Why is there a penalty for dc?

Your teammates are punished when you dc from a match hence the penalty. The bot is there to help circumvent that a little versus in the past it was instantly now a 3v1.

The DC system in DBD is one of the most terrible I've seen.

Imo it's a perfect example of theory that doesn't hold in practice. It's crazy how many obvious flaws this system that have still not been patched after years. And some people still naively defend it thinking it disincentivizes giving up early, when giving up on hook has never been as high…

The thing is, griefers who really want to DC easily circumvent the penalty system. They can give up on hook or going AFK, both heavily penalize the team as they won't even get a bot.

In contrast, someone who has actual connection problems will take the full penalty, even though they'll leave much later in the match, and give a bot, hence being a lot less detrimental. Contrarily to one might believe, the penalty system is quite severe, even though the first penalty is only a minute, it only fades out after 24h which means in reality you can DC at most once per 24h, which is really not lenient if you play a lot, you will eventully get the 15 min from time to time. Meanwhile again, griefers can give up on hook with no penalty, then DC at the end of the day, they can do that every day and if they play only 1-2 hours per day, they'll never hit the penalty.

Another "hilarious" consequence of this system was when big streamers like Otzdarva got held hostage for entire hours by hackers, yet they couldn't leave the game or they would get an even longer DC penalty. Once again, this penalty never works in practice. It seems to only punish normal players.

I used to complain a lot about this system but just like so many things in this game I simply gave up on logic and decided to not care. I have stable connection so whatever, I'm not affected.

Or at least I thought I was not affected, until now. Because apparently we can't have functioning servers for Christmas, so now half the games start with 300 ms ping for everyone, and I can't even DC out of these matches as the killer. So I waste 10 minutes in a match where everyone only point to hooks, begging for me to kill them because they don't want to play either, yet nobody can leave the match.

tl;dr: REMOVE THIS STUPID PENALTY AT LEAST UNTIL THE SERVER ARE FIXED PLS.

Agreed with everything for the most part but I feel removing it isn't the right call. At least not right away.

I will say this though - the game is in a better state now even with bots that I'd rather just have people DC than suicide on hook. We have bots now and yes as a survivor my POV is I'd rather have a bot than someone who decided to kill theirself to avoid penalty. Am I going to kill a bot easier than a human in matchmaking? Absolutely. But at least I have to deal with a player as opposed to that player who opt'd out and now I don't have to worry about either.

Self unhooks without perks or offerings shouldn't be a thing either. Punishing survivors or players in general is just such a stupid call at this point in the games life. BHVR has such arbitrary unspoken rules that can get a player banned yet these rare scenarios can just be avoided if they actually bother fixing the game. All the obvious solutions do not affect normal players.

There is literally a mass server problem right now. Have you tried playing? During evenings half the matches have 300+ ms, then crash + "dedicated server is not responding".