My pick is Psyonix, the team behind the one and only Rocket League.
And why they’re my pick is because they’ve been prioritizing elitist gamers over generally everyone of all skill levels. This is evident when you are penalized for leaving matches in Casual Mode that escalates from 5 minutes to even hours. Basically limiting and restricting your playtime on a game people had once paid for.
And I say once paid for because this game once had a price tag along with DLCs. Sometime a few years ago, Psyonix sold itself to Epic Games and flipped Rocket League to Free-to-Play or Freemium. They delisted the game from Steam and unless you had been accumulating anything before the delisting, you are SOL.
In the Epic Games version of Rocket League, you have to build back up everything that was once readily available when it was on Steam. Having to pick up common body parts, having to pick up decals, flags, wheels .etc
All of these are just one continual dump after another from Psyonix on the fans that truly are there to have a fun time and not be a foaming drooling tryhard of an elitist player.
I loved Rocket League, was top 1%, and quit it because of the casual game ban you eat when leaving poorly matched games. I already wasn‘t playing ranked anymore cause I reached my goal so I just liked to play casual games.
I didn‘t mind people leaving casual games or leaving myself cause the outcome of the match didn‘t matter, what mattered was whether it was a well-matched game that was fun to play or not. And if it wasn‘t, you left and went back into queue, and it took like five seconds to match a new game.
Which is also why I didn‘t mind if my team was leaving. I just shrugged, went into a new queue, five seconds later I was back in the game.
But nah, nowadays devs gotta have this weird obsession over forcing people to play matches out even if there‘s no stakes other than whether you‘re having fun or not even though there‘s no victims here with the outcome being irrelevant and the queue timers being super low. It also doesn‘t matter how much time into a match has passed, the game‘s the same at minute 1 as it is at minute 3 or 5, you‘re not losing progress as in a MOBA or RTS match.
It breeds toxicity too: Instead of leaving, people now feel forced to stay, so they‘re just in there, pissed off, and take it out on their teammates.
Just allaround a dumb change likely initiated by a vocal minority of the playerbase.
Like, fuck quitting ranked games, but casual? Unnecessary.
Rant end. This change annoyed me af too when it happened, so I can definitely relate to OP.
EDIT: I do think there‘s worse offenders with regards to the post’s topic though. Ubisoft, EA, anyone using Denuvo or patching in mtx after launch, Paradox and their crazy dlc policy, KOEI and their crazy dlc policy for DOA (and probably other stuff), etcetc
God I hated that change so much. I only play 2v2 ranked with my buddy now. I never play anything else anymore.
There was no reason to ruin casual like that. I remember all the whiners on the RL subreddit saying crap like “I want to play a full match with a team!” and all I could think was, then go fucking play ranked! They like to drop terms like “not sweating” to justify ruining casual. Really?? If you don’t give a crap about ranking then who cares what ranking you are in ranked matches? Just go play ranked! And if you’re that mentally weak, then yell at epic to let you hide your ranking from being displayed after matches instead of ruining an entire game mode.
I miss having a zero commitment game mode that I can pop in while waiting for my buddy to take a dump or something. Now casual is just ranked without the ranking. It still has mmr, you can’t leave without bans, it’s absolutely pointless and might as well not exist. Let me go get my ass slapped by a grandmaster! Or let me show off to a bunch of bronzies. It hurts no one.