There MUST be a stat for DC'ers

Wouldn't it be simpler to just let disconnecting hurt records, then?

But the disconnector hurts everyone else on the team, because the ai tends to be worse than a human player.

There are lots of threads about this issue, but about this issue i have a diferent not such straight view.

I understand the problem, and why ppl complaint about leavers, but only to a certain extent.

Consider the following examples:

1) a player(s) looking for games to raise his score, enters a game and on the other team someone leave after being killed the first time. That players team get weaker with a AI playing for him, no doubt. That player should get his score afected, no doubt about that also. This is the comon case ppl complaint about and makes sense.

2) some friends, imagine 4 guys, want to do tests about strategies with diferent demigods, builds and items. They will for sure create and leave several games without finishing a single one. Should any of these players be penalized? I dont think so.

3) a "casual" players finishes his dinner around 22h and wants to have some fun, play a bit, finds a game 4x4 and enters. No problem there, maybe the game will end in about 1h:30m that will make 23h30m when it finishes time to go to bed. But imagine that his team is losing, considerably but being able to pospone defeat for an extra hour, the dude needs to go to bed to get up soon in the morning to go to work and the only thing he wants, since he sees no chance of winning, is to forfeit the game (+1 loss) and go to bed. In his mind the game is finished and there is no point in delaying the inevitable. Why should he be marked as leaver, he admits defeat and forfeits... (chess permits forfeit for instance)

I'm just saying that not everyone is a ragequiter. Some times there is no point in playing a game till the end, its a waste of time or a e-peen demo for the winning team.

If some of you played WC3 a LOT, WC3 TFT and NOT DotA, after game number 2000 you know when you are going to lose and forfeiting at that point was a "decent" thing to do. Specially if you were in a Blizzard tournament. Some times you would play against a turtler, someone that knows he is going to lose but delays it as much as he can and you would lose precious time, time that you needed to complete more games to be elegible to the next tournament phase. And that dude just ruined your streak because he didnt leave "when he lost", no time for more games, not enough games to continue IN tournament.

No one likes ragequiters, specially in a mixed team of people that dont know each other and the quiter just nailed a big LOSE on your team. But there should be ways to quit/ forfeit/ admit defeat/ smth.

Disconnections are being recorded, but at the moment I don't believe they adversely affect the stats.  However, I am also in the mindset that if you quit, you should be punished, so I'm trying to push disconnects to have negative effects on stats.

Bara

This should not happen without a surrender or forfeit option period.

In Demigod, there were a few times that it was obvious that I lost the game.  I just sat at the healing crystal and alt-tab out to surf the internet.  Since it's beta, I stayed in the game to be nice.   If this was after release day with thousands of players, I would have quit right away and look for the next game.

Disconnect - dishonourable loss, should incur punishment.  (Right now I'm seeing disconnects counted that weren't actually player disconnects.  If DCs can't be reliably counted then they shouldn't make it into statistics, but I assume this is a Beta thing)

Forfeit/Surrender - honourable loss, should be recorded as honourable loss.  Forfeit/Surrender option should be in release candidate, imo

Test games should be an allowable mode where no stats are recorded regardless of win/loss/DC.   

How does this sound?

I agree that should be smth around that line of thought.

Just carefull on the disconnect thing, we may punish someone that unplugs his cable on purpose to save his stats and he deserved it, but disconnects happen to people who didnt want to disconnect. Maybe establishing a margin of disconnect/month or smth, to allow for those "random" disconnects connection failures that one cannot predict.

As far as I am concerned, I think all stats should show. 

There should be a surrender vote...  and if no one votes to surrender and you quit it should be noted in your stats as "dishonerable surrender" or something...  If your computer dissconnects then you shoud have a stat on DC. 

Regular gamers like myself will know that not everyone will have a perfect record and will allow a couple of DC's to pass, but if you have a third of your games resulting in DC in your stats and you enter my hosted game....  I WILL KICK YOU... 

Here is an example:

I've been playing BFME2 since they beta'd the game 3 years ago...  I've gotten pretty good at the game and when I play I would like to play against someone who is close to my playing skill.  The thing is that I generaly look to stats to get a good game going, I let some people stay in the game who look good on the outside then I start up the game....   What do you know, after the first 5 min. the DC screen pops up.  He def knows that he had lost.  This is not a once and a while thing for competitive RTS, trust me!  If you do not have a stat showing this, than it will ruin the online community.

If you want to test out different builds than make a new profile like "testaccount" or something.  Just because you are learning the game, all of us who play competitively don't have to suffer.

PEOPLE WILL FIND CHEAP WAYS TO MAKE IT ON THE LEADERBOARD!

How do you differentiate a surrender from a D/C?  Can you only surrender after a certain time period, or have be losing by X amount?  My point being that a leaver is going to take the easiest way out (surrendering as opposed D/Cing assuming D/Cing is punished) unless there are limitations.

Yeah...  there should be limitations for sure...  I just cant stand people on my team leaving me to get the loss.  Maybe if the person who surrenders get's the loss and those who are left high and dry don't.  There just has to be harsh treatment to those who don't see the game to the end.  And if you are a consistant DC'er then your account can be reported and banned from ruining everyones exsperience. 

We are talking about asending to a god?  Right?  There should be no mercy to those who cheat or find the easy way out of a situation.

The problem is WC3 is very 1v1 oriented, when you quit the game is over.  In Demigod if you quit, your team now has to fight a man down.  If the entire team conceeds at once, fine.  However, rage quitting will become an issue.  It near ruins left 4 dead.

Personally, I feel the best way to encourage people to finish games is to lay out rewards at the end (basically favour points) which they lose if they quit.  Just extend the rewards a player gets at the end (for example maybe they get titles on their account and account levels for gathering favor points, nothing that changes gameplay, but something that feels like a status symbol.)

High levels of disconnects should start to ding your stats in other ways (maybe start losing wins or tacking on extra losses.)

Here is an example that happened to me in another game....  3v3 me and another were short on a clan member and our stats were really good...  We decided to play another clan which had 3 members online, who we have beat many times...  so we took on a third who we didn't know...  long story short, it was one of there friends on a "smurf" account and purposely made hard for us to compete and DC'ed towards the end.  This act hurt our record and they escaped without any recourse...  This crap ruins any game...  and causes everyone to take advantage the same way... 

DC'ers should be marked with a "scarlete letter" so to speak and they will eventually be kicked from every game that they try and enter.  Lets teach those jokers a lesson.

DC's happen, probably intentional for the most part, but if you give the benefit of the doubt to the player (maybe they're having internet or computer trouble, maybe they have a stint where they HAVE to leave etc.) the DC count should be reset at a set interval, every month or three. I don't think it's wise, for a developer/publishers, to discourage someone from playing their game by keeping a persistant record of this infraction.

EDIT: I do agree with OP that there should be a stat for DC's

A million times they searched for an answer. A million times they failed.

Nothing will stop Dc'ers in any game. Just give 'em minus points and show a % of how many games they've left. But you cant erease stupidity out of humanity.

@Warskullx

If i want to bullshit people, why would i care about titles and cosmetic changes? Those things are not that important to alot of people who actually play games - they're nice to have, but thats it. Minus points on the score are the only thing you  can do. You can't even punish them to hard, else you'll hit those poor guys who have bad internet connection or just a random badluck disconnect.

That's what we need Aspartem....  Give us the information and let us gamers weed them out.

You vastly underestimate the hold of shinies on people.  Look at gamerscore with x-box live.  It means nothing, it is just a number.  Yet people really buy into it and want to make their gamer scores go up.

Absolutely not! There are a number of exploits throughout various games that have allowed players to force others to drop from the game. The result is that the player who was forced out of the game will suffer a penalty, when it clearly wasn't their fault.

I would like a surrender option to leave games that I've lost, but penalizing players for a d/c usually winds up favoring the dishonourable players. I'd rather allow people to disconnect excessively (it will be apparent who d/c's to avoid a loss) than have someone use a drophack against me; thus forcing a loss on my record.

How about this:

Voting! Basically, when someone drops from a game the team can vote to penalize the player that dropped from the game. The player will be penalized only if majority vote decides for punishment.

OR:

Players can either    or  allies at the end of a match. A disconnector will likely get t-down from their allies. This means that players with a low score are not desirable allies. Since you have to play a match for to recieve ratings it makes a little more difficult to abuse.

I won't speak for everyone here but ideally when I'm in the lobby for a game I want to find out whether someone is a chronic disconnector.  

The problem with people who don't finish games is that they're harming the other players with them.  

Dealing with disconnecting is something that you'll find we consider a big deal.  In June we're going to be releasing something that does more advanced match making than what we have today that will really take disconnecting into account at a level far beyond what we're doing at launch.

I hope before that patch goes live there is a way to surrender (as a team) before then (or at least in that patch).  Being forced to sit through another 30 minutes of slaughter when everyone on both teams knows you have already lost but you can't disconnect because a DC is worse than a loss... sucks.

Surrender option FTW

I agree that disconnecting should hurt your record.

I also think, however (and I'm not sure how this could be accomplished) that somebody who has a lot of disconnects should have the ability to "rehabilitate" their account and their record.

I say this because in the past I've played RTS while having a really terrible and unreliable internet connection, and my record and rating were terrible for a long while because of all the disconnects I got even after my connection was fixed and I started winning consistently. 

The problem with punishing people with disconnects is always distinguishing between the people who are victims of terrible ISPs / internet connections and those who intentionally disconnect to avoid losses or to simply annoy other players.