Forgive me if this has been talked about before, but for a long time now we full well know unbalanced teams (eg. 3v7, 2v8, etc.) in pubs has been a problem. One of the major reasons for this I have noticed is people just giving up if an objective gets taken too fast or they are close to possibly losing - some people simply be bothered to wait it out and try to win. This seemed to be even more apparent with the inclusion of profile stats, due to some wanting to keep their win:loss positive, or as high as they can.
It’s clear we need to encourage people to stay in the matches in the first place, rather than trying to balance the imbalances - skill imbalancing is another issue entirely and should be looked at separately. So my suggestion is this:
Like competitive games/matches, give players a warning upon leaving a match. This doesn’t carry any kind of penalty like the comp matches of course, but simply warn the player telling them “Abandoning your team-mates causes imbalances and will result in a loss for you. Are you sure you want to quit?”, and mark a loss on their profile for leaving.
Now of course, there will always be people who get immediately salty and will leave matches regardless, even if there’s a penalty, so there’s not use catering to those people - however I feel this some-what small change might be worth a try, because it may have some positive effect. I’m not saying this is any kind of silver bullet or anything like that, but it might reduce the imbalances in terms of player numbers in pubs slightly.
Thoughts?