Destiny 2 Still Needs to Get Serious About Punishing Rage Quitters

Destiny 2 recently had an update that implemented quitter protection for Trials matches that start with missing players. While we will cover that more in a bit, Bungie still needs to address its PvP quitter issue.

So, in the game’s recent 7.2.5.3 update, quitter protection was implemented for Trials at the start of the match. What this means exactly is that if you have a missing member or two at the start of the match, you will be allowed to quit and matchmake again without incurring the normal penalty for quitting a Trials match. This is fantastic news for all those players who suffered and still do suffer from a connection error named after a particular animal.

However, this update is only for Trials of Osiris and does not stop quitters from leaving matches early. Just in my experience alone with lots of Control and Competitive playtime, this is still a rampant issue. One that would be fixed, if players were properly incentivized to stay in the match until the end or punished more severely for leaving a match early.

Nothing is more demoralizing to be PvP-ing in the Crucible and are winning, until about halfway through. When suddenly, you or your team starts doing poorly, losing some one-on-one engagements and slowly watching the enemy team’s score pull away from ours. So, of course, your teammates start to leave, and now you’re losing almost every gunfight. The act of leaving a match before it’s over ruins it for everyone else. So, let’s fix that and show Bungie some things they could try to accomplish that.

Now, it’s important that Bungie do their best to try and differentiate innocent connection loss and rage quitting. I’m not entirely sure how they would go upon doing that, but it would certainly help if Bungie were to implement harsher penalties for quitting matches early. I used to play a lot of League of Legends, and I found their leaver penalties quite effective.

So with that in mind, harsher penalties like quickly escalating tiers of punishment. For example, first offense would be a single five-minute Crucible queue delay. The next offense in the same 24 hours could be a 10-minute queue delay for the next five Crucible queues. As the player continues to rage quit, the longer the queue delay, the more matches it lasts for, and the longer the effective window for gaining such punishments would last.

While increasing the punishments for making unsportsmanlike choices in the Crucible is sound, it could be as equally effective to also implement a system that rewards players based on X number of games they finish in a row. With the right incentives, this could help put and keep Destiny 2’s PvP playerbase in the right state of mind while playing. You catch more flies with honey after all.

One of the best ways to do just that would be to make sure said incentives are above all worthwhile to a majority of players. As a Crucible player myself, I rarely rage quit outside of the most brutal stomps after most of my time has quit. However, I would certainly be persuaded to stay if say after playing five matches in a row, there was a rare but slowly escalating chance to earn Adept Legendary weapons or Artifice Legendary Armor. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who would turn down such rewards just to rage quit from a tough match and feel their actions justified for that one moment.

Visual cosmetics like rare shaders or interesting ornaments that have appealing colors or other visual traits may be the way to go as well. Although, I don’t believe those rewards would be as inciting enough to keep people from becoming upset and choosing the easy way out. Either way, with the right rewards for staying and playing and the appropriate punishments, it’s harder to imagine people ever leaving mid match again.