Anti-Rage Quitting

What happens when you quit an online match? Your opponent gets to watch Your Head A-Splode.

Your previous online play session didn't end naturally, which is PREEEEETTY suspicious. If this keeps happening, we're gonna have to block you from playing online for a while. Make sure your Internet isn't busted and try again.

— Splatoon 2 ragequit warning

Anyone who's ever played an online multiplayer game has encountered the Rage Quit. Maybe they're mad that they're losing. Maybe they don't like the game. Or maybe they're just a griefer. Either way, rage quitting disrupts the flow of the game and annoys the other player(s)—especially if the game ends because of it. And if a game accumulates a large number of rage quitters, then legitimate players may eventually leave the game (or at least its multiplayer mode) out of frustration due to never being able to actually finish a match.

Many game developers have taken notice of this and implemented ways to minimize the effect of rage quitting; in games that require a set number of people, players who leave early may be replaced by bots of varying skill. Another way is to introduce mechanics specifically tailored to discourage quitting in the middle of a game. This usually comes in one of two forms (though they may be combined):

• Punishing players for leaving early. A common form of this is having a withdrawal count as a loss on the quitter's record, but no one else's. Repeated quits may result in further actions, such as suspending the player's online privileges temporarily. In the case of particularly egregious offenders, these bans may end up permanent. However, this also punishes players who disconnect for other reasons (such as a power outage, loss of internet connection, or just having to do something else), as well as players who have to leave for rational reasons (such as a desperately-needed bathroom break, someone telling them to stop playing, or a life-threatening medical emergency). To avoid this, some punishments only start triggering with several disconnects, either consecutively or total in a short span of time; so obvious offenders are still punished but people who only leave once in a blue moon for valid reasons are spared.
• Rewarding players for staying until the end of the game. A game may give players a small bonus or boost of some sort for playing the entire match, even if they lose. On the one hand, this encourages people to stay even if they would normally quit and doesn't punish people if they have legitimate reasons to leave; on the other, people who don't care about the rewards won't have any more reason to stay in a game than before.

See also Anti-Grinding, Anti Poop-Socking, Anti-Trolling Features, and Video Game Cruelty Punishment for other ways in which developers discourage unwanted behavior.

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Examples:

Board Games

• Board Game Arena: If someone abandons a game, the remaining player(s) can kick them out. This gets them a harsher Elo penalty than if they had played it out, in addition to a reputation penalty. Additionally, if it's a 2-player game, a hopelessly losing player is allowed to concede a game for no penalty (other than the usual game loss) as long as it's at 50% progression or more.
• Chess is a bit of a special case, as resigning hopeless games is a common and accepted practice. However, chess sites like chess.com and Lichess still require you to make a sincere attempt to win every game (so no rage resigning because you don't feel like playing against your opponent's chosen opening). They also require you to actually resign if you want to abandon a hopeless game — you'll be penalized for spitefully running down your clock instead.
• The electronic (browser, mobile, and Steam) versions of Ticket to Ride use a karma system where finishing a game raises your karma by 1 point and leaving a game early or timing out lowers it by 1 point. When you create a game, you can set a minimum karma level, meaning that people who rage quit (or regularly idle during games) will have a smaller pool of games to choose from.
• The official Wingspan app uses a karma system, which goes up by 1 point every time you successfully complete an online match. However, you're deducted 5 points as punishment if you're the first to timeout or forfeit the match.

Card Games

• Multiplayer online card games from Silver Creek Entertainment, such as Spades or Euchre, list among other player stats an Incomplete Game percentage. For most players, this number is 1% or less, and the servers actually make near-heroic efforts to reestablish broken connections. Any player with a 5% or higher incomplete percentage gets an admin warning, a suspension or outright ban.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links gives you small rewards even if you lose a duel. If you surrender or you cut off your connection, however, it's treated as though the duel never happened in the first place - you get nothing and nothing that happened in it applies to any of your missions.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel works the same way. While the losers of a duel usually gets low score that doesn't get them any post-duel rewards, conceding also negates any progression towards daily or lifetime missions, the Duel Pass or progress for a event's reward track.
• Mahjong Soul has a very harsh rank point penalty for coming in last place. Why is this an example of this trope? Because rather than make disconnectors leave the game entirely, the game will instead automate the missing player's actions, making them discard every tile they draw; this is to give the player a chance to come back, but without holding up the game for everyone else. A player who becomes a "discard everything they draw" automaton is extremely unlikely to earn any more points^note because they cannot call tiles to win hands; there is a chance that they still can if their existing hand is tenpai (one tile from a complete hand) and the round goes into exhaustive draw in which everyone in tenpai splits a 3,000-point reward taken from non-tenpai players (unless everyone is in tenpai or no-tenpai, in which case no exchange of points occurs) but it is extremely unlikely and will likely bleed points since their freshly-drawn-and-discarded tiles (possibly making the game end early due to negative score) will be ripe pickings for the remaining players. That said, the penalty applies all the same to last-place players who have the sportsmanship to finish the game, creating a Morton's Fork for players who may not have any chance of bouncing back into a higher standing due to being dealt a crappy hand for their last one.

Eastern RPGs

• Combined with Obvious Rule Patch: Rage-quitting was incredibly rampant in Pokémon Black and White and Black 2 and White 2. In response, Pokémon X and Y has a mechanic where anyone with excessive amounts of disconnects will be blocked from playing online for a short amount of time. If they're playing a rating battle, the ranking will also drop significantly. These people will also be ineligible to play online competitions, or if they disconnect too much during one, they are disqualified—considering rare Pokémon and Pokémon with unique abilities are given out merely for participating in them, that's quite the incentive to keep on playing. It doesn't entirely stop people from rage-quitting left and right, but there's a lot less of it than there was before. This approach was taken up a notch in Pokémon Sun and Moon with the competitively lucrative Mega Stones, unobtainable through normal circumstances, given out as participation prizes for the online competitions. Though they're given out to everyone at a later date, rage-quitters will have to wait several months before they can obtain them.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet keeps the mechanics from previous generations, along with introducing anti rage quit mechanics for Tera Raids. There is, however, a Game-Breaking Bug that can ruin these raids. If a host cancels a online Tera Raid, all joiners get hit with a penalty of being unable to join random raids for a while, even though the raid never officially began. This also goes for joiners that quit out of Tera Raids before they even began. This is not the intended behavior, as Pokémon Sword and Shield allows joiners to join new Max Raid battles if one was canceled before it even began, or left a lobby.
  • Running from a online Raid battle in Sword & Shield or Scarlet & Violet will give the fleeing player a loss in their record, regradless of the raid battle's eventual conclusion.
• If you dodge out of invasions in Dark Souls II by force-quitting the game (unlike in Dark Souls you can't choose to 'Quit' from the menu any more once someone else has connected to your world) too many times, you'll "break" your connection to the online world of the game, meaning you won't be allowed to have ANY beneficial online connections, such as summoning other players to help you, or allowing them to summon you so you can reap rewards for helping them. Rather nastily, it doesn't actually disconnect you from the online game world, meaning invaders can still invade you. An item called the Bone of Order, given to you for free when you start the game, can allow you to repair your connection to the game, to allow players who were penalised by accidental internet dropouts or hardware crashes to avoid being penalised unfairly; while it's single-use, a replacement one will eventually spawn at the altar in Things Betwixt where you begin the game after an uncertain amount of time (the problem is that there is nothing that tells you this anywhere in the game).
• If you reset Dragon Quest XI after screwing up in the middle of a forge, the game will not let you try again for a few minutes because the forge has overheated.

Fighting Games

• Marvel vs. Capcom 3 will mark someone who disconnects themselves in an online match as "having bad connection" and will get lumped with other players labeled as such.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • If you quit an online match in Mortal Kombat X, your character's head explodes and your opponent wins with a "Quitality".
  • Mortal Kombat 11, meanwhile, either has the quitter impaled or their entire body explode.
  • Mortal Kombat 1 retains the exploding Quitality if they were in the air, while the quitter snap their own necks a la Hara-Kiri if they were on the ground.
• In Street Fighter V, disconnecting from a ranked match several times in a 24-hour period will result in a loss in LP.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U has rules that can disqualify you from playing online such as targeting a single player, idling, and disconnecting during a match. Players are banned for a minimum of 10 minutes and can go higher.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate kicks players automatically for repeatedly self-destructing (falling off the stage on purpose) during matches.

First-Person Shooters

• In Call of Duty games, you won't receive your endgame XP bonus if you quit midmatch, and quitting will count as a loss for you. In addition, although this one isn't as bad, Black Ops 2 gives you a medal called "Strength and Honor" if you stick around through the end. In Black Ops 3 and Black Ops 4, you're encouraged to at least finish a game you join midmatch, as joining an in-progress game and losing won't count toward your loss stat. Crashing your game or turning off your console however does not count towards your loss stat; it is not uncommon to see players with hundreds of wins and precisely 0 losses.
• Titanfall 2 shares a similar mechanic to Call of Duty above, in that if you join a match mid-game where your team is losing, the loss won't be counted on your record.
• Every mainline Halo game incorporating matchmaking has enforced this, with penalties up to and including temporary matchmaking bans for excessive quitting. Titles from Halo: Reach onward also provide experience only upon completion of a match.
• Overwatch
  • The game enforces a 75% penalty to EXP for players who repeatedly ragequit. In Competitive Mode, quitting in mid-match, as explained in an ALL CAPS warning on a red background, will also temporarily suspend you from subsequent Competitive matches, up to and including being banned for the rest of the season if you do it enough times.^note Note that while in other modes, the window for early quit ends while the "VICTORY" or "DEFEAT" animation is playing, not during the "MATCH COMPLETE" or final score tally, so if you're not careful trying to leave the match you can get penalized for an early quit even though you did quit after the match ended.
  • A player's Endorsement Level will lower if they leave matches prematurely too often. Having a higher Endorsement Level affects matchmaking and provides higher level-rewards, so lowering your level can result in worse teammates and diminished rewards.
• In Paladins, players are unable to leave a match in progress without closing the game entirely. Opening the game again before the match ends will drop a player right back into the same match they just left, and it still counts as a win or a loss. Not only that, but XP and Gold are calculated based on how well you did in the match; even if a player finishes the round after rejoining, they'll get a penalty due to lack of effort.
• In Team Fortress 2, either leaving a Mann Up game without winning/losing a single wave or leaving a Competitive match at all results in the game handing out an "abandon penalty", which disallows you from playing those modes again for a certain amount of time. Continued abandons will make the penalty last significantly longer.

Live-Action TV — Reality and Game Shows

• Survivor: After two players quit at the same time in Nicaragua, a rule was introduced that considers quitting a violation of the players' contract, and allows the producers to withhold their consolation prize, and if applicable, their spot on the jury.^note Voted out players leaving the Edge of Extinction is considered okay. This may be waived if the producers feel the quitter had a valid reason for doing so, such as an injury serious enough to demand treatment, but not life-threatening to necessitate a medical evacuation. Also note that no player has reappeared on the show after quitting the game.

Mobile Games

• In PVP mode of Kingdom Hearts χ, a player is given five tries per day to rank up. Competing in a PVP match — win, lose, or draw — earns a player daily, weekly, and monthly rewards if they do it enough times. There's also a points system which automatically gives rewards when a player hits a certain score: a win is worth 100 points, a draw is worth 50, and a loss is worth 10. However, quitting mid-match earns zero points, the match doesn't count towards any of the reward goals, and it still uses up one try. This encourages a player to stick around in a match, even if they're being outclassed by their opponent.
• Pokémon GO's online PVP takes a simple approach. Rage-quitting simply counts as a loss for the quitter and a win for their opponent.
• In Tales of Crestoria, if you force quit the game at any time during an Arena match, it counts as a loss and you lose the Arena Ticket expended to try the match; you only recover an Arena Ticket every two hours. In addition, staying until the end of the match (even if you lose) has the match count towards Battle Pass rewards; forfeiting or quitting mid-match earns nothing at all. Finally, in order to maintain your battle rank from week to week, you have to fight in the Arena at least forty times and have a win rate of at least seventy percent. Doing both keeps your rank in tact, doing only one of the two causes you to drop one rank at the end of the week, and doing neither drops you by two ranks. Since quitting mid-match counts as a loss, rage-quitting too frequently means that your win rate, and therefore your battle rank, will suffer.
• Tom and Jerry Chase features a Karma mechanic to punish disconnects. Karma increases over time and by completing games, and decreases for disconnecting or going AFK. A player that maintains high Karma gets bonus rewards for doing so, while a player that lets their Karma get too low will be barred entry from certain game modes.

MMORPGs

• Star Trek Online's multiplayer raids (called Special Task Forces, or "STFs" for short) feature a quitting penalty that bans people who leave early from queuing for another STF for two hours. This is not applied to private queues and switches off after fifteen minutes in the scenario, just in case people are quitting because the scenario has become genuinely unwinnable.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, leaving in the middle of a dungeon or a raid or withdrawing from the queue three times in a row locks you out from the duty finder for thirty minutes. Both penalties are to discourage people from bailing, and to get people to stop signing up for duties they aren't ready for. The withdrawing penalty was introduced primarily to punish tanks (and to a lesser extent healers) who had basically instant queues due to imbalances between the number of tank/healers and DPS. The Duty Finder, if the "in progress" option was enabled, used to tell how many bosses were killed (now it shows how many minutes the group spent in the duty), and tanks would try to find groups that were on the final boss but had their tank bail on rather than fresh groups in order to get a quick clear and be rewarded with their currency without doing the whole dungeon. For the various PVP modes, losing teams would still earn a decent amount of PVP currency and EXP.
• Among Us had issues with people promptly leaving public games if they weren't the Impostor (and to a lesser extent, people who quit as soon as they were killed or Impostors that left as soon as they were caught). The devs eventually made it so anyone who disconnected too frequently would have to wait five minutes before joining another lobby.

Puzzle Games

• Aside from being an Arcade Game and thus inherently discouraging ragequitting by charging money for each play, Tetris: The Grand Master 3 - Terror-Instinct discourages ragequitting in two of its own ways if you're logged in with an account:
  • The game keeps track of your last seven games, and if the average of your best four games exceed your current "qualified grade", you'll be given a "Promotional Exam" in which you try to meet or exceed the target grade; doing so increases your qualified grade to the target grade, giving you a measure of how well you generally do and not just your best performance. In fact, reaching the qualified grade immediately below Grand Master is required to be able to achieve the GM grade.
  • If you're doing poorly compared to your qualified grade, the game will quietly hand out a "demotional exam" with the opposite mechanism: if you do not meet your qualified grade, it will decrease by one.

Racing Games

• If you leave an online match of TrackMania before the round is up, you won't get any ladder points, even if your best time qualified you for them (i.e. if you did better than at least one other driver higher than you in the ladder).
• Every Mario Kart game from Mario Kart Wii onward has a number-based rank system for multiplayer racing. This rank number increases with good performances in races and decreases with bad performances. However, anyone who disconnects mid-race will suffer a severe drop in points, far more so than if they placed last. For instance, in Mario Kart 8, you begin with 1000 rank points. Coming in last place is a drop of no more than fifty points, and that's only if you came in last place while ranked drastically higher than everyone else in the race. Quitting mid-race is a drop of one hundred points at a minimum, and it can keep go higher if you you continue to quit without completing a race.

Real-Time Strategy

• Starcraft II: Instead of "Quit", the menu reads "Surrender". Unfortunately, this is also the only option that shows up if you're playing alone and you get disconnected.
  • If a player disconnects via internet or closes the game, the game records the match online after a 60 second timeout. If the player who disconnected their internet or forced the game shut doesn't reconnect to the service and continue the match within that time limit, the ranking for the player who disconnected is automatically dropped and the player they were facing is given an instant win via default.
• Dawn of War II: There is no save option in the campaign missions, and quitting counts as a loss.
• Town of Salem gives you two free early leaves (leaving before you die), a 5 minute timeout for your third, a 30 minute timeout for your fourth, a 1 hour timeout for your 5th-9th leaves, and a 24 hour timeout on your tenth leave and beyond. This resets each week, and every 10 games takes off a strike. There is no penalty for leaving after your death, however those who stay until the end of the game will receive town points even if they lose (10 if they win, 5 if they lose), which can be used to purchase scrolls that boost your chances of getting a specific role, along with cosmetics.
• Abandoning a game in progress or getting reported too many times in Dota 2 matchmaking games will get you stuck in a Low Priority game along with other similar players. What makes being in Low Priority harsh is that to get out of the trench, you have to win the Low Priority game, making the stake immensely higher than even ranked matchmaking.

Rhythm Games

• In the arcade versions of Groove Coaster, in local and online multiplayer modes, players are ranked not on raw score, but on stars they can earn. While scoring and chaining ranks earn you a lot of stars, you can also earn extra stars through bonuses for using challenge items, style bonuses (such as "most balanced", "most right-handed", and "most frenetic"), playing a song for your first time, and being one of the one to three unfortunate souls to not have your song picked. In online matches stars double as event points, so even if you're constantly getting 4th place either in-song or throughout the session, don't give up!

Simulation Games

• Star Fox Command's now-defunct Nintendo WFC mode would show, in addition to your matches played, matches won, etc., a "Dropouts" counter, which increased every time you disconnected from a match (which caused the entire match to end for all players, by the way) for any reason.
• War Thunder: if you leave or suicide while having still available vehicles to use, you get for each of them a crew lock for several minutes or until the match ends, representing your crew operating "in a mission".

Third-Person Shooters

• Splatoon makes no bones that ragequitting is for chumps.
  • The games make it hard to "rage quit" to begin with, as the game doesn't let you exit during a Turf War or Ranked Battle fight, meaning that the only way to quit a match is to manually close the software or turn off the console.
  • Disconnecting from a match will result in a penalty that depends on the mode that was being played: points will be deducted from the player's rank meter in a Ranked Battle, the player's pay grade will be cut by 5% in Salmon Run, and the player won't receive any of the cash or experience that they would have earned from the battle.
  • In addition to the above, Splatoon 2 issues a clear and present warning if you disconnect repeatedly, advising you to check your Internet connection in case of a problem. If you keep at it, the game will eventually issue a temporary ban from online play, which can last from five minutes up to a full thirty minutes if you continue to disconnect after this.
  • From Splatoon 2 onwards, the game also includes several Anti-Frustration Features for the teammates of a player who disconnects from a match. For example, if a player quits during a Ranked Battle and their team loses the match because of it, their rank will not be affected by the loss. Likewise, if a player quits during a Salmon Run shift, their team's Golden Egg quota will immediately be lowered for the remainder of the shift.
  • In Splatoon 3, if a player disconnects early enough in a match, the match instantly ends in a No Contest and only the disconnecting player suffers a loss. This highly discourages players from ragequitting as soon as the match starts and prevents their would-be colleagues from playing at a handicap.
• In Warframe, should you leave a conclave match early, you'll receive less standing for the Conclave Syndicate for the next few matches. Given that most people tend to ignore the competitive multiplayer, though, results have been mixed.

Western RPGs

• In the multiplayer mode of Mass Effect 3, players earn XP based on the points they score during a match, even if the group fails to complete its objective or doesn't make it to extraction. You don't get the XP if you leave early. Additionally, it's possible to promote max-level multiplayer characters to War Assets in the single player game, meaning that not rage quitting in multiplayer can actually help your single player campaign as well.

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