Yes, you are hurting your team. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Monday, August 24, 2015, 21:37 (3476 days ago) @ slycrel

I expect Bungie has been down this (and other) paths, and ultimately doing nothing, allows the team with people not leaving to have a good time, and an unfair advantage -- there's not much they can do anyway to add fun in this situation to one side without taking away fun from the other.

The question of what to do about disconnects mid-game was the single most frustrating problem for us to deal with back when I was QA lead on some FPS games. There are basically three ways someone can get disconnected:

1) Accidental disconnect.
2) Get kicked.
3) Intentional disconnect (or quit/exit from match).

There is no way to detect the difference between an accidental disconnect and an intentional one, which is why the option to leave a match is always included in games (to encourage players to use a method whereby the developers can gather data).

The method currently viewed as "best" by most devs I'm familiar with is to have a matchmaking ranking based on how frequently a player disconnects. You then match players to other players who are likely to behave in a similar fashion. This is not ideal.

First, it creates three distinct pools of players: Those who never disconnect, those who sometimes disconnect, and those who frequently disconnect. You've now limited your matchmaking options by 1/3 for any given player.

Second, this method completely falls apart when two friends from different player pools are in a party together. Do you match to only other teams with similar ratings etc? It becomes exponentially more complicated the more players you have in a single party.

Third, because you can't distinguish between poor connections and poor sports, you often get a larger percentage of players who mean well but have bad connections all in the same game, which just means the multiplayer experience for those players is going to suck major balls with people joining and dropping all over the place and they may as well quit because they'll never finish a match and it's because you've only matched them with other unstable connections.

So yeah, I've spent at least 100 hours in meetings with people trying to solve this particular problem and what we landed on is that the current (above) "solution" is still the best option, and no one is happy with it.

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Xbox Live actually has an under the hood matching system based on player feedback, so players who routinely get crappy feedback will be matched with other crappy feedback players. I think that's potentially better, but it's also prone to abuse since you can just give crap feedback on everyone if you want (though apparently it checks for this sort of behavior as well). I'm not sure how I feel about it, and I'm also not sure if it does anything at all since I've not noticed anything like "hey, wow, there's no cheaters in this game and haven't been for months." Of course, I have noticed WAY more cheaters on the PS4 than on the Xbone, but that's also totally different games, so who can say if the feedback matchmaking is the reason for that or not?

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I have no idea if Sony does anything with the player feedback you send. Bungie, I know, adds people who get reported to some kind of list or something, presumably to check and see if they're really cheating and to eventually ban them when the annual purge comes around (note to Bungie: Please increase the frequency of your ban passes to at least monthly).