My pick is Psyonix, the team behind the one and only Rocket League.
And why they’re my pick is because they’ve been prioritizing elitist gamers over generally everyone of all skill levels. This is evident when you are penalized for leaving matches in Casual Mode that escalates from 5 minutes to even hours. Basically limiting and restricting your playtime on a game people had once paid for.
And I say once paid for because this game once had a price tag along with DLCs. Sometime a few years ago, Psyonix sold itself to Epic Games and flipped Rocket League to Free-to-Play or Freemium. They delisted the game from Steam and unless you had been accumulating anything before the delisting, you are SOL.
In the Epic Games version of Rocket League, you have to build back up everything that was once readily available when it was on Steam. Having to pick up common body parts, having to pick up decals, flags, wheels .etc
All of these are just one continual dump after another from Psyonix on the fans that truly are there to have a fun time and not be a foaming drooling tryhard of an elitist player.
I loved Rocket League, was top 1%, and quit it because of the casual game ban you eat when leaving poorly matched games. I already wasn‘t playing ranked anymore cause I reached my goal so I just liked to play casual games.
I didn‘t mind people leaving casual games or leaving myself cause the outcome of the match didn‘t matter, what mattered was whether it was a well-matched game that was fun to play or not. And if it wasn‘t, you left and went back into queue, and it took like five seconds to match a new game.
Which is also why I didn‘t mind if my team was leaving. I just shrugged, went into a new queue, five seconds later I was back in the game.
But nah, nowadays devs gotta have this weird obsession over forcing people to play matches out even if there‘s no stakes other than whether you‘re having fun or not and even though there‘s no victims here with the outcome being irrelevant and the queue timers being super low. It also doesn‘t matter how much time into a match has passed, the game‘s the same at minute 1 as it is at minute 3 or 5, you‘re not losing progress as in a MOBA or RTS match.
It breeds toxicity too: Instead of leaving, people now feel forced to stay, so they‘re just in there, pissed off, and take it out on their teammates.
Just allaround a dumb change likely initiated by a vocal minority of the playerbase.
Like, fuck quitting ranked games, but casual? Unnecessary.
Rant end. This change annoyed me af too when it happened, so I can definitely relate to OP.
EDIT: I do think there‘s worse offenders with regards to the post’s topic though. Ubisoft, EA, anyone using Denuvo or patching in mtx after launch, Paradox and their crazy dlc policy, KOEI and their crazy dlc policy for DOA (and probably other stuff), etcetc
God I hated that change so much. I only play 2v2 ranked with my buddy now. I never play anything else anymore.
There was no reason to ruin casual like that. I remember all the whiners on the RL subreddit saying crap like “I want to play a full match with a team!” and all I could think was, then go fucking play ranked! They like to drop terms like “not sweating” to justify ruining casual. Really?? If you don’t give a crap about ranking then who cares what ranking you are in ranked matches? Just go play ranked! And if you’re that mentally weak, then yell at epic to let you hide your ranking from being displayed after matches instead of ruining an entire game mode.
I miss having a zero commitment game mode that I can pop in while waiting for my buddy to take a dump or something. Now casual is just ranked without the ranking. It still has mmr, you can’t leave without bans, it’s absolutely pointless and might as well not exist. Let me go get my ass slapped by a grandmaster! Or let me show off to a bunch of bronzies. It hurts no one.
Thank christ, someone understands. If you tried saying anything similar to what you’ve said in most Rocket League communities, main or self-created, you got put on blast.
Nobody should ever have their fun dampened because someone doesn’t want to be a team player or intentionally grief or throw matches. I entirely understand it in Competition/Ranked, but I’ll never agree with how Casual Mode is handled. Psyonix is just asking people to try and stop playing or even supporting their game through MTX.
Well, there‘s your vocal minority. Some people act as if you’re breaching a contract on performing lifesaving brain surgery when you leave a lobsided casual game. And for some reason they can‘t just take that attitude and stick to ranked. It blows my mind that Psyonix caved in on that, but here we are.
Different perspective here:
I don’t really get why people want to leave lopsided casual matches in the first place. You either get to chill out against easier opponents or get better by playing against stronger opponents. At the end of the day, winning or losing doesn’t matter because, well it’s casual. If you wanted a balanced match every game where everyone is trying their best to win, then you should be playing ranked.
What annoyed me with the old system was when my team would go down 1 point, the teammate insta-leaves and then I get a bot or some unfortunate guy who joins into this match midway through.
The people leaving seemed to care more about winning than the match being lopsided; It was really rare to see someone from the winning team leave. And I know thats a common perspective to have, but for me personally, I like playing matches for more than 1 point. I think comeback games shouldn’t only happen in ranked.
With the changes, the casual playlist has improved in some ways and worsened in others. It is way more likely to get a team that sticks around for the full match, but the mode is more competitive now, which is not what it’s supposed to be like.
I think there was probably a better solution to the problem. The issue seems to occur when one player wants to leave, but the other wants to continue. An idea I had to reduce the chance of this happening was matching together the players who tend to abandon and matching together the players who tend to play out matches.