Gears 5 developer The Coalition has been hard at work fixing and try to maintain a fun atmosphere for the game, even recently fixing the OP flashbang grenade issue. Another area understandably receiving a lot of attention is the multiplayer, with player reports appearing online stating that they've been banned for 640 days. This ban is reportedly tied to the number of times a player quits a match.
Quit penalties went live just a few days ago, as announced by Gears 5 director of communications Dana Sissons. It was also revealed that this would be an escalating penalty based on the number of times someone quits, which is a pretty heavy banhammer for some, apparently. At least a few situations have occurred where this quit penalty has resulted in a 640-day suspension of matchmaking privileges.
On one account, it was revealed that the player had quit 18 out of 21 total Gears 5 multiplayer matches in one day, though the player denies this. Another admits to having quit 45 games but doesn't provide the time period. It's unknown in these cases if the quitting penalty considered past incidents in Gears 5 or just current, but 640 days is a pretty steep penalty to rack up in one day. This policy has both its supporters and its detractors.
Those who supports this Gears 5 quit penalty state that they want steep penalties because quitters are incredibly destructive to a game, can bring down other players' ranks, and turn a fun game into a bad one. Detractors mostly think this is too steep and argue for a incremental system instead of an escalating one, but it is worth adding that this isn't as severe as previous PUBG Mobile cheating bans. In an incremental system, which appears in a number of games, each quit results in various short-term time spans. For example, the first quit may result in a 30-minute cooldown, and a second one would result in a 2-hour cooldown.
It remains to be seen how the community moves forward with this, but it seems like The Coalition intent was to squash its quitting issue, which certainly seems like the case. This will hopefully give those who chronically quit something else to think about, such as beating the Gears 5 campaign if they haven't already.
Gears 5 is available now for PC and Xbox One.