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This suggestion is made on 2/9/13 and represents the state of play at that time.
Some Background:
Missions are often imbalanced due to a matchmaking failure, voluntary disconnect, player’s client crashing, or similar event. This dramatically increases the difficulty for the side with fewer players.
The Challenge:
Disconnects can’t be stopped.
Solution:
Increase reward for the increased risk.
Implementation:
Multiply the reward at the end of the match by the ratio of connected players. If one team has 7 players connected and the other 8, then the side with fewer players received 8/7 of the calculated reward and the side with more players receives 7/8 of the calculated reward. No UI enhancements are required.
Care will need to be taken to keep the system from being exploited. A player could disconnect prior to their death to create the appearance of imbalance. One way to prevent that is to capture the number of connected players at 1 minute into the mission. This should include anyone disconnecting prior to the start of combat, but exclude anyone disconnecting to avoid a kill or to cause imbalance.
There would be an interesting way to exploit the system that might actually be fun for everyone. Half of an 8 mech drop could disconnect to provide an extreme challenge to those who remain. This is fair as long as those who disconnect are not given any reward at all.
Purpose:
There is no way to prevent technical issues from causing disconnects, so provide a reward to those affected. Not only would this ameliorate the situation for those affected, it might actually be viewed as a reason to keep fighting against hopeless odds instead of give up.
Further Enhancements:
Intentionally imbalanced matches should be an option. A four mech team drop, for example, might elect to not include any more mechs on their team. This would require a minor UI tweak and change to matchmaking, but would result in more competitive gameplay and fewer slaughters.
Edited by KamikaziChaser, 09 February 2013 - 04:47 PM.
