For clarification: “Auto-balancing” occurs when one team in structured PvP has least two more players than the opposing team. A pane will appear on the user interfaces of each player representing the team containing the most participants, asking if they would like to volunteer to change sides. Ten seconds later, players are shifted in an attempt to lessen the disparity between teams.
When your team has the player advantage, would you volunteer to switch teams? Not many would.
The issue this creates (an issue I’m sure many of us have experienced at one point or another) is as follows: A player can spend the majority of a match representing a team— Capturing nodes, killing opponents, tending to secondary objectives, etc., only to be relocated prior to reaching that coveted 500th point. All effort exerted leading up to this point has, in reality, gone towards securing the player’s loss rather than victory.
So what can be done?
The simple answer is to implement some brand of penalty applying to those who choose to leave a match before it ends. The penalty itself can be a variety of things ranging from disallowing the player to re-queue for a set duration, to limiting the valor acquired in the player’s next match. This way, players will less often opt out of an SPvP match midway and reduce the need for the auto-balancing feature.
What would you change to accomplish this?
