Matchmaking Ban for Internet Stutter Disconnect?
So picture this:
You're doing well as Killer. Three kills, last person injured, mid-chase. You hit them, but then they up and start running place. So you hit them again. They get up and start running in place. After ten seconds of this, you're booted to the post-game screen and told "Disconnected from host".
And then,
You're slapped with a five minute matchmaking ban.
Emotional argument aside,
I think it's a little silly to punish players who are disconnected forcefully in the same way you punish players who go "Ew, a killer I don't like, time to screw my team over just so I don't have to deal with a minor inconvenience for a few minutes!".
And I've heard the argument of "Well, the game doesn't know whether it's your internet disconnecting you, or a manual disconnect", but it clearly does if it can tell me why I disconnected, makes no sense to me why it wouldn't be able to tell itself why I disconnected. And it's a little far beyond my understanding why, not only, does a player have to spend around upwards of $140 USD just to have the full game's content after the $20 upfront, but that it also befalls the player to have enough money to move somewhere with pristine connection, just to be on the same playing field as any other given player in terms of how often they'll be allowed to play the game.
I mean, maybe they're worried about players getting so angry that they walk away from their setup and physically unplug their modem just to evade a matchmaking ban (even though it'd probably take five minutes for it to start back up fully after plugged back in), and in that case, fair enough I suppose, but aside from that extreme, I really don't understand it.
Anybody able to enlighten me to any of the reasoning behind it? Anybody agree or disagree on the validity (or lack thereof) regarding matchmaking bans for disconnects out of the player's control? Perhaps a different form of punishment may be necessary or thought up?
I'm open to hearing any and all perspectives on this, go ham.
Comments
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The server doesn't know why you disconnected. All it knows is that it was receiving packets, and then it wasn't. Furthermore, not only not all modems take five minutes to reset (mine can easily reset in a matter of thirty seconds), but you don't need to kill the modem, you can simply remove the ethernet cable out.
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Well, surely there'd be some way for the server to be able to tell why you disconnected? Or at least, make an estimation.
i.e., was the player giving movement input when they disconnected? Did they open the escape menu before the disconnect took place? Was the "abandon match" button pressed before they disconnected?
Kinda feels like it wouldn't be rocket science for such a thing to be in place, though granted, I have no idea what the code end of things looks like, and I, frankly, dread to.
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If you're making an explicit request to be disconnected from the server, then yes, of course the server knows about that. But of course we don't really care about the people who are being straightforward, we're concerned with those who would try to cheat it. There's no reliable way for the server to tell what happened when you disconnect. All it knows is that the data you're supposed to have sent hasn't arrived. Imagine your job is, every day, to drop a little paper boat in a river. There's somebody near the sea who checks that the paper boat arrives safely. If one day the paper boat didn't arrive, how could they tell what happened? Did you forget? Did you feel ill and physically couldn't send the boat? Did you actually send the boat, but it got stuck in a rock? Was it splashed away by a fish or bird? There'd be no feasible way for them to tell whether you were negligent or if something happened to the boat.
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good example of random disconnects
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There is literally not a way.
Imagine it like a phone call, and then silence. You have no way of knowing if the call dropped, or they dropped dead, or if there was an emergency and they had to put the phone down, or if there was an accidental hang up, etc. All that you know is that the transmission stopped.
Long story short: Internet problems suck, but no they should not remove the penalty. If anything I think it's too lenient.
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We don't care about the people being straightforward? What's the point in a matchmaking ban at all at that point? Literally just to catch out dirty dirty ethernet-unplugging match dodgers and people who are already getting punished by their ISP merely for existing in an unoptimal space?
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Since there's no way to discriminate between people who disconnect of their own volition and those who don't (when disconnecting by means other than the "DISCONNECT" button), matchmaking bans are applied uniformly, but if we lived in a world where it was somewhat possible to do, then of course you'd have a very easy time punishing the people who are like "I quit!". It'd be like sending to prison the people who go to the police station to confess... way easier than catching those who run away.
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And would simply losing MMR grade progression (or not gaining it from that match to begin with) not be sufficient enough? Do we have to bar players from experiencing the game at all? For players who are sweaty enough to DC just because they made one wrong move or were put against a killer they don't like, or on a map they don't like, that'd, at least in theory, be enough to discourage them from up and disappearing at the slightest provocation, and for people like me, with occasionally trash internet, it would make things completely outside of your control a lot less impactful than "Oh damn, my internet stuttered, guess I'm unable to simply walk it off and continue attempting to progress, thanks video game". Why even give players the option to DC in the first place in that case, so that it's ONLY connection fluctuations and the odd ethernet-cable-unplug to account for?
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There's an option to disconnect because no self-respecting piece of software would ever ship without providing a way to sever connection with the server. As for the punishment, making it simply a matter of MMR would make it extremely rife for abuse. "Sweats" who care about their MMR don't disconnect for no reason. People who disconnect are people who think they're wasting their time. The thing is, feeling like you're wasting your time because you're playing against a killer you don't like/you don't feel like you can beat/because you're on a map that's got bad rng/whatever other reason is subjective. Leaving your teammates stuck in a likely unwinnable 3v1 match is objective fact. Because of this, the game needs to find a way to discourage such behaviour. Furthermore, if all it did was make you lose MMR, it would make smurfing extremely easy. You could tank your rating and get to bullying lower rate players in less than 30 minutes, probably.
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So no possible better solution exists than "You no play game now"? You could eat out of their bloodpoint pool, make it go into the negatives if need be, you could have it cost them iridescent shards, maybe get those things' worth up. I feel like the matchmaking ban, whether for willful DCing or internet stutters, is a bit of a caveman solution. As SonicOffline put it up there, it may even be too lenient, on top of just being an annoying inconvenience that makes the experience of being suddenly booted from a match you may or may not be winning that much more subtly infuriating. Is my head entirely on backwards here, or does the matchmaking ban feel lacking?
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Currency-based punishments are ineffective because they're either too small or too large. If the bloodpoint/shard penalty doesn't grow quickly enough, then you're effectively not being punished for throwing the game. If it grows too quickly, you could potentially be punished so much it'd discourage you from playing completely. Imagine being multiple million bloodpoints in the red knowing you'll have to grind for hours just for a chance to get back to actually progressing. Or, if you don't care about progression for one reason or another, you could simply make your bloodpoint/shard debt grow indefinitely without really being impeded from ruining other people's games whenever you want.
The truth is that, when it comes to playing a game, wanting to play the game is the only assumption you can really make about the player (and even then, knowing DbD players, that wouldn't be correct a lot of the time), thus preventing them from playing when they want to play is the only real punishment you can dish out.
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When you find a way to apply a DC penalty to only the people who yank out their ethernet cables, let us know.
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Gee, it's reductive, it's uninformative, it's snarky, and it didn't even make me laugh. Thanks, Tag!
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Fair enough then, when you put it like that, it starts to make a lot more sense. Thank you.
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I reached out to customer service when this was happening to me during the event. Their responses were copy & paste. I did everything they suggested before they even suggested it. They marked the issue as closed and it kept happening. I replied that it keeps happening and I got another copy & paste response. Do a lot of people disconnect from the servers like this? I figured it was due to the event, but it kept happening after the event, for me. It never happened to me before the event. If it has, it was years ago.
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I'm curious as to how common this type of disconnect is for players? Its very frustrating when it happens.
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I'm not sure as to the statistical norm of it as a flat number, however, speaking personally, it doesn't happen TOO too much, just seemingly only when I don't want it to happen. Likely some negativity bias thing going on there, but I distinctly remember the last times it happened were on Coldwind, against a Huntress, and on Lery's and MacMillan, both with me playing as Dredge. Likely isn't relevant to anything, but that's all the information I can really provide in terms of my experience with it.
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What i provided to customer service included so much info. Down to the costumes. I was surprised to get copy & paste responses. I thought there might be a bug or something.
It would be nice to see statistical data on this disconnect issue.
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It's the truth, though.
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