Street Fighter V launched with no system in place to punish rage-quitters, a frankly mad state of affairs in this, the year of Zangief. In response to complaints, Capcom vowed to punish naughty quitters—and now those punishments have begun. Writing on the Capcom Unity blog, Capcom's 'haunts' has said that "roughly 30" players had their League Points and ranks docked last week, an action the company considers a warning. From now on, there will be weekly sweeps on accounts with "abnormally high disconnect rates" (as in, an 80-90% discount rate), with the offenders having their LP reset.
This is not the permanent solution promised last week, but Capcom says it'll let us all know when that system is in place. The company also said last week that it wants players to send in proof of rage-quitting players, but it seems that's no longer needed. Here's a bit more detail about those punishments:
"First off, we want to thank the community for being so proactive on this issue. Ever since last week, we’ve received a ton of videos both here on Unity and our social channels which we've been able to cross reference with our data and put together a clear picture as to which players are abusing the system. Though we were pretty confident that players in our system who had high disconnect rates were indeed those who were attempting to avoid a loss at all costs, we didn’t want to start dishing out any punishments without clear proof.
"Since then, we've been working hard with the SFV server team to put together a process to pinpoint users who are clearly abusing the system and we're happy to announce that we can now do this without any proof of video. We will be punishing players on a weekly basis who have extremely high disconnect rates coupled with unrealistic win rates.
"To be clear, we are only targeting the worst offenders in our system, so if you have had a few instances of being disconnected during a match, you have nothing to worry about. The players who fit the criteria of what we would call a “Rage Quitter” typically have an 80-90% disconnect rate and their accounts sit far outside of the norm as compared to the majority of other players."
You're probably wondering what the promised March update has in store. Good news: there'll be a "major news drop" about that next week.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.