Leaver Buster too severe
I wish to put some things forward for full disclosure. I did recently deliberately leave a game, and that I rightfully should be punished for that. I am not saying that I shouldn't be punished in this. I had made an estimate as to how long a game would take and when it ran longer than expected I had to leave, as the place where I was at was closing and I was getting kicked out.
I have had a number of times where I have been giving five game leaver buster because I disconnected from the game before it started, a fault of the internet connection where I was and a thing that I have no control over, or even much forewarning before hand to know about. In all of these cases they have resulted from two attempted games in a row having connection issues. These games were played on a less powerful computer which meant that for the first bit of the loading screen it would remain frozen and not show the ping at the bottom, so I will wait for it to finishing loading enough to get through that at times finding that by the time it had, I got this game has already finished messages having never connected to the game.
The point I am trying to get to is that while some form of punishment is necessary for leaving games the one hour and forty minutes of time out from the game seems overly harsh. I have limited time to play at times and with the twenty minute timer being the only leaver buster, that I have to dedicate an entire day of attempting to play to get through that, or I often can't play for days at a time. Further that this penalty doesn't have a time limit for how long I have to complete it, as in that the punishment doesn't seem to drop off after x days of not playing, it is a constantly prohibitive thing to at least my ability to play this game. This is a rarer thing for me as of recent, my new computer is much better equipped to run the game and I have had less internet issues, again through no action of mine as I am always on public WiFi, often at libraries or coffee houses.
I think that a shorter wait time would still accomplish the goal of discouraging players from dropping from games they do not want to continue to try to win but would also be more fair to those players who have to leave for one reason or another. Say ten minute per game time out instead of twenty minutes, with the same number of games on time out.
On a related note it would be wonderful if we could still use the client while in leaver buster que, say to build item sets view the client side information and other such things, that are not apart of in game time.
