Ever since fighting games obtained the ability to go online, players have been rage quitting and leaving matches early by any means necessary while developers have tried to come up with ways to keep them in check.
Rage quitters or “pluggers” have continued to be an issue in Tekken 8 from the time it released at the start of the year, but now it seems those types of players are starting to see some more immediate consequences for ruining the experience for everyone else.
Although Final Fantasy’s Clive Rosfield was the biggest addition to the game this week, the latest update to Tekken 8 also brought in something that probably made some players even happier.
The official patch notes state that a new disconnection penalty has been implemented for Ranked Matches.
According to the description, disconnecting during a match will now result in a loss of rank points by the offending player, and a notification will appear on the main menu screen when it happens.
This tactic is something that has existed in other fighting games for quite some time, but it isn’t always standard or available out the gate still since it can be difficult for developers to always determine who was at fault for a match disconnecting — so they often times stay on the cautious side to not punish innocent users.
Before now, Tekken 8 largely seemed to go after pluggers by handing out suspensions and bans, barring them from playing online at all for a period of time once reported by other users and / or receiving a high enough disconnection rate — and presumably also putting them in “jail” where they’re more likely to fight other rage quitters.
That apparently wasn’t enough of a deterrent, however, as those types of individuals continued to want to hold on to their precious ranked points they didn’t fully earn no matter what.
Now those points should drop if they do try and close the game, unplug their router or chuck their console out the window.
Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to ascertain how soon and often these penalties are applied and how many points are lost since rage quitters are not likely to rat themselves out online by sharing that info.
And we’re not really willing to risk messing up our own account in perfect standing to find out at the moment.
We’re also not sure if that means the other player will receive those match points too.
There is still going to be some players who may not be actual pluggers who end up getting punished as well by this new system.
The game has crashed 5 times today and everytime i get the message for the disconnect penalty…..
@tk8_report @TEKKEN— Mohammad Mishima (@Mohammad_Tareqq) December 17, 2024
We’ve seen some reports of users getting docked points after the game itself crashed on them.
So if you’re having issues with crashes and / or poor connection quality, it may be best to avoid Ranked Matches until that can be resolved on your end.
Hopefully, this leads to a healthier online experience where people are less willing to dip out to try and maintain their fake win streaks and ranks (but it’s probably near impossible to stop them entirely).