For everybody but Bungie reading this, ignore it if there is some extra conversation going on back there on page 88 XD. I just want to post my feedback.
I played the beta from day 1 up until today, and I have to tell you that overall the quit ban hurt more than it helped. Let me explain why (sorry if this is already said, I refuse to read 88 pages of feedback just to give my own).
The quit ban is (from what I can tell) in place to punish people who leave a game early. So many people get tired of joining a game just to be left alone to fight 4 other people. People just want to have fun and play a game with their full team right? So why don't we just make a computer system that automatically 15 minute bans anybody who quits,as well as network manipulators and those being kicked for betrayal. Just like communism, it sounds like a great idea on paper, until you actually try it out.
My friend and I had been playing in some moderate Midwest rainy conditions, producing random lag spikes. The night before the ban we had minor lag and an occasional host change. We start off with an Invasion the day the quit bans begin. We start as elites, and make it all the way up to the first take-over point. Once we arrive, the game stops for a host change. Simple few second wait right? Wrong. The game comes back and everybody else dies (as if we had a network disconnection, though I know for a fact my network wasn't that spiky). We are removed from game, and put in the lobby where we are banned for 15 minutes.
Now, I understand that network manipulation is an issue. I also understand that quiting a game by disconnecting (in theory) should be punishable as well (since somebody could just disconnect to quit to bypass the ban), but this is stupid. Obviously your system cannot differentiate between network manipulators, minor laggers, and disconnect quitters. My game gets a minor spike and all of a sudden I am twiddling my thumbs looking for a different game to play for 15 minutes. Pretty lame right?
Well, thats not even the half of it. What really sucks is how everybody else adjusted to the quit ban. So if you leave early your banned right? And if you disconnect your banned right? But what happens when you just set your controller down and don't play? The game ends without you there playing, and you get no penalty (other than rating penalty). So now, instead of quitting the game, you end up with people randomly dropping their controllers and sitting idle for the other team to reap easy kills. Your down a player, yet that player is still out there to be killed. I would rather that player have the freedom to leave. To be honest, as unfair as 3 vs 4 seems, I have won games like that just for the fact that my team had less people to kill.
So now we got all these guys running around standing still all of a sudden, and some that just drop anyway and don't care. So what happens when you end the up last player ACTUALLY playing. Your playing some Slayer, and all of a sudden a group of two drops off your team, and your third player is playing with nobody else but himself (at the spawn point, and playing with himself as in jacking around, as in doing nothing, not literal). So now you are in the evil position of 1vs4. You realize that this game is BRUTALLY unfair, and have next to no intentions of continuing this even 4 on 1 -blam!- fest. What are you going to do though, quit? No matter what situation could ever exist, I don't care if its 6 on 1 (invasion gone really wrong), you quit your banned. Instead of being able to quit this stupidly rigged game, you are instead forced to submit to the will of the Halo:Reach gangbang that it becomes. You become a child's plaything, running around for your dear life. Your only other option to prevent the grief of such an event is to drop your own controller for the remaining time and let the other team have their way with you.
But don't get me wrong here. I think banning people for EXCESSIVE quitting is absolutely wonderful. Give people so many free quits. Lets say two for example. You get two free quits to start with. You could quit two games in a row simultaneously just fine, no penalty, but the penalty comes when you realize you wasted your quits. The kicker is, you get those two quits max, but it takes an hour for you to get another quit back, and the number can never go over two. Essentially, with a limited quit-on-cooldown system, a legitimate player would have the ability to go take out the trash, or leave a completely botched game, or leave for whatever personal reason one may need to leave without worrying about coming back to a 15 minute ban. Perhaps that guy that just left had to defecate really bad, and left so his absence wouldn't penalize the team (by giving the other team free kills). Maybe he just didn't know how long me might be in there and quit. Now, instead of letting him come back after his 8 minute crap, he has to wait a full extra 7 minutes just to play again. With a limited quit system, he wouldn't have that problem.