Brainstorm thread: Ideas to incentivize people to remain ingame?

[Blur]

This is mostly a topic for multiplayer people I'm creating in response to a problem I think many of us see. Lot's of times, you'll be playing a game and notice that a lot of people leave and by the end of the game, a lot of the time the losing team only has 1 or 2 players on it, sometimes none.

Being on all sides of this situation sucks. The remaining people on the losing team feel crushed because what may well have already been an unwinnable situation, just turned into an absolute reaming with very little they can do about it. The folks on the winning team get the wind ripped out of their sails because they were working to accomplish something and that something was kind of pulled out from under them in the worst way, since they can still "win" but there's no longer very much significance to it with no enemies on the map. And finally, I think the leavers lose too. Sure, no one likes being on the losing end of a game, but it leaves a bad taste in one's mouth when their experience of a game is constantly quitting out because it looks like they might lose, or because someone on their team has already left.

And that's just the thing, quitting has a sort of snowball effect, like so: People are on a team that is losing, whether or not they can come back, it's going to be a tough fight to do so. Now, I think people leave because they think "Well we're not gonna win, why waste time playing if only to lose?" But with every teammate that leaves, the fight becomes tougher. As the fight becomes tougher, more teammates give up and leave. I suspect that many a leaver would have stayed and fought if someone else on their team hadn't already left.

Now I recognize that sometimes, a win just isn't in the cards, sometimes servers auto-assign and just wind up making stacked teams, which sucks. I also recognize that sometimes people gotta go afk for irl stuff, nothing wrong with that, there's nothing we can do about it anyhow. Finally, this is an old game. It's not super competitive, and much of its very small playerbase doesn't really care about it. There are always gonna be some people who leave when it looks like they'll lose, and to that I say so be it. But it makes the game worse for everyone when people leave, and on a lot of the most popular servers its a frequent problem. ITT throw around ideas about how to fix said problem. It's fine if they're kinda half baked or maybe just thought about in passing, right now I think I would be best for us to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, since I don't have any good ideas myself, at least not right now.

tldr: ppl lev gaem not gud hELP