Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is “strengthening timeout penalties” for rage-quitting, but all players want is for the quitters to lose

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is dialing up its anti-rage-quit measures, but players seem pretty unified in wanting an additional penalty: you rage-quit, you lose that match.

Right now, there really isn’t any meaningful punishment for rage-quitting aside from increased matchmaking time, but in a tweet, Bandai Namco says it’s “strengthening timeout penalties against players with excessive disconnection or quitting rates during online matches.” Essentially, it sounds like it’ll put rage-quitters in timeout for longer than before but isn’t adding any additional penalties for now. And apparently, that simply isn’t enough for most players.

The overwhelming response to the above tweet is a very specific request for Bandai Namco to simply automatically name the rage-quitters the losers of the matches they quit, and the remaining fighters the winners. “Please make it so that the person who disconnects will get a loss while the person who didn’t will get the win,” reads a tweet with almost 2,000 likes at the time of writing. The vast majority of other responses are asking for roughly the same thing.

I’m no game developer, but my immediate concern with automatically declaring rage-quitters the losers is that it would also apply to players who actually lose connection, and that disadvantage would disproportionately impact lower income players and people from underprivileged communities. Some players have floated an idea to simply give the fighters who remain in a match the win without dishing out losses to disconnected players, but frankly, I don’t know what ripple effects that might have on the overall scoring/ranking system.

For now, one can only hope the increased timeout penalty will dissuade a meaningful amount of players from rage-quitting.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero “saw outstanding sales,” and Bandai Namco says roughly 90% of that was from European and North American fans.