wanderer, on 14 March 2014 - 04:30 AM, said:
Hey, just let me retreat off the map instead. Then if for some reason I don't want to be an exp/C-bill snack for the other side when the rest of you died five minutes in and by some stroke of luck I didn't, I can simply take myself away instead of looking like a brain-dead mouthbreather engaging six nearly fresh opponents in my heavy on a suicide run.
You can even penalize me based on how long the match continues after I leave. Last guy and I leave? Zero penalty and nobody's mad. Chicken out halfway through? 50% penalty to exp/C-bills. But hey, the other side didn't get damage/kill/salvage/potential savior kill rewards out of my easily torched carcass.
Think about the fact that right now, the only damage a lone survivor can do right now to the other side is -survive-, as the longer they do so, the more time it took for the inevitably winning team to earn their rewards. You're dead and on their side? You should be cheering him on, he's actually doing more "damage" than you did in the long run by running the clock down. You got stomped, but I guarantee you're losing fewer exp and C-bills per tick of the clock than the dominant team did.
Too bad you can't double like a post, this one deserves it. This is exactly the point and there are a lot of issues that lead up to situations like this; MM weight imbalance, wacky ELO matching, multiple 4-man teams on one side, etc. There are tons of threads here that point out these issues.
People rarely run off to hide when their team is winning, which means it happens when these people believe the team is going to loose, usually because they crumbled beneath a roll. Hiding in the corner is for some a means of causing more damage than a shot or two with their weapons. Some people are just not skilled enough to take out 5 healthy enemies themselves and they know it. I seriously doubt there are a lot of people sitting there saying "I really want to annoy my team, so let me go hide". More like "god, the guys that could not break 200 damage or survive beyond a minute wonder why we got rolled and they have the gall to tell me to go die because they are impatient". The majority of the situations where I have seen people hide/overheat-suicide/run-off-the-map is because their team decided to play house of cards in a stiff breeze.
On a side note I think there are some serious misconceptions regarding the "non-participation" clause. There is a grey zone here and a few seem to take it a bit too black and white. There should be no doubt that the guy above in his hunchback who fought hard during the battle has participated sufficiently, even if he decides to wait under the bridge to see if a final opportunity presents itself or not. Derping about and dying early with less than 50 damage to claim at the end of the match may count as "participation" for some, but I honestly would have wanted to trade those players for a turret instead of their glorious "participation".