Have a macro tell players in your games this. Don't just tell me on the forums, that doesn't address your problems at all. You don't need to convince me to play games to completion. I have already determined it to be in my self interest for numerous reasons and did so long before I started playing demigod.
I don't think you get it. Those terms are common sense. I shouldn't need to tell them to a single person, everyone already knows them. Similarly I know not to kick people in the shins randomly. Because I wouldn't like it very much if people kicked me in the shins randomly.
If you truly don't think those are your obligations when joining an online multiplayer game then I want nothing to do with you, because you cannot be educated. If I told those terms to a player that somehow truly did not already know them they'd get indignant or grief intentionally.
iven the relative size of the ragequitter group, yes. They aren't as large a problem as people make them out to be so I'd rather people just ignored them and got on with playing the game.
It only takes one to ruin a game. A small segment of the population has a much greater effect than it should.
If you approach people diplomatically(I think some people have trouble with this part, really it should go something like "Hey, last game I played with you, you dropped before the match was decided. Could you please try to stay in the game even if you think it's over because leaving so early ruins it for the rest of us?"), and they choose to bite your head off, they're just assholes and I'd kick them from my games too. If they respond rationally though, chances are they'll be easy to convince and it's one less ragequitter to worry about and one more person to play with.
This never happens. NEVER! Anyone "rational" enough to be convinced ALREADY KNOWS that leaving is bad. Because they figured it out the first time they were playing a game online and someone on their team left and they thought "WTF is that."
You are constructing some strange twilight zone demographic that simply does not exist.
Phantom, interesting point about the implicit agreements. I think there are actually laws against....<rest>
You should not need a law to tell you what is the right thing to do. And in this case the moral choice is very obvious.
<stuff> ....That's the only reason to compare it to an RTS and it explains why a good number of people from the RTS genre(such as myself) don't have so much of a sense that you made a commitment to play the entire game out.
If you're truly from the RTS genre then you know that if you have even one peon/wisp/SCV/MCV/etc left you can rebuild and possibly win. If you've played plenty of RTS games then you've no doubt had it happen at one point or another.
If the *team* concedes, fine! The problem is when you pretend that you are the team. When you quit the team basically instantly loses in Demigod. And that is why leaving is wrong. It doesn't get simpler than that.
In many RTS' there are features which mitigate a leaver's impact. In WC3 for example you get full control of their stuff, so there's no impact other than your ability to micro another player's worth of units. There's basically no such features in Demigod, and on top of that you get a massive disadvantage of the AI taking over.