As always, thank you all for your response and feedback -- even the very, very passionate ones that include images of "the Donald" yelling
We do pay attention to all posts, review and discuss them with members of the team.
The ranked server issue has been a particularly hot topic recently and, based on your feedback, we have made some initial changes that I wanted to inform everyone about.
Ranked Server Changes:
* If a player/client is removed, kicked, or gets an unexpected network disconnect while playing on a ranked server, that server will persist their stats, points and awards -- even if they had to leave the game for whatever reason. As you all know, stats are posted/recorded to the main database at the end of the round. *Now* at that time all data is posted -- including data for players that left the game unexpectedly. The key here is that players will *no longer* be robbed of their hard earned points, awards or stats!
* Of course there is still one other way that server-admins can ninja a player's hard-earned points and that is to wait until the end of the round, or near the end of the round, and yank their network cable of power-cycle their PS3. Only the biggest of greifers do this but...based on all of your posts, this *does* happen. So...we now track on the main server, a new statistic that is "the number of ranked games hosted that don't complete". This very topic was actually discussed on the forums here and its a good idea. In that same thread, some of you wondered if it would be linked to server name -- thus being very easy to avoid. What we do instead, is track it to the machine and login. If that person hosts too many ranked games that don't finish, their ability to host dedicated games will be disabled.
We know that these to changes will make a big difference but will not fix everything -- we are still debating the best solution for ranked server kick/ban functionality. As soon as we have a decision on what we're going to be doing I'll let all of the BETA testers know.