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.
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.