your daily missions if you don't complete the battle you were in. In most cases you also wasted a good chunk of your time already just trying to get into battle and deploy before you left, never mind the time you spend in battle before leaving.
Honestly we need the carrot not the stick here. Give people a reason to want to play the game, not try and force them to play it.