Bungie recently announced that in Reach they will punish gamers “who are habitually quitting out of games.” Bungie wants to “remove them from the population so they can't make everyone else keep having a bad time.” Does this mean that there will be a separate lobby for rage quitters, or a time penalty before they can enter another match? There are so many unanswered questions.

The fear is that disabled gamers who need to quit in the middle will be labeled as rage quitters. Certain people’s disabilities can hit at a moments notice, forcing them to quit out of a game. While according to the statement Bungie is only punishing those who habitually quit, it doesn’t discuss how they gauge that. Is that a certain percentage of total games? Frequency? What?

What has gone so wrong that it has come to this? Has Bungie exhausted all other options before walking down this path? Not really.

Take a look at Modern Warfare 2. The game allows players to jump into an existing match if there is a vacancy. This means that no matter how many people quit, the match will go on. On the flip side, this creates an unfair situation for incoming players. It is beyond infuriating to be placed on the losing side of a match and being massacred. On the other hand, if that happens, the player can just quit. MW2 doesn’t penalize the player for quitting; it only takes away bonus experience. Hardly a penalty considering all other achievements that carries over.

On the opposite side of the spectrum we have Halo 3, which doesn’t allow players to join into other games. In turn, when players quit, the teams are forever unbalanced. Once one player quits, there is often a ripple effect, especially in smaller matches. In addition to this, there are no real penalties for quitting. Losing one experience point is not enough to stop people from quitting.

People always want to quit early for different reasons, from the reasonable needing to put a child to bed to real fatigue from a disability. But then of course, there are just the immature quitters who leave when losing.

There is no real way for developers to know what the real reason is, so they treat all quitters the same. So which of these models is better for disabled gamers?

The Modern Warfare model is better, although it needs to be revamped. It is unfair to be placed in the losing side of a match. They should only count that game in the player’s stats if it benefits him. Getting a loss for a match the gamer only played a minute of is outright wrong. In Modern Warfare there is also no need to severely punish people because the game will always be full. This creates a much better environment for gamers who need to leave in the middle. There is no guilty feeling in deserting your team because someone else will take your place. If Bungie adopted this model, then it wouldn’t need to severely punish quitters.