How should Ian and co. handle ranked game disconnections in 2010?

[MS Hank]

Written by Hank



It's happened to all of us.

We'll be up by 14 with 3 minutes left in the second quarter and we catch our opponent blitzing leaving a 1on1 matchup on the the outside.

You throw it up and your WR gracefully glides underneath the pass for a perfect 6... just as you cross the goalline, the game freezes for 5 seconds.

Here we go again.
__________________________________________________ __________

In what is the most bittersweet of all victories one can gain in an online match, the opponent pulling the plug is by far the most annoying.

When an opponent quits the game, we have 3 options:
1. Continue Game vs. CPU
2. Quit and Count Game
3. Quit and Don't Count Game

Let's define what each of these mean.

1. Continue Game vs. CPU - Quite simply this means that you finish the game you started against your human opponent with the in-game CPU AI.

2. Quit and Count Game - You quit the game and get credit for everything you did up to this point which means partial stats and partial ranking points. Do you ever get any partial ranking points though? Nah...

3. Quit and Don't Count Game - All your hard work up to this point is essentially thrown away.


Now that we know what is done now, what can be done to make it a better process?

1. How about the option to SuperSim the rest of the game. This would at least allow players involved in a blowout of the opponent a chance to finish out the game without having to sit through each agonizing cutscene vs. a CPU opponent.

2. Add fractions to users' records. For example if a player quits at halftime and is down by 10 or more, their opponent will get a .5 added to their win column. This would be a good way to still reward players that want to play the game against a human opponent, while still keeping leaderboard cheats at bay.

3. Incorporate a new column into the online record: Wins - Losses - Neutral. The neutral column would only be used when a game disconnects when a user is leading a game. These would most certainly be games that were unintentional disconnects as the player was leading so that player should not get a loss.

4. Give every person that DCs while down by 14 points or more 2 losses. 99% of the disconnects from players that are down by 2 or more scores are by plug pullers whether they admit it or not. Just punish those players so they think twice about doing it again. Of course, some innocents may be caught in the middle of this, but the vast majority of these DCs are due to poor sportsmanship.

How you would change the system to make it more friendly to the legit players out there?

Original Topic Here

[Tubaker]

The ability to grant mercy to the CPU and they have to accept it .. ive been saying this forever ..

[dbgameover]

if they can get all the glitches out they should just give you a win if your up by 2 scores in first half in second half give you the win if up by 1 score if down then no one gets tha win i think thats fair

[MS Hank]

It would be great if we could use those 2 ideas, but the cheaters would tear the leaderboard apart...

[ktulu22]

The player that loses connection should get the loss. 99% of the time a connection is lost it is caused by intentional plug pulling.

[Cusefan]

Quote: Originally Posted by Tubaker

The ability to grant mercy to the CPU and they have to accept it .. ive been saying this forever ..

Second that, That would literally solve the Quitting issue 100%

[alliance4g63]

Any disconnect should be an automatic loss. Or at the very least, count as a disconnect. This issue should have been resolved ages ago.

Disconnects happen unintentionally but with my decent cable connection it is insanely rare. So I don't mind if I have a few blemishes on my record because of the random day my power flickers.

[Nintari]

This one's simple. If someone drops out, you win and you win instantly. There's ZERO point in making me play 3 quarters against the computer to pick up a win.

Also, there should be punishment. After 5 quits, you're banned via your system from Madden for a week. 10 quits, a month...any more then that and you're banned until the next game comes out.