By now, you’re probably aware of Bungie’s much publicised decision to lay down the law on “Rage Quitters” for its upcoming FPS behemoth, Halo Reach. Speaking to Xbox 360 Achievements, Bungie community rep Brian Jarrard outlined plans to detect and punish those who quit out of games early. Reportedly, these “soft bans” could prevent repeated offenders from joining matchmaking servers for up to 30 minutes and could be smart enough to differentiate between Rage Quitters and those with genuine connection problems. We’re not currently sure where yanking the Ethernet cable out of your 360 sits between those two areas, but trust that Bungie are.
Predictably, this news has arrived to a mixed reaction amongst the community. Halo is an incredibly popular franchise and can count a large number of Rage Quitters (and other annoying sorts) amongst its legions of players. However, to suggest that Bungie’s bold and rather admirable decision to effect change is restricted only to Halo Reach could be shortsighted. Is this a sign of things to come for the online gaming landscape?
There is of course more than one side to this particular story. Personally speaking, I’ve long since wished for EA Sports to introduce a system similar to Bungie’s into its FIFA franchise. FIFA itself is great fun to play online, with a stable environment and the ability to take the competition beyond the confines of your living room being one of my personal highlights of the relatively new uptake of online gaming. Occasionally however, the experience can be soiled in infuriating fashion, often for no reason other than simply being better than your opponent. In fact, I think I’m being too coy on how annoying this actually is. I think it’s fair to say that Rage Quitters have all but destroyed any enthusiasm I have for playing FIFA online.
It’s a story I’m sure many FIFA players – or sports gamers in general – will be able to recall. You start the game, take a commanding lead early on and the other player quits. You’ve wasted your time and achieved nothing. I’m not even that good at the game, being of a pretty modest standard and usually picking lower ranked teams that aren’t just Barcelona or Manchester United, and yet the amount of times I’ve seen the opposition quit out of a game just for falling behind has pretty much killed the experience for me. In line with EA’s equally annoying Project Ten Dollar, new copies of FIFA 11 will require code activation to unlock online play. This year, I might just not bother.
Have Bungie stumbled upon a potential solution to problems such as this?
“Possibly” is my personal and irritatingly vague answer to this question. In theory at least, stopping Rage Quitters from spoiling the experience for everybody else should be a no brainer to be welcomed with open arms by everybody other than the quitters themselves. Unfortunately however, things are never that simple. Even between genres, the effectiveness of handing out soft bans in an FPS that supports upto 30 players is a totally different kettle of fish to a sports game that supports two in direct, one-on-one competition.
Community-wide, valid concerns have been raised. Will genuine connection drop offs be recognised? How about people who simply hit the dashboard button to exit the entire game, as opposed to just navigating their way out of a particular round? What about those who intentionally quit for reasons no more complicated than they are no longer enjoying the battle? Simply due to the nature of the experience, I think there are more wide ranging reasons why an individual would opt out of any shooter battle than, say, a match in a sports game. As an FPS gamer, I will happily quit out of matches if I find myself restricted to a map or game type that I don’t enjoy. How long will it take for Bungie to restrict how often I can play Reach online for choosing to opt out of such occasions?
On the other side of the coin, perhaps FPS games provide the best environment for schemes such as this to thrive. In battles where 30+ people are required to co-operate and or use skill to win, it only takes a handful of users to ruin the experience for everyone else. Any attempt to stop the minority from ruining the experience for the majority should surely be welcomed?
At the end of the day, it could only be a short wait until we find out. Launching on 14 September 2010, Halo Reach is almost guaranteed to shift yet more staggering numbers of units, perhaps providing the ultimate testing ground for an initiative such as this. Tears and tantrums are almost a given, but time will be the only real decider as to how viable Bungie’s idea’s really are.
Until then, all we can do is speculate. Is this a move you agree with? Is it likely to affect you? Are you a victim of Rage Quitters or are the games you play online immune to such petulance? As always, fire away in the comments below.
Email the author of this post at matc@tap-repeatedly.com
Guild Wars has a three strikes your out policy. If you leave a random arena before it’s started, and do it three times you get a “coward” flag on your character, that doesn’t let you partake in any more matches until it fades over time (takes about 10 minutes).
In the context of FPS however, there are many
pricks on servers, meaning you may have to ‘rage quit’ multiple times until you find a server you enjoy (including the players/gametype/server rules).
I suspect, it is also a factor worse on consoles. There are tons of ass-hats online, but shit me-
First Gears of War server I ever joined some ten year old yank shouted at me “fuck you prick”.
That’d be one rage quit simply because I wouldn’t want to play with twats like that!
Good stuff Mat!
I can echo Lewis B on this. My biggest reason for quitting is annoying kids (or adults who seem to act like kids) making racist/homophobic or otherwise offensive comments.
I don’t mind trash talk, hell it’s half the fun, but when you get stupid about it, I don’t want to play with you.
It’s the same reason I tend to avoid too much online gaming though. Just looking for a maturity that doesn’t seem to exist in most gaming communities.
I like that idea in Guild Wars. Go ahead and quit but, until a certain passage of time with good behavior, be stuck with a “quitter” tag or something like that.
Sort of how if you entered cheat codes in Warcraft 2 you wouldn’t receive a normal performance ranking at the end of each mission: instead you’d simply achieve the rank of “cheater.”
Great piece on an interesting topic, Mat. Who’d have thought, 15 years ago, that something like “Rage Quitter” would be in the public lexicon? And yet since the days of self-fraggers during DOOM deathmatches, there’ve always been those who’d prefer to ruin the experience for all rather than take a single freaking loss.
I’d like to know more about Bungie’s technology, and how it’s going to differentiate between those cable-yankers and dashboard-visitors you mention. I think I’m okay with soft-banning players who try to wreck the experience, but it’d suck to be soft-banned because your cable modem blinked.
What about if they had optional ‘rooms’ that were flagged as ‘no quitters’? You could choose to play ‘vanilla’ or ‘no quitters’, and the ‘no quitters’ option disables your ability to quit until the round is done (or hands you a tough punishment) – but at least you know that everyone else who’s logged into the ‘no quitters’ option won’t pull out either, and they want to be there.
And those who might need to leave early, for whatever reason, and go in the ‘vanilla’ room/instance/lobby, and can quit to their heart’s content with no negative repercussions.
I haven’t seen a game without griefers. Driving games are terrible for individuals trying to take out as many players as possible in the first corner. One solution is to qualify poorly and avoid the first corner carnage by being last.
Battlefield 2 had its share of tkers, spawn campers, exploit abusers, and quitters. Then there were expansion kit purchasers that could bring advanced weapons back to the original game.
Sadly I think the best solution is a social one, where you join closed leagues or get hooked up with players on sites where you have shown some patience and maturity, like some of the enthusiast sites like SimHQ, for instance.
I have zero to do with multiplayer, but if I did I would like Helmut’s idea of closed leagues. I did play a lot of Guild Wars but it must have been before the “coward” tag cause I would time out several times a night because of bad DSL connections. I usually just gave up though after a couple in a row.
EDIT: Never mind. I see Lewis meant PVP. I was talking about PVE.
It’d be best if players accumulated ‘positive’ time played, which is converted into ‘X’ amount of rage quits. I.e. Play for 10 hours with no disconnects, or Rage quits and you can choose to leave 6 times (or something).
Still, only playing Team Fortress 2 myself people rage quitting does not effect the game in any way- the servers are so busy people instantly fill their place.
So really- what is the real point of this restriction, to ensure multiplayer balance and even teams at all times? That suggests (against TF2) that not enough people play Halo (or will play Halo) to plug the gaps others leave! 😉 🙂
Hmmm, it’s funny because I don’t recall more than one case of someone rage quitting on me in all my time playing games on PSN. And I mostly play one on one fighting games that are much more prone to rage quitting affecting the gameplay than 16 or 20 player games. Is it the case of PSN being that much more civilised than XBL? Playing Street Fighter over PSN I’ve made a bunch of friends just by thanking each other after the match for a good game and the closest I ever came to thinking the other side is a dick is when they customise the match to last only one round of 30 seconds. So, TF2 doesn’t have this problem, most PSN games I’ve played don’t seem to have this problem, but FIFA and Halo do have this problem. My conclusion is that Halo and FIFA attract proportionally more assholes than other games. I might be wrong, but…
Amen Meho!
I agree, Halo at least (and probably FIFA too) has a larger asshole contingent.
It’s funny, even Left 4 Dead has its share of griefers and rage quitters these days. When it first launched it was amazing how it really forced teamwork, forced cooperation, and in so doing made strangers into friends. Nowadays if you have an open slot, there’s a good chance someone will pop in, shoot the entire group, and drop back out, or someone will quit in fury because they didn’t get the Tank kill.
People. They suck.
FIFA and Halo are huge franchises that reach an incredibly diverse spectrum of people. I think by virtue of that, it’s sort of obvious that you’re going to get a higher percentage of people who are likely to bend the rules or act in a way that irritates others.
I’ve had plenty of good matches on Halo and FIFA and met some good people myself playing such games, just to add balance, but it’s an incredibly infuriating process when somebody does come along and rage quit out of a situation to waste your time.
Also, I’m not sure I agree with the reference to a fighter game having much credit. It’s a different gameplay environment. A Street Fighter battle lasts, well, what? 2x 2 minute battles which can be finished in seconds if you’re good enough? It’s a little different to a sports game, where matches can be 10 minutes long or upwards. If you’ve invested 9 minutes of your time into something and somebody quits out of that in the final moments because they’re losing.. well.. say no more?
I’ve had many online games of NHL 09 where I was winning and my opponent waited until the last minute of the game to quit, thereby not only wasting my time but depriving me credit for the win.
On the other hand, I’ve endured contests where my opponent was exploiting glitches in the game to constantly pepper my net with goals; I’ve lost games 0-15 and stayed until the bitter end, not giving them the satisfaction I know they’re looking for by goading me into “rage quitting.”
The only competitive online game I enjoy to this day where I am not bothered by griefers is Team Fortress 2. Why that is, I’m not certain, but I can always look to it for guaranteed enjoyment.
I think it’s because TF2 is a chaotic riot; you wouldn’t notice shit in that tumbler. I applaud your stiff upper lip xtal. Take it like an ‘Abrams tank bench pressing, glass munching, chainsaw shaving’ Man. GRUARGH!!
Mat have you been secretly watching me on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the last two weeks or something? Yesterday I apologised to two of my closest friends for swearing holy hell in their ears for a good few hours while we fought tooth and claw against a team that outnumbered and outclassed us. I was an apoplectic mess. My problem is that rage makes me even more committed so like xtal, I’ll hang in there to the bitter end to the detriment of anybody in earshot. Seriously I’m like the fucking Hulk of gaming. Virtually at least. Physically I’m his polar opposite.
L4D is arguably the worst for rage quitting in my experience because it can happen really late on in a game which can be nearly 2 hours worth of toil and obviously it has a massive impact when there are 8 or less playing. I love it when a team can handle being the underdogs and enjoy the struggle. It’s a shame there are legions of individuals out there who can’t handle a challenge or don’t have the drive to crack a tough situation.
@Lewis: the problem is how do you discern the difference between an innocent ‘my dinner is burning in the oven’ quit and a raging ‘DIE WORLD’ quit? I think that’s the real issue here.