The Coalition declares war on Gears of War 4 quitters with more punitive measures

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The Coalition recently rolled out Gears of War 4’s Title Update 3, deploying massive game changes aimed at improving the overall gaming experience. This update brings two new maps and many spectator mode improvements as well as a series of punitive measures to prevent early quitting in the Core and Competitive modes of GoW4.

The new quitting penalties mean that The Coalition finally heard fan uproar and decided to do something about it. GoW 4 players have long requested harsher penalties for rage quitters and the news that The Coalition will finally take the necessary measures to do so have made many fans happy.

I am very excited to see how this new TU will change the game. Extremely pumped for all the quitters to slowly but surely start leaving this game for good 🙂 […] Thank you to TC for listening to the fans requests and taking Gears 4 in a better direction. Can’t wait for future updates with further quit penalties, weapon tuning, hopefully some more swarm/locust characters, and pre-game lobbies. Gonna be an awesome year for Gears fans! Let’s Go!!!

New Gears of War 4 quitting penalties

TC has deployed the first wave of quitting penalties with Title Update 3. More specifically, here’s how the company is planning to punish GoW4 rage quitters:

  • Players leaving a Core/Competitive game early will be suspended from matchmaking
  • To avoid unfair penalties due to power shortages, players can rejoin a Core/Competitive match within 5 minutes of quitting
  • Rejoining and completing a match will remove the matchmaking suspension time
  • Matchmaking suspension time is displayed and visible including to your Squad Leader. If there is a suspended user in your Squad, you won’t be able to matchmake until their suspension has completed.

TC will implement more punitive measures against early quitters in the coming months as well. Hopefully, this will heavily discourage dishonest gaming behavior and reduce player frustration.

We’re continuing to work on lobbies for Core and Competitive in addition to more punitive measures for quitting and investigating tuning improvements. We can’t wait to deliver all this and more throughout 2017.

GoW 4 quit penalties: Is this really the solution?

So far, we haven’t answered an important question: What is the root-cause for GoW4 early quitting? Many gamers suggest that it’s the matchmaking system’s fault. For example, if a Bronze level player enters a match against a diamond level player, naturally they would want to leave the game.

Many fear that quit penalties will only increase player frustration and they’ll soon just quit the game in reponse. In other words, players suggest that TC should address the game’s imbalances rather than focusing on punishing gamers.

The fact that there are penalties isn’t the most frustrating part. The most frustrating thing is that TC is using the penalties as a means to avoid them having to actually figure out the issues that cause people to leave.

Other players believe that TC will only implement mild punitive measures in order to avoid dividing an already small community.

All in all, early quitting in GoW 4 is a multi-layered issue that TC cannot address with a single solution. The changes the company has implemented and will continue to implement in the future allow it to assess the overall quality of matches. TC can then analyze the data they’ve collected and use it to add further changes.

And this exactly what the company will be focusing on in 2017:

We have further quit penalty and balanced match features in the works – including Core/Competitive pre-game lobbies – coming in future Title Updates to further improve the online experience.

What’s your stance on early quitting in GoW4? Do you think the game’s new punitive measures will help?

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