What I mean by "I don't see the point of punishing the smurfs" is that if the games matchmaking is working properly, smurfs would rather rapidly be put with people of their own skill, so you'd really only get them 1-3 games where they'll go stompy stompy. I just don't see the need for ADDITIONAL punishment.
The reason for the punishment is because one way or another, it's basically a form of trolling/griefing, in a genre that tends to have LONG matches, complete with penalties for leaving early... so once a smurf starts ruining a match, guess what, you *will* put up with it for the entire match, or you get penalized. And the matchmaking in these games is never perfect, and sometimes just outright decides to barely work at all. And smurfs are pretty darn frequent... these arent isolated incidents.
In other irritating news, Dawngate has been cancelled, because EA. I should have seen this coming. Someone I know *did* see this coming. After trying it myself, I showed it to a friend awhile back, who said "Wow, yeah, that looks pretty good. But it's under EA. It's probably going to get cancelled before too long, because that's the sort of thing they do. I'd try it if it was under anyone else, but under them it's just a matter of time, so there's no point". I kept thinking, why would they do that, the game is doing well and the population keeps rising. Even during the middle of the night, I'd never had any trouble finding matches.
But recently, BAM, it was over. And I feel sorry for the devs... the jackasses at EA didn't exactly give them alot of advance warning. This was for a game where EA did basically NOTHING to advertise or promote the game (and it's not the first time they've done this, that's for sure). And one where the guys that the devs dealt with directly had freely admitted that they "didn't actually understand how this genre of game like this works". This was also RIGHT after a game-changing patch, which was also the point where the devs were deciding to switch from LoL's style of F2P, to Dota's "get every character, but there's lots of extra stuff you can buy" payment model.
The going theory is that EA basically figured "Well, Dota and League just print money like crazy... if we, the Great and Mighty EA, put out a game like that we'll DEFINITELY get the same results". Upon this not happening WHILE THE GAME IS STILL IN BETA, they pulled the plug.
And at this point, I'm totally fed up with this crap from them. Way too many times, EA will take a game, or an entire developer, that I like and just DESTROY it. It's gotten to the point where every time EA acquires a new property, I just EXPECT them to wreck it somehow, and become amazingly surprised if this does not happen.
Just... ugh. Whole thing is pretty frustrating. Just like every other time they've pulled this crap.
....there, rant over. Bah.
