'Street Fighter V' Rage-Quitters Will Be Branded With Marks of Shame

Ever since it launched back in February, Street Fighter V has been plagued with "rage quitters," or players who realize there's no possible way they can win and thus quit the match before they have to suffer the indignity of the final blow. But it's also about much more than denying your enemy some satisfaction. Quitting early allows players to maintain a high win-loss ratio, making it easy for them to keep a high ranking in the game.

But developer Capcom appears poised to brand repeated offenders with a mark of shame. Based on screenshots leaked from NeoGAF user Moaradin, Capcom will start slapping a skull icon on the profiles of players who frequently quit their matches early, and players who consistently stick it through the end will get their own shield icon announcing how trustworthy they are. It doesn't say if there's a way to get the icon removed with repeated good behavior.

In the words of the screenshot, "Special icons will be displayed on the Fighter Profiles of players who frequently disconnect, as well as those who never do, making it easier for players with the same icon to battle against each other."

The leaked information gives no clue as to when players might see this in the live game, but there's little reason to doubt its authenticity. Capcom reportedly neglected to require a password when the latest test build went live on Steam, thus allowing curious players to swarm in and dig around with impunity.

Players have long criticized Capcom for not putting in greater safeguards against rage-quitting. Fortunately, the company started trying to address the problem almost immediately after launch, first by finding players with abnormally high disconnect rates and then stripping them of some of the League Points used for ranking. (As the new leaked screenshot shows, that remains in the game.) But the conditions were very specific, and unlikely to catch skilled offenders who may usually win but want to avoid a loss from time to time. "To be clear, we are only targeting the worst offenders in our system, so if you have had a few instances of being disconnected during a match, you have nothing to worry about," Capcom said in its post from March. "The players who fit the criteria of what we would call a 'Rage Quitter' typically have an 80-90% disconnect rate and their accounts sit far outside of the norm as compared to the majority of other players."

And so Capcom refined the system in August to target any player who leaves a match three times within two hours, a design which seems more likely to accurately flag the offending behavior. Players thus caught then suffer a staggering deduction of 1,000 League Points and a 24-hour ban.

This wasn't without its problems, further pointing to the difficulties of curbing this kind of bad sportsmanship, as some players claimed they were getting banned because of other players quitting on them. Capcom's Neidel Crisan responded saying that this shouldn't be happening despite numerous reports to the contrary:

"The way it works is the system will penalize the player who is disconnected from the server mid-match. If you're returned to matchmaking after another player pulls the plug, you won't be penalized," he said.

And now we have this icon system, which appears to serve as little more than a warning. For months now players have been wondering why Capcom doesn't just implement a far simpler system instead of all this complicated maneuvering: The match could count as a loss for the player who leaves early and count as a win for the player who stays online. But so far Capcom has made no public moves to embrace such a design.