A more nuanced penalty system
I'm a big fan of DC penalties.
I'm not a big fan of DC penalties that penalize me when your server is the cause for disconnect. I know I've been disconnected three times, and punished each time. I've never DC'd my way out of a game, and don't plan to. So being punished while being a "good" player feels pretty terrible.
If you're going to do a DC penalty system, you need to have a network that can tell the difference between when it fails and when the player pulls bad behavior. Otherwise you're going to get more resentful people and we'll be forever in this loop of having DC penalties, then not, then having them again.
It needs to be improved.
Comments
Yeah from what I've seen from various moderator posts, their current system cannot tell the difference between a "legitimate" DC (though you could theoretically always disconnect your PC from the internet to trigger a DC) and somebody just leaving the game. The issue comes from the fact that regardless of what's causing you to DC (actually losing connection or leaving the game), the effect on the other players is the same. As such, it kind of makes sense to punish it the same regardless.
However, I do personally think you should get a smaller penalty for "legitimate" DCs, or potentially have them increase the penalty less. I don't have 100% stable internet so I usually lose connection in the middle of a match once or twice a day, and I'm worried I'm going to end up with like hour long matchmaking bans because of it.
There will always be some collateral damage, as games that have tried to treat seemingly legitimate connection/server issues differently to obviously intentional quitting has proven one thing: People will disconnect their internet to quit "for free" if they can. Either with the old school cord pull or less hardware-y methods like just disconnecting their gaming platform in its network settings until they're dropped from the game.
I don't think I've ever seen a game actually be able to tell the difference between genuine connection errors and intentional disconnects. The most popular method to "soften" the collateral damage seems to be to give players the ability to rejoin matches, which is in theory a possibility if a DC husk system was implemented. But DBD matches generally last for a shorter period of time than something like an Overwatch, CSGO or MOBA match just to name some examples.
That and escalating and non-extreme penalties of course. There's a reason most games give people relatively short bans to begin with, to make sure people with genuine connection issues or unexpected "I gotta go" moments don't get screwed too hard.