While what I'm about to say isn't necessarily related to your incident (which sucks, I hate people like that), I couldn't agree with you more about the leaderboards, and I thought I'd take a moment to rant a little about it. The stats in every game nowadays is moot: Halo, Call of Duty, and yeah, even Mortal Kombat. Why? Because they either incorrectly label you a rage quitter, or intentionally demand that you rake in the losses.
Bungie thinks it's a good idea to punish people who leave matches of Halo Reach by banning them from online play. This is a really great feature that comes in super handy when my entire team bails, forcing me to take on four players all ganging up on me at once - or
stop playing. The same goes if I don't agree with the odds of fighting against one person while I'm on the team of four; if I leave, I get banned. There's just no feeling of getting screwed quite like unknowingly joining a match that's not even remotely fair only to be rewarded for searching elsewhere by getting kicked offline for thirty minutes. Then when you take into consideration the fact that a teammate accidentally jumping in your line of fire has the option to kick you, wouldn't you know it, but that also counts as a leave and can get you banned. What an incredibly awesome feature that totally won't backfire in the face of innocent gamers!
Call of Duty is a little different, but games that give you losses everytime they instantaneously throw you on the losing team of a match that's only 30 seconds away from ending? Man I don't know what I'd do without that on my record. And let's not forget all the perks, contracts, and challenges that
require you to lose and/or cost your team the match; like "Take out a Sentry Gun". Gee, how on earth could I accomplish that... unless I either A) intentionally suck by running to the middle of the map, shooting at the sky, and spinning around on the offchance that someone on the other team may or may not have the Sentry Gun perk, or B)
throw the other team my sentry gun, and hope that not only it won't kill my teammates but that I'll also be the one taking it out. More Halo than anything, these developer politics are about as fair and balanced as Fox News and the only people fooling themselves into thinking these methods are a legitimate means of accomplishing anything are the devs themselves. Games like Black Ops that require you to lose or screw over your own team incorporate one of the most asinine reward strategies I've ever seen in the history of video gaming.
Now what bothers me about the stats in MK? Well, yesterday I redeemed my online pass. I went to play a simple ranked match - it looked for an opponent and managed to find one who (lucky me) was several thousand wins and a handful of losses. What better way to break in the new guy than to toss him right to the sharks instead of pairing him with other people his level, right? Well the obvious solution to that problem is to just decline the match... except for the fact that you can't, and leaving at the character select screen counts as a disconnect.
Now everyone who looks at my record can see the disconnect, and get the wonderful impression that I'm a rage quitter.
To all the million dollar developers who implement label systems like these without having a single person on their team with the foresight to know when, and when not to tag on that label I say thank you - for making everyone think I leave matches like a five year old. I mean since I already, undeservedly have those labels, why not start rage quitting? I might just do it all the time.
Way to go, guys. :bs:
