maybe my original post missed the target. maybe punishment isnt the fix. your points are fair and show an issue that i may have missed in the original post. my main point i wanted to get across is there is an issue. lets find fixes for it. anything that can make the game more enjoyable.
I think there are a couple things they could do, giving my ideas:
I would make maps more representative of the gamemode (arcade maps stay in arcade, RB gets decently sized maps that feel like realistic tank maps more often than not, and SB gets exclusively the biggest and most realistic maps and arcade maps of any kind are banned). This would remove the most legitimate criticism I think for leaving early, since the maps are genuinely terrible for RB and SB. Stuff like BR decompression and making CAS more realistic would help too, but I think the first point makes the difference between being a good game and a bad game - even a bad game on a good map isn’t that terrible of a game because it’s fun.
Additionally, make players who zero death leave be replaced by the matchmaker, so teams that have 0-death leavers get a replacement.
But for actually preventing 1-death leaving, a couple or all of these could help,
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Rewards for defeats do not change preferably. But rewards for victories are significantly increased. Maybe like double rewards. Make the game more competitive where if you want your game to mean something, you really have to fight for it as a team. Otherwise you just get the default reward.
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Rewards increase for victories are only given if you stay to the end of the match, use all your spawns and only leave then, or stay within a relatively long period of time before leaving (say 15min). If you leave early, despite being able to spawn more vehicles, you simply do not get that double rewards for the victory if you win.
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Leaving early for a defeat under the same circumstances decreases rewards by 50% or more, with no effect on repair cost being decreased. Reward loss could be exponential perhaps, leaving within 2 minutes gives 10% or 0% reward for participating in the match, regardless of what you do. While leaving 15 minutes in gives like 80% or so, presuming you have SP left to use. (Leaving because you have no spawns is not affected by this). This could be for defeats only, or regardless of victories and defeats, up to interpretation.
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Maybe make SL slightly exponential reward over time, getting kills at 0-5 minutes into the match gives 100% SL reward, but getting kills say 10-15 minutes in gives 120%-130% reward or so. Both to compensate for a less target rich environment as well as to encourage you to stay and fight late game. Would compensate for repair costs more and yield more rewards, and would stack with victory bonuses.
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Maybe increase the crew slots in game by two, so you get 4 crew slots when starting the game and 7 crew slots before you need to buy more for GE. Also make experting crews not require a level at all to do. I say this because the crew system actively encourages taking few vehicles and leaving early. If they want players to stay, they should encourage making lineups.
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Either the one above or making every vehicle purchased even in the tech tree have a set number of backups (5-10), and have backups handed out like candy (like hard-fought victories gives you more backups to compensate for what you took). Either point 6 or point 7 should make taking more vehicles more possible.
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Regardless of which previous point is implemented, if any, they should require all or most crew slots to have a vehicle to take into battle. Lineups with 1 or 2 vehicles only should simply not be allowed into the game. And I don’t care how good you are, all those youtubers bringing one tank is just setting a bad example for the playerbase.
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Add more vehicles to the game, especially at BRs that don’t have many for certain nations. Like could be literally copy-paste vehicles, adding “early” and “late” vehicle variants with only minor changes like some suspension change that happened in 1946 and doesn’t actually affect gameplay, or “early” and “late” vehicles that represent say a vehicle in a 1950s vehicle configuration with only 1950s ammo, with a late with the 1950s vehicle but with 1970s ammunition as it was still in service, thus giving two vehicles you can take out when the better one is destroyed. Or simply vehicles with zero difference if they’re at BRs that have no other vehicles, like how the Chi-To and Chi-To Late have no gameplay difference and no BR difference, yet they exist to give multiple vehicles to take out instead of just one.
There is multiple things they can do, some require more effort than others.