I’m going to provide an example of why Surrenders need to at least stay the way they are:
One thing I think we can ALL agree on, is that the Battleborn community is small. Overwatch has stolen a lot of BB’s thunder, thanks in no small part to Blizzard all but driving money trucks up to gaming news outlets for coverage and those insipid comparison videos.
Anything we do that starts to partition players off, or set up preferred groups of play, is detrimental to the pool of gamers wanting to play as a whole. Who do the lesser experienced players play with, if all the high end, experienced people JUST play with friends or pre-mades and THEN queue for randoms? What good is learned by 5 100’s on voice chat, PUGstomping through ten or fifteen games, destroying lesser teams of randoms with no voice communication. Remember, this is what happened to the DOTA community, and the word toxic doesn’t even BEGIN to describe how salty those players can be to new people.
Now imagine that Surrenders are harder to have happen. If I as an experienced player, know going in that I have to stick with it to the bitter end, why am I going to queue up with strangers who have carte blanche to ruin my game? I’m ONLY going to play with my friends, rather than the community as a whole. As will most of the experienced people. And I can’t game with my friends all the time in BB. So it’s LESS time I’m playing, less time OTHER experienced people are playing, and less time new people get someone who might give out advice.
It becomes a vicious cycle. New people either pay SERIOUS dues to get into Battleborn and make friends in LOST matches, to queue with and hopefully do to others, what was done to them. Meanwhile, experienced players don’t get as much of a challenge, since instead of playing with a lot of people, they’re perfecting their skillsets with JUST their friends. Each game begins to feel the same, because they’re playing with the same people, over and over.
Again, a hard truth: we’re not going to see BB on the e-sports scene. Again, Blizzard’s already bought and paid for that by attaching Overwatch to the Diablo, SC 2 and WoW e-leagues. So those people perfecting their skills, aren’t going to find some great amazing challenge in the end game. In the end, they’ll leave, and again, fewer players in the player pool.
Everything that’s done to penalize people for having no fun, hurts BB’s fairly fragile playerbase. And it is shockingly easy for people who tell others to just suck it up, to end up with a game without players. I don’t want to be part of a toxic community, and there are other games out there where I don’t have to be.
I don’t like offering a surrender. But I DON’T offer one frivolously either. Take the time to look at the situation honestly, not just as someone who wants to play. We ALL want to play. But it’s not fun playing if the fight is manufactured. Vote how you feel, but respect those who voted differently as well. Because the day we can’t agree to queue up with one another again after a match is over, be it a win, loss or surrender, is the day BB is done as a MP game.
