Anti-ragequit. Compilation of ideas and suggestions... (small update #1)

Many options, GPG please read!

By Ghost on June 8, 2009 2:12:06 PM from

(updates are marked with ##)

Concede option:

I agree with the concede option, but this isn't a real fix for rage quitting. Rage quitting is when a player quits in the first part of the game (usually in the first 1-15 minutes), either because he gets killed and can't take it or if he considers that the rest of his team are noobs. Concede option can't help it in this situation, he will either directly quit or he will spam with it. This should be taken really seriously into consideration by GPG: make it in a way so a person can't spam with it, by putting a cooldown timer on it (like 5 or 10 minutes, but not less!).

That being said, concede is really useful for when it's clear for the majority in your team that you can not win (for example when the enemy is in your base or when some player in your team gets killed more than 5 times in a raw at the beginning of the match). If the team agrees to concede, the losing team still gets whatever fav points and exp has got until that point in the game. People who quit at this stage of the game are not rage quitters, imo. You should say GG, bye all and quit. With the concede option, this is more elegant and useful (you still get the fav points, etc).

Rage quitting will never be eradicated in this type of game. But you can alleviate it and i have some suggestions (i'm not taking credit for all of them, this is a list with stuff i gathered from the forum, about this subject):

Enable rematching. For example, a game is made with 8 players in it. One of them quits. In this situation, the game is 99% lost for the team with the AI replacement. Allow the players to vote for a rematch, a "back to the lobby" option, so you can wait for a human to replace the rage quitter. Rematch is also useful when you want to replay a game with the same people, maybe so you can have your revenge, in case you have lost. This feature was also requested here.

##Fix the stats and skirmish connection problems. Then combine the ranking with the disconnect % rate in one single skill lvl. For example the final skill lvl of a player should be something like 60% ranking and 40% diconnect%. Or 50-50. Or 40% for ranking and 60% for disconnect%. I don't know exactly the proportions. The idea is that when every player in the game would have this kind of skill rating, they would be matched accordanly, hopefully rage quitters will end up in a game with other rage quitters with the same rank lvl. In custom games, everyone should see other's skill lvl, before entering the lobby (in a pop-up window or something).

Friends group join. This would limit rage quitting because you know your team mates and you trust them not to rage quit.

AI replacement tweaks:

Do not give gold and exp to the player who killed the AI. Or limit it very much.
Let players in your team to control the AI player. I don't know if this can be done in DG, but it's an useful option to have.

Option for kick in-game some player from your team. It should be based on vote and all players should agree on it (not the majority). Useful when someone's AFK or lagging the game or something of this nature. I'm not sold on this option, but i've put it here anyway.

Allow players to do something useful when they're dead: instead sitting idle watching a greyish screen (which btw, should be lighted a little bit), let players check all the screens, from skill's menu, to shop's menu and citadel upgrades. Just for looking, you still can't buy anything in this state. This option should be also available in the game, when you are not dead, but with a difference: you can't buy anything until you are in the range of the citadel/shop, just like it is now. This could be very helpful for new players (noobs), who don't know yet all the items and prices by hard. They don't have to come back to the shop just to check if they have enough money for an item or citadel upgrade. Or they could plan their upgrades, without visiting the shop.

Tweak the gameplay, fixing the steep slippery slope. This i think is a little bit more complicated and maybe deserves a separate thread. Some fixes could be:

Reduce the amount of gold awarded for killing an enemy DG at the beginning of the game and eliminate the demigod assist killing gold reward, or make it much smaller. Combine this with giving the players more gold for creep killing; allow the losing team to farm for gold also, not just for exp.
Maybe when you upgrade the death penalty in citadel, also reduce the amount of gold the enemy gets by killing you, not only the time spent in the death screen.
##Something more radical would be this: give more gold for killing creeps, but don't give any gold for killing enemy DGs, only exp. The penalty for the killed demigod would be a loss in his exp and/or gold. (see Reply #3 on this thread for more info)

These are just some ideas that could fix the slippery slope in this game. They certainly need balancing and i don't know if they could work 100%. What is clear is that something needs to be done. Imo, this game has a more steep slippery slope than even DOTA.

This is all, feel free to comment. I'll also appreciate very much if someone from GPG could post here something.

+13 Karma | 19 Replies

Ai definitely shoudlnt grant gold period when other players kill it, then i could careless what he's doing, in fact since ai is so aggressive, i can use it as bait

Some good suggestions here. I particularly like the suggestions around positively identifying people (rather than negatively identifying ragequiters) for future games, and think it could be taken further. I'd love an option to tag everyone I ever play with who plays reasonably nice. A simple prefer/avoid (just impacting me personally) toggle for each player and an interface to tell how many of each type of player is in a given game before I join would go a long way towards making everybody happy. Let the guys who can't stand to play a game anymore after their side gets three deaths in a row play with each other, and the guys who prefer fighting for a glorious comeback play with each other. At this point I've come to think it's just irreconcilable trying to stick them both together. Lord knows I see plenty of the same names in the games I play....

Give the players more gold for creep killing; allow the losing team to farm for gold also, not just for exp.

I've always been in support of this. Currently if you're down a gold difference because the enemy killed your Demigods a few times the only way to make it back is....to kill their Demigods. Which you can't - they have better items because of the gold difference. And they already bought the currency upgrade with the gold they got from killing you. And so on. There is no way to farm your way back.

Something more radical would be this: give more gold for killing creeps, but don't give gold for killing enemy DGs, only exp.

I think the better solution is that people who die should not give much gold but should instead lose gold....like Dota. Before you roll your eyes let me explain that there is a large benefit here - the person who dies is penalized, but the enemies do not make significant gains (like they do when they get a kill with assists now - that's a crazy amount of gold!). As such the enemy's relative strength will increase compared to the person who died and lost gold but NOT to the other people on the team who did not die.

A few kills for someone now and they become unstoppable even to the people on the other side of the map who didn't die because of the items they buy with the kill proceeds. That's the real flaw with Demigod, there's a very large snowball effect. Not giving such massive gold boosts is part and parcel to fixing this. But the penalty should be about the same, which is why the person who died should lose the comparable amount of gold.

If noobs stop joining my 'no noobs' and 'pros only' games I would see a lot less rage quitting ^_~

Yes, the conceed will help a lot I think. Sometimes winners and losers, are both ready to end the game. But since some love the feeling of seeing the enemy citidal crumble while hearing the announcer broadcast their victory (A reward for their hard fought victory), I usually ask if they'd like a conceed/GG, or to have me fight to the end. It's been about 50/50 so far which they pick.

But they are going to really need to do something about the rage-pouting (afk'ers) who are going start poping up more too. Maybe 2 mins a Demigod does nothing = AFK = kicked from game; or something like that.

I've been talking about the AI/gold/xp thing for a while; I agree completely. Everyone hates AIs cause they feed; if they could not feed (no xp/gold), then they might actually help in some cases.

think the better solution is that people who die should not give much gold but should instead lose gold....like Dota. Before you roll your eyes let me explain that there is a large benefit here - the person who dies is penalized, but the enemies do not make significant gains (like they do when they get a kill with assists now - that's a crazy amount of gold!). As such the enemy's relative strength will increase compared to the person who died and lost gold but NOT to the other people on the team who did not die.

This!

Good idea. Dota did not everything better than demigod, but this worked way better than this feeding-mode in demigod...

Maybe a compropmise: The person/people that killed an enemy DG get less gold/xp than they do now; the person who died also loses some. What happens in Dota if the person killed had little or no gold?

They go down to 0. Yes that could encourage spending instead of saving but that's not bad either. Saving up for a big item is then a risk, as it should be.

That's actually a good idea to compromise. Puts a lot more self-risk into dying. And maybe people will even invest money into the citadel D:

The thing is, when you start the game, you have ~1000 gold and most of the time you just buy something with it immediately. And when the first kills are made, at the beginning of the match, that killed DG has almost no gold on him, so there is no gold penalty for him. And most the time, the games are decided in the beginning, when some DGs die a lot (3-5 times).

A better idea would be to increase the gold that creeps give upon dying (but give that amount of money to the DG that actually killed the creep) and reduce the gold given to a player upon killing an enemy DG (and eliminate the support kill gold bonus). Balance the low gold award for killing a DG with some form of penalty for the killed DG (besides the time spent dead), either by forcing him to lose some exp or some gold.

You underestimate the gold you get by doing nothing. By the time you get to the middle and start fighting people there you already have a couple hundred gold back. You die and you lose it. You wouldn't be losing thousands of gold at the low levels, obviously, and it should scale as you level up.

Well, i don't know. It could work, it's a good idea that they (GPG) could test it and balance it, if it's needed.

Since I play Sedna a lot, the thought of having to get most my gold from minions (or even kills) makes me grimmise; if only I got some gold/xp/favor for healing. And another thing for us to "playtest in our head" is how agressive, even crazy, people with almost no gold may battle; could be great, could be bad. . .

If people played as a team and stopped rushing in to die, the other team would not make so much money in the beginning. In the beginning, running away is a viable strategy. I do agree that the AI should not give gold bonuses when killed (or atleast not as high until they make them have smarter decisions). Sometimes they have this overwhelming desire to take on 3 demigods at once in the middle of enemy towers while the rest of the team is elsewhere.

I do not like the idea of farming minions for gold. I like the idea of keeping as much focus on the demigods as they do. I do not want sit around in some obscure corner of the map, so I can play by myself and farm gold from minions. Theres also the fact that you know atleast 1 person in a randomly set up game is going to do that. In a 2v2 game this can be especially devastating. You are trying to fight off Demigod attacks and cap flags and your partner is off in their own world. The gold they make will not help you when all your defenses are destroyed and all your flags capped, but this will not stop them from thinking it is a viable strategy.

In all the random DOTA games/mods i have played, theres always going to be that one guy who goes off and does whatever, and encouraging more people to play that way defeats the team aspect of it. I like keeping assist bonuses in because it promotes teamplay.

I would also like to see rewards for killing or sissting in killing demigods, and penalties for dieing to be rebalanced a little though.

Since I play Sedna a lot, the thought of having to get most my gold from minions (or even kills) makes me grimmise; if only I got some gold/xp/favor for healing.

What if you got "assist" credit for buffing a teammate who goes on to kill an enemy DG (in the next 30s or something?) TF2 has something similar, where the Medic class gets an assist point for healing somebody who then gets a kill . . . this would give Sedna/QoT/Oak another reason to use Heal/Bramble Shield/Shield on allies, and could be possibly stretched to other abilities as appropriate.

The option to vote-kick AFK or rage-pouters sounds great. That's happened on my teams twice, and there's really nothing you can do about it but know your a man down for the entire game (who will get Favor too for doing nothing).

RE: The Sedna comment, if anyone knows how to tweak the individual gold rewards for creep using the lua files let me know. This needs to be playtested properly imo.

You could also look at changing the gold reward for capturing and holding flags, which is something Sedna does better than some of the creep killers like TB or Reg

Allow players to do something useful when they're dead: instead sitting idle watching a greyish screen (which btw, should be lighted a little bit), let players check all the screens, from skill's menu, to shop's menu and citadel upgrades.

this will finally help the noobies L2P.

thanks for consolidating Ghost. +1

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

Anti-ragequit. Compilation of ideas and suggestions... (small update #1)

Many options, GPG please read!