Yes, you are hurting your team. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Monday, August 24, 2015, 22:09 (3476 days ago) @ dogcow

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.

I have trouble swallowing this. Poor connections will DC fairly randomly, win, lose, or draw. Poor sports will not DC if they're winning. Seems pretty simple to me. Now, if your sample size is only one DC, then yes, there is no way to tell, but you can develop a profile over a period of time.

True enough. I think that, at least at the time I was working in games (about 10 years ago), bandwidth was an issue, and the game's servers didn't actually keep track if the goings-on during matches beyond who the host was and which players were connected to him. It seems, in retrospect, pretty easy to send some info like the score along with the "this guy disconnected" signal, and maybe that was done (I'm really not sure), but I don't believe we were using player connection metrics in order to determine if disconnects followed patterns or not. I know we talked a *lot* about how hard it was to know if a disconnect was intentional or not, and the impression I was left with was that they just didn't have a good measure of that.

The gist of it is that poor connections (in almost every FPS I've ever played with the exception of Destiny) hurt the ability of that player to do well, which means that player's team suffers as a result of his poor connection and he's more likely to be on a losing team when he eventually drops, even if he didn't drop on purpose. That, and the fact that if you start banning people just for having a bad connection, you're going to get a lot of angry calls to customer service, and a few returned games, and both of those things get expensive. So without pretty close to absolute certainty, any method of detection was deemed inadequate.