Pokemon Unite is brilliant, for the most part. Despite being a MOBA - a genre often inherently tied to complexity - it’s approachable to all kinds of people. Also, it’s not really a Pokemon game at all, nor is it just “baby’s League of Legends.” Pokemon Unite is its own distinct thing and that’s great, although it unfortunately suffers from one major issue that’s even more infuriating than how broken Zapdos is: idling.
Idling refers to when a player goes AFK or decides they’re not arsed playing anymore. When this occurs, you’re a player down in a 5v5 game, meaning the enemy team has 25 percent more damage, bulk, and presence than you do. It’s over twice as impactful as a player getting sent off in a football match, especially when you consider that, in a MOBA, it gives the opposing team a 100 percent opportunity to dominate at least one lane. Sometimes people who go idle do so by accident - their internet could flop or they could have an emergency to respond to. Most of the time, however, it’s just people being sore losers because the first 30 seconds of the match didn’t go their way. These players need to be punished - from what I can tell, Pokemon Unite isn’t doing a very good job of that right now.
After five minutes pass in a Pokemon Unite match, you’re given the opportunity to suggest surrendering. You can’t surrender unless over half the team agrees to it, but if three people vote to throw in the towel, it doesn’t matter how much you want to swing a comeback - the game is over. The thing is, if you’re getting battered a minute in - which, let’s be real, is not necessarily indicative of how the game is going to end - and someone wants to pack it in, they occasionally just sit in the spawn and that’s that. You can report these players - I’ve already reported several - but I have yet to receive a notification that my reports resulted in corrective action. People are currently spoiling games for other players and getting away with it.
In other online games, idlers are often called griefers. They don’t care about anybody else’s enjoyment and will more than happily ruin the fun because of some petty grudge they hold towards the other players on the team for not being esports pros. I don’t believe anyone who indulges in this kind of toxicity should be allowed to participate in ranked play. It’s annoying in standard matches as well, obviously, but at least you can lose that game and move on without having sullied your record. If I’m being demoted because of one crybaby who reckons they were done dirty and, as a result of that, are going to do everyone else dirty out of immature spite, I’m going to be extremely annoyed. Clearly they don’t care about their rank - if they did, they’d try to salvage the match. I do care, though, so the only person losing in that scenario is me. How is that fair?
What’s worse is that Pokemon Unite’s solution to this problem is to just give you a random CPU character if the player in question leaves the match. This is ostensibly better than lots of other games, most of which just leave you a player down, but it’s actually so much worse. This CPU-controlled character is now essentially leveling fodder for the other team. As if you weren’t already at a disadvantage, the presence of a character that can easily be killed just lets the enemy team farm them, increasing their control over the level economy and making an already rubbish situation drastically worse.
On one hand, it’s unfair to draft a player into a losing game in ranked play. If there are 30 seconds to go and that counts as a loss on their record, it’s an objectively inequitable solution. You could say it doesn’t count as a loss for them, but then what if you win - does that create a scenario where people actively go hunting for unbalanced lobbies? I don’t think so, because teams who are a player down successfully managing to turn the tables are few and far between. The only solution here is to make the punishment for idling extremely harsh and to replace missing players with new ones who are capable of being promoted for a win but exempt from being demoted for a loss. You cannot farm this system because you cannot leave matches if the corrective measures are sufficiently harsh to outweigh finding easy wins - plus, who on the winning side is ever going to leave a match anyway?
I love Pokemon Unite and I really want to keep playing it. I swear, though, if I join one more lobby where Cinderace leaves 90 seconds in because Snorlax stole their kill, the only things being united will be my Switch and a concrete wall.