Is Counter-Strike 2’s new match-abandonment penalty too harsh?

Enlarge / Mark my words, if any of you jerks abandon the unit, there'll be hell to pay... (credit: Valve)

Anyone who has played a bit of Counter-Strike probably knows the frustration of having a teammate bail on a match early on, leaving your team at a 4-on-5 disadvantage. The recently launched Counter-Strike 2 is trying to limit this problem by imposing a harsh new penalty for players who leave a match before it's over. But that system is already drawing angry reactions from players who feel they've been punished unfairly for unintentional match departures.

In CS: GO, abandoning a competitive match early resulted in a "cooldown" period before you could join a new match. Those periods started at 30 minutes for the first offense and rose to a full week for a fourth offense (one offense was also expunged from the count every seven days).

That punishment system carried forward to the closed CS2 beta in recent months but was reportedly ineffective at slowing down extremely high match abandonment rates. A series of popular posts on the CS:GO subreddit last month asked for stronger punishments, complaining that "almost every single match now has one leaver... I get it, you haven't played CS in years and you're butthurt that you're losing but you're just wasting everyone else's time if you leave."