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So can we agree that the lockout mechanic does absolutely nothing to prevent suicide farming or trolling since you 99% of the time need to use a different system to address them?
Lockout slows them down. Reports ban them completely from the game. Both combined makes things as miserable as possible for the farmer in question.
Since I can't legally find them, douse their computer in gasoline and ignite it, we have to use civilized methods of dealing with trolls instead of using them for additional fuel for the bonfire their computer would become.
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And with it, you weed out the player population keeping the game alive.
If your idea of "playing" is suicide farming, you're literally ruining the game of actual players by throwing the match for the rest of your team. At one point when there wasn't lockout, we even had people running movement bots designed to get killed ASAP (cheat detection helped there, of course) to farm C-bills via automated means.
Making the game worse and putting nothing into it isn't keeping the game alive, it's attempting to make the play so bad for real players that they leave.
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And you didn't address my question: Wasn't this supposed to be the job of the matchmaker? Wouldn't it be fine if bad players was just pitted against other bad players? I'm pretty sure the bad players would prefer this as well.
We knew literally the day the new MM was put in that it had nothing to do with sorting players, only a method of giving people a level-up carrot to chase while it simply sticks anyone it can find into games anyway.
I'd be perfectly happy if bads stayed in potatoland and were never seen again as opponents for competent players, but you'd also have nothing to prevent sealclubbing accounts from grinding C-bills fast (while bad stats from suiciding keeps you down in newbieland), and suiciders would then be disproportionately ruining newer (lower skill) players games on top of that, effectively doing more damage to the game either with or without proper sorting in reducing the numbers of actual players. In fact, without suicide disincentives, their effect on the player pool would be even WORSE.
Nothing can prevent suiciding in MWO legally, but it can make it as unrewarding as possible to spend time doing so (lockouts, eventually banning). You can't tell people not to shoot someone, after all. The only way to do so would be disabling the player, as F2P games effectively allow as many accounts as you like. And as noted, MWO cannot punish people by destroying their hardware or health, since that would be the act of a sociopathic sadist rather than a gaming company.
