I was considering this yesterday when my power went out. People one death leave for a variety of reasons. Power goes out, they’re ass blasted, they’re trying to do some irritatingly specific daily on a time limit, etc. Gaijin has tried to “solve” this by adding stock tanks as reserve options, although obviously this didn’t really do anything productive.
Regardless of why people don’t finish a match or the solutions, locking their crews out does ensure something: for any match they enter afterwards, their new team is now permanently stuck with someone that can only play a single tank. Effectively, you’re not actually punishing the person who may be willing to abandon a match, but you’re punishing the 15 other people on their team. If the player left intentionally, they won’t care. If they had no choice, freezing their tanks isn’t “disciplining” anyone. Pragmatically, it’s an utterly pointless system and really only exists to make other players feel like something was done.
Maybe if a player leaves with a threshold of spawn points / arcade spawns still available, a new player could fill that slot. Although, I’m not sure how that would work for either the backend or in terms of how people queue.