Bandai Namco has implemented a rather intense punishment for those who continuously disconnect from their online matches. According to an in-game message, the company will be imposing restrictions for players leaving matches by banning them from entering match lobbies for one full week. However, it’s the second part of these new rules that has the community talking. According to the message, if a player is repeatedly abusing the system by disconnecting from their matches, then the restricted ban might become a permanent one. In short, those who “rage quit” matches in Dragon Ball FighterZ are now subject to being permanently banned from online multiplayer.
As mentioned in both the link and the tweet above, the message is pretty cut and dry when it comes to stating the permanent ban: “If a player is found to be repeatedly engaging in the above behavior, the restriction mentioned above may become permanent for that player.” Considering that we are now in Season 3 for the game, it’s more than likely that this was done by both Bandai Namco and Arc System Works to try and keep the game’s quality of life up, as well as ensuring all fairness for every player. So far the decision for permanent bans on rage quitters has been received fairly well by the fighting game community.
For those who don’t quite understand the term, rage quitting is when a player leaves an online match before the fight/battle is concluded. This is typically done by the player who is about to lose, has been losing the entire match, or loses early on and simply quits because they see no point in continuing. This is often an issue in most online games, especially in competitive one-on-one fighting games. Some studios have attempted to deter this such as Capcom shaming players with specific badge in Street Fighter V, and Double Helix actually putting them in a “rage quitters jail” in their game Killer Instinct.