The new penances for titles and some others lessened the quality of matchmaking a lot. There’s some new rewards now that encourage players to abandon a mission, such as:
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The penance to not die 10 times in auric is completely cheesable by just quitting out of games to avoid having the counter reset. This causes people to just leave games when they go down and don’t want to risk dying.
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The penance to not die 5 times in auric maelstrom has the exact same issue.
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The penance to beat an auric maelstrom without downs encourages people to just abandon a mission the first time anyone goes down.
What this causes is that there’s a ton of half finished games that are now backfillable. In actual practice this means that a vast majority of auric/auric maelstrom queues now don’t actually put you into a fresh game, they put you into some halfway point to replace some sore loser who quit out. Obviously this already happened before sometimes and it’s by design, but it happens way more now with those penances being in the game.
Another thread here acknowledges this issue so I know it’s not just me:
As for why backfilling is annoying, for me there’s no other reason than it’s lame to load into a halfway through mission. I’d prefer to do them from the start but there’s no option to start a mission (unlike VT2) so there’s no way to avoid this. Even ignoring this it’s bad design to have penances that cause teammates to quit out mid match a lot. It makes missions annoying (go to res someone and he just alt+f4s instead) and the bots replacing them are absolute trash which adds to the issue.
TL;DR the new penances cause tons of half empty games which makes quickplay annoying and should be looked at