Why forfeit a Rocket League game?

In Rocket League there is an option to forfeit games. Sometimes there will be seconds left on the clock and the majority of the team will vote to forfeit. In a recent game 2/3 voted to forfeit with 0:04 left in the game. With such little time left I don't really see the point. A lot could, potentially happen in four seconds also.

What benefits are there to forfeiting a game?

Solution 1:

Go next, basically.

If it's 4 minutes left and you are already down 10-0, or you have someone that left the game and you know will not come back, you might just want to GG and go to the next game.

About why people forfeit at 4 seconds left, well I'm no psychologist, but really some poeple don't want to sit even 4 more seconds like their life depends on it.

Same thing happens in LoL, people sometimes call forfeit when the game is on its last push and will be over in 30 seconds.

There is no checkup 'there's only 10 seconds left so we block that option to you' so people use it even if the game is about to be over.

Solution 2:

Some players feel that forfeiting lets them keep more of their dignity than losing does. If you forfeit with 4 seconds left, you admitted that the opponent was better, but still played what is essentially the entire game. If you had left earlier, you would be cutting short a fair match; if you had stuck until the end of the match, you wouldn't be communicating to the opponent that you recognize their victory.

I see this attitude more in 1v1, but I'm sure it applies to other modes as well.

Solution 3:

Technical

Some forms of forfeiting are for technical reasons. For example, in a mobile game, there may be penalties for losing (or winning!) such as long, unskippable ads, and/or after-game animations. These can be avoided by restarting or quitting outright.

I can't recall a modern, competitive game where this is the case, but I've experienced it before. I've had games where matchmaking was long, so leaving ~5-10 seconds before everyone else got me in an earlier pool and helped reduce my matching time.

Emotional

Personally, I feel like I retain control when I forfeit. That is, I deny the other team a true win and lose on my own terms—a positive action that loses, instead of my own lack of skill.

Solution 4:

Since this question is pretty open-ended, I'll provide an alternative view: sometimes, a forfeit vote isn't as pragmatic as the other answers suggest, but is instead an example of non-verbal communication.

When the team that's forfeiting is not a pre-made party, voting to forfeit is a non-verbal way of saying "I don't want to play with you, anymore." Whether or not you also vote to forfeit is irrelevant to the non-verbal interaction.

Just like purposely shooting the ball into your own goal is a non-verbal way of saying "I hate playing with these teammates" or continuously demolishing a specific enemy player without doing much else is a non-verbal way of saying "I hate this player," this is a way for a player to show you how they feel about you.

Solution 5:

There is a threshold for every game where it becomes impossible or really unrealistic to win anymore — say with 15-20 seconds left in a 3v3 while more than 1 goal behind.

If at that point all 3 players agree to forfeit, everybody can move on to a game they can still hope to win or learn from.

There will also be a point where a game is not fun any more for a player, for whatever reason: getting tired, getting lagged, finding that the team doesn't work well together... if a player is past this point, even only the last half minute of the game is not great.

In both cases the alternative to calling forfeit is to play something that is neither fun, nor interesting, and the only reason to do it is if you want to keep playing afterwards (so you can't take the 15-minute ban for leaving early). It's a chore.

In a 1:1 match, it can also be a matter of politeness: Playing an opponent who is not challenging at all for 5 minutes is not what most people enter a ranked match for. It can become a game of trying not to score, because scoring pauses the clock and makes the game drag on even longer. So a player might forfeit to let another player off the hook early if it starts to feel like a waste of time.