I loved Rocket League, was top 1%, and quit it because of the casual game ban you eat when leaving poorly matched games. I already wasn‘t playing ranked anymore cause I reached my goal so I just liked to play casual games.

I didn‘t mind people leaving casual games or leaving myself cause the outcome of the match didn‘t matter, what mattered was whether it was a well-matched game that was fun to play or not. And if it wasn‘t, you left and went back into queue, and it took like five seconds to match a new game.

Which is also why I didn‘t mind if my team was leaving. I just shrugged, went into a new queue, five seconds later I was back in the game.

But nah, nowadays devs gotta have this weird obsession over forcing people to play matches out even if there‘s no stakes other than whether you‘re having fun or not and even though there‘s no victims here with the outcome being irrelevant and the queue timers being super low. It also doesn‘t matter how much time into a match has passed, the game‘s the same at minute 1 as it is at minute 3 or 5, you‘re not losing progress as in a MOBA or RTS match.

It breeds toxicity too: Instead of leaving, people now feel forced to stay, so they‘re just in there, pissed off, and take it out on their teammates.

Just allaround a dumb change likely initiated by a vocal minority of the playerbase.

Like, fuck quitting ranked games, but casual? Unnecessary.

Rant end. This change annoyed me af too when it happened, so I can definitely relate to OP.