If the DC problem is going to be solved, we need to have a legitimate discussion
You’ve seen it everywhere. “Let’s stop DC’s with ______ idea.” Discussion follows for a few posts, but things very quickly devolve into:
“Survivors DC more!” “Killers DC plenty and ruin 4 peoples’ games.” “This punishes people with bad connections!” “You’re salty!” “You’re toxic!” “Git Gud!” “It’s The Spirit’s fault!”
On and on and on. The original idea sinks into oblivion...
So I propose we filter out such comments and only focus on constructive suggestions/discussion. The end goal is to present a workable idea to the devs for consideration.
Here’s how it goes: Read through the following list of questions. If you answer “Yes” to a question, move on to the next. When you hit question that you answer “No” on, you are invited to navigate away and post your thoughts on other DC discussion threads. If you answer “Yes” to every question, welcome! Please post your ideas and provide non-emotional, constructive criticism to other peoples’ ideas.
- Do you believe that DCs are a problem that needs to be addressed?
- Do you believe that the VAST majority of DCs are intentional, as opposed to resulting from bugs or poor connections?
- Do you believe that a solution can be viable even if it is not 100% effective because some people might dodge it? (Consider the “something is better than nothing” mentality.)
- Do you believe that, through civil discussion, we can hammer out an effective solution here on the forum?
If you made it this point, congrats! Your input is welcome!
Comments
Yes.
Yes.
No.
Judging by the devs own opinions on the matter, no.
If you're going to fix the problem, there can be no excuses, no justifications, no "But this or that, so you can't punish people." The biggest issue is that crashes and disconnects do happen because the devs can't seem to make their game stable after all these years. That is a good reason for not implementing something, and maybe there is a way around it to punish people.
This is the first patch I've seen that actually had any sort of forced disconnect, prior to the half a year of infinite loadscreen bugs. They need to fix their ######### so that there is no excuse for it being the games fault, and then punish people.
This is the only game that I have EVER played that does not punish people for leaving. The only games that do not do that are games that have a ranked version or games that have backfill AND have a ranked version. Just because your game is "casual" more than anything (despite not having more than 1 game mode, and it is, technically speaking, RANKED) does not mean you as a dev get to sit there and say that it's "fine" in any aspect. If you're fine with it, then I question your ability as a dev.
@BhSMRT These are absolutely valid concerns. So the question is whether we throw up our hands and wait for the game to be fixed (years, most likely) or try to make a workable solution with the reality that exists.
Unintentional disconnects happen. This is a fact. So how can we discourage intentional ones without punishing the innocent? (Btw, notice I said “discourage”, not “prevent”. There’s gotta be some wiggle room.)
I would say we use statistics to help. How likely is it that someone suffers a legitimate connection loss or bug twice in a 10 match span? How about 3 times?
If punishments start at 3 disconnects in a rolling 10 match span, that should protect the majority of innocent players. 8 matches later, your 1st disconnect no longer counts toward the tally and the punishment ends. (There may be some outliers, but we can’t build a solution around edge cases. If their connection is that bad, they’ve got to take steps to improve their situation.)
If punishments gradually increased as the tally increased, this could be an effective deterrent.
3 DC’s: 5 minute timeout between matches until your 10-match DC tally is less than 3.
4: 5 minute immediate timeout plus 5 minute wait between all matches.
5: barred from joining SWF and 10 minute immediate timeout, plus a 5 minute wait between all matches.
And so on. You get the idea.
On top of this, I would suggest resetting the tally every 1-2 days. If someone truly has a bad connection and they’re working to get new equipment, they’ll have a clean slate from these punishments soon, so they don’t have to deal with slowly clearing off the delays that weren’t their fault.
Dcs happen because people want to have fun with the game and this is problematic on 2 different balancing scales. Killers should get bonuses against SWF either bp/mori depending on the amount and they should diversify/double the offerings for killers while having mori's autoed for swf. I think there should be a countermap offering to just avoid that map, this would prevent rng and offerings from playing such a huge issue in games. Gens/chases and secondary objectives need more rewarding interaction they are both circular and repetitive or unrewarding and time sinks. Perk diversification needs to be implemented in some way for survivor, because after 3 years of nerfs survivors are running the same meta and like 65% of killer/survivor perks are completely useless or so niche they need other perks to function. Ruin/Gen times needs to be reworked so it's not so essential and has more killer/survivor interaction. I think if survivor had more depth and interaction and killers had more passive power levers it would fix most of the game's issues. Map spawns need fixing too, I don't think survivors should ever spawn near a gen or objective and one survivor should always spawn in the basement and totems should spawn there randomly.
Some games have consecutive match bonus to encourage people to just tough it out when they know they will probably lose. I think this is a good start, reward people for not quitting.
Of course you still need to punish those that quit excessively, the problem is how do you punish them in a way that is ACTUALLY punishment?
If you do something with bloodpoints/shards, well not every player cares about this so it's not a good solution. Same if you do something with rank/pips.
Can't remove Auric Cells because that's paid and probably illegal somewhere.
Time out penalties just end up pushing people out of the game and end up punishing the wrong people more often than not.
Some sort of jail system where you get matched with other frequent quitters might help. The catch is that lobby wait times are already pretty high so this makes it worse for everyone, not just those jailed.
It's a tricky problem to solve at least when you want to punish DC's. That's why I think the first step should be rewarding NOT DC'ing, as that could help a good amount without causing other issues.
Maybe a better solution is something as simple as greying out the “end match” button after it’s been used 3 times. Reactivate it when Daily Rituals refresh.
Will some people just pull their network cable from the wall? Yup, so it’s not 100% effective. Will other players just tough it out since they have to walk to a different room to access their router? Yup, so it IS effective despite those who circumvent it.
This is what I meant earlier by some improvement is preferable to the current situation. This would reduce, not eliminate DCs. But any reduction is welcome.
Yes
Yes
Maybe
No
4) oh..... so close
Now that dedicated servers are out, there are a lot more options for working with disconnects. One of the ones that devs actually talked about was leaving survivor characters as afk husks in the game that others could still interact with. This would solve the problem of intentional disconnects purely for the sake of screwing over the killer which happens to big a gigantic chunk of them. And it also helps both killers and survivors get bloodpoints by interacting with the character instead of immediately ruining it from the game.
I've always thought the bloodpoint rewards given for disconnects was pretty much a joke. If they can't do the husks, a very easy solution to implement would to be to give every player in the game 2000 bloodpoints in each category per disconnecting player unless they were grouped with them in a premade and increase survivor repair speed by 33% for each disconnected survivor. This again takes away the incentive to intentionally disconnect and takes away some of the annoyance of disconnects.
As far as the punishment system goes, obviously the increased wait time for anybody who has disconnected is a decent idea. Any truly accidental disconnects or people that had to leave for emergencies clearly need time to sort things out so this won't affect them as much as players who just ruin others games selfishly and shouldn't be disconnecting. The ban system is currently so weak, I would be incredibly surprised if anybody got accidently banned for too much disconnecting. Now that they have dedicated servers, they can actually program the system to detect if a disconnect happened right after an event like a down, totem getting cleased, getting grabbed, flashlight saves, or something along those lines and increase progress towards bans for those disconnects cause those are the signs of intentional disconnects a computer can recognize.