sprockitz wrote: ↑06 August 2019, 03:08
To me at the very least they shouldn't be computing Elo as if you've tied with all the other players besides the quitter. Ignore the ties and only distribute points gained against the loser.
While I agree with your reply in general, one should consider the "gaming ELO" folks before implementing such a mechanic. Suddenly, for -every- player on the table, such a reward system would encourage kicking good players as fast as possible once they time out. I cannot imagine that will lead to a more pleasant experience overall. Much like in real life, you'd rather try to avoid someone standing up from the table and leaving the others hanging, so you try to find ways to ensure everyone is sufficiently okay with whatever you choose to do about some changed circumstances.
So instead of curing symptoms of the underlying issue (something undesirable happens when a player rage-quits a table), I'd be in favor of trying to approach the issue itself: quitting is too easy, particulary out of frustration for the game(s) prompting this kind of thread from time to time. So perhaps introduce harsher penalties that don't just affect your reputation and generally steer players towards finishing games properly – here's a few ideas off the top of my head, not having put much deliberation into any of them:
- Block people from opening or joining a table of this particular game for a period of time
- Hold a vote on the abandoned table whether the remaining players feel like the quitting was accidental or on purpose and punish deliberate quitting differently from the timeouts that inevitably will happen from time to time with online play
- Introduce a period of time during which, if player B expelled player A for time reasons, the other players can instead choose to extend the clock of player A after a voting (this mostly matters for turn-based)
- Invent a new trophy for a streak of X games without exceeding the time limit that you lose once you quit (any table, not just the trophy for that one game) to help players with matchmaking who are looking for well-behaved players
- Only grant players a limited amount of expel actions per week / month / playing activity, so that you must invest a resource of your own to prematurely end games. Alternatively, have expelling players slightly over time come with a karma hit on its own. This is mostly to avoid team-game quitting where everyone might still be playing, but one side feels like they're losing and is looking for an easy way out. Once it's clear the inactive player won't return (e.g. max. thinking time has gone by twice) the expelling should become free.
For the admittedly few games where the intermediate scores can indicate possible final placement: maybe allow throwing non-2p-games in the same way you can concede 2p games after 50% progression, which would hopefully at least be better than quitting the entire table. The conceding player would always come in last no matter their current score, so that also has potential to be gamed, but if the table has to vote between "abandon game and get -some- realistic result" and "results neutralized, have an empty win", some like the thread opener might try to convince the rest that the game was meaningful and the current scores reflect a likely outcome to some degree.
