Problem of this is that it allows "Dodging" , lets say you are the number #1 player and want to stay #1 , you just leave the games where good enemies are in and only play worse players. Have seen stuff like this in Supreme Commander when they still showed you the enemies name before the game started.

Don't have a better solution for now though, going to think about it the next days.

In Example III, I think that if it was a random team the player who left should get a loss, but if it was a arranged team and his teams wins nonetheless, as in an arranged team you can be pretty sure the player who left didn't do it on purpose.

i think for acceptable disconnects, including timeouts, each time it happens, the players should vote on whether to file a complaint, which would affect the quitter's participation rating.  Their participation rating should be based on number of games full played (good) and mid game disconnects (bad) and displayed when joining a game.

I agree with hobodefcon, the punishing criteria should be subjective.

The players should choose to mark to quitting as good or bad.

According to a certain percentage of the votes, the player is marked or not.

Objective rules never work when it comes to punish bad players, they always find a way to avoid it.

so much demigod coverage on the sins forum...and nothing from the sins devs...

for Example 2 a draw/abort game option like we had in supcom could help but unlike in supcom it shouldn't affect rankings at all - draws made sense in supcom, don't make here.

I would solve all of the above with 2 rules:

1) A dissconnect is a loss, in ranked games you are required to have a good connection and enough time to play, bad connection people will have to get their connection improved or accept the losses, that is in no way unfair in competative internet games.  Other games use this system and people just learn to live with it.

2) There should be some connection speed/stability monitoring, after 3 minutes of play if this is below the acceptable level (hard coded) then the player is given the option to drop with no standing loss.  However the ratio of completed games to drops is monitored and standing is deducted if this ratio is too biased to dissconnects.

Why does it bother you if someone has a computer which is capable of running it on the highest settings? I hope that somewere in the future they will add a insane high setting.

If you got too low on fps it is you're problem and you will probably loose. Only problem i can see is people with slow computers where the sim time get's to low. So under 5 sim speed a lower setting should be enforced online.

I do not know what the best number would be, i picked 5, just to make sure that later on when more happens it still runs fine. Maybe something like 2 or 3 would be ok. But I expect some cpu room is needed, just in case.... Main point is that for online play it would be nice that no one slows everything down because of high settings.

But enforcing low settings just because of online play is too draconick.

If you can resolve the other problems below so there is never a legitimate reason to quit, I'd count it as a loss. Otherwise, it becomes much tougher. Hiding enemy names can help prevent this, but it also works against feelings of community. I like playing against the guy who beat me last time and getting sweet revenge.

Ideally this is resolved in the software, and one person's system problems only affect them (client / server models allow this). However, if it cannot be resolved there, I would say the situation is twofold:

a. Don't let people set their system settings too high for multiplayer if they do not have the computer for it.

b. When a player lags either on the system or the net side, they use up their grace period, until it runs out, at which point other players can kick them.

Also, this should be solved as much as possible in matchmaking. Pings should be even a little more important thang ranking in determining matches, because I would rather have a match that is a little too tough than one that freezes every five seconds for the entire duration. Smooth matches are a very top priority for me and many others.

You could do an Arranged Team vs. Random Team split here. Arranged Teams win or lose as a team, regardless of connection status (so the guy whose dog pulls out his cord at the last minute still gets the win if his teammates win), whereas in Random Teams if a teammate quits early enough, you only take a partial loss in terms of ranking.

A few more thoughts:

1. This is an interesting post. It's very cool to hear the thought that goes into games.

2. A team vote to resign might help resolve some of the rage quitting problems. If you look at chess, it is considered polite to tip your king over once you have definitively lost. But yet, most games do not allow that, but make you either play a decided game, or knock the board over and run away. A way of saying, "Congrats, you've clearly defeated us," might help put a little more respect into losing.

3. I'm really glad you are thinking about this. Due to the way internet games work, a small but very annoying portion of the population will try to take advantage or make the game less fun for others, and developers are on the front lines to prevent this. By changing the incentives available, you can make antisocial actions a little bit less likely. My mind blanks for a specific example, but if you look at Xbox Live games where you do not take any penalty at all for quitting, but you do take a loss if you lose, it actually becomes more likely than not someone will quit early just to spite the winner.

Designing rank systems to reward any game you complete, even if you lose, but also rewarding winning more, tends to make that much less likely. An example of which would be Call of Duty 4, which you earn experience points for playing at the end of a round, even if you lose. Everyone eventually gets to the top ranks, but winners get there faster, so there is an incentive to do well. It also has some challenges, like unlocking the golden skins for various guns, which are tougher than would be fun for some players (1050 headshots, some of which are with inaccurate guns, to get the golden AK), but are optional and do not confer a mechanical advantage. It is a very well designed reward system, which I think can be learned from.

BTW, one of the things we plan to do with Demigod is have Ladder "Epochs".  These epochs would mark different phases of the evolution of the competitive multiplayer experience where, at the end of an epoch we would create a new epoch where everyone's stats (rankings) reset. You would still have access to previous epochs so you could see who the top players were at a given time.

This way, it gives more opportunities for players to be top ranked and it gives us a way to reset the rankings occasionally when we've made a significant change to the rules.

For example:

Epoch 1 might only last until the end of May 2009 during which time we discover various expoits or rules that seemed good on paper but got griefed/cheesed.  As a former PGL player, I've seen a lot of cheesey lame tactics and I have a long list of such tactics that can be employed in Demigod.  

Can I assume I'm not the only one here who has played an online game with stats that's gotten annoyed that the developers overlooked some exploit and the top players were merely the people who had mastered them?

So clearly, Epoch 1 will be the age of figuring out the unique idiosyncracies of Demigod in on-line play and deciding, as a community, the best way to deal with them.

Then Epoch 2 might start in June and last the Summer when we figure out more things.  

And so on.

But each Epoch would be available in the Pantheon so people could go back and see players and such.  In the long-run, we hope to make it so that replays can be submitted to the server so people can go back and watch games.

That's awesome.

epochs sound awesome.   I know some developers (namely valvue) pay very close attention to their game stats.   I've heard and seen notes from lectures based on them.

I think simply having a ladder system or something that helps stop elite super pros from playing total noobs would work.   Since its tied to a stardock account (which I believe has to be tied to their demigod CD key) I wouldn't imagine people would make very many accounts so they can just trash noobs.   Of course I might be wrong.