Well, there are a couple of things with Battleborn in particular:
-the surrender option is way too early in the match when compared to the potential match duration
-there aren’t penalties for leaving/surrendering, so people are EXTREMELY trigger-happy when it comes to surrendering. I mean, I have never ever played a game where people like to surrender this much. Ever. Of any genre.
-surrender is weirdly calculated, as in, you need to actively vote against it, not just leave it to fail due to not having enough votes. This leads to basically half of the team deciding for the whole team. Why, you ask, when you can “fight the surrender with voting” - because many times, people don’t notice there’s a surrender voting in progress. So they shoot at someone and they see “defeat” suddenly.
-surrender option is crazy spammable. Even with the hotfix - it’s sitll crazy spammable.
-not all moba’s (we can also include other genres) have the surrender option. HotS doesn’t, for example. And it’s about the same when it comes to match length.
-being “stomped” in battleborn is one of the nicest and most pleasant stomps in moba-ish genre existence. I had matches where we were absolutely destroyed with like 500-32 or something, but I still had to experience the true battleborn gameplay. There was no reason to surrender. In virtually any other moba(ish) game, an equivalent matchup/score would simply pin you and the match would be ~20 minutes of pure suffering and/or scrolling the map for ages and staring blankly at the screen because you are dead 90% of the time. In battleborn, death timers are very low, TTK is VERY high (very, very high), so you can live longer even if you made huge mistakes and generally - you do “gameplay” even when the other team is much better.
Of course, this isn’t a binary notion, but in general, even in the case of a clear stomp, there’s still gameplay to be had in battleborn. Not so much in other similar games (including overwatch, hots, lol or dota. All of them are objectively twenty times more pointless and crushing if you are on a wrong end of the MM. You can’t do anything. There’s no “gameplay”. In BB, I had embarassingly bad losses but we were, well, PLAYING). This is very important when it comes to the surrendering notion.
-A LOT of people see the surrender option not as “this is completely pointless, MM failed badly, I see no gameplay, they are 100x better and it shows, I stare at my death cam 99% of the time, we are pinned at spawn - let’s try to initiate the surrender vote” - but rather as “it seems we are losing, I have an idea - why not surrender lol?”.
I’ve seen the surrender vote cast at 100-99 in incursion - scratch that, I’ve seen it at 100-100 - scratch that too, I’ve seen it at 100-92 FOR THE SURRENDERING TEAM.
-there are no mechanics to prevent trolling, semi-afking, leaving etc. This leads to certain people attributing ABSOLUTELY NO WEIGHT TO MATCHES (notice how I wrote “absolutely no weight” - I didn’t write “less weight than I think they should”
). Which leads to people going “ah, I died, surrender” or “ah, i wanted galilea, surrender”. Or, on the other hand - afk. Whic leads to others being like "ah, we have an afk, surrender"
Justified or not, this isn’t exactly healthy and it basically makes surrender an option that’s being pressed more than character abilities on average in one BB match.
-a lot of people surrender out of spite towards the opposing team, in order to “deny them victory”. A notion with no mechanical purpose, but a psychological one. For example, your second sentry is at 10-9-8… and is being constantly pushed, you are dead and it will all be over in ten seconds - but wait! what’s that? A surrender vote. Yes. A surrender vote hurriedly proposed like LITERALLY ten seconds before the inevitable end. I mean literally, I don’t mean it in some millenial-hipster way:) It happend more than once, to put it lightly. It’s very petty and brings notihng.
All this combined is very powerful in creating a certain reputation for “battleborn surrender button”.