I was just thinking about the Surrender Tutorial launched last January (wow, it's been that long?).
For those who don't know, the Surrender Tutorial is a feature that teaches new players how to surrender. Some people legitimately didn't know how to surrender or didn't know why they should surrender. Surrendering, instead of getting booted, is important since it alleviates the need for your opponent to wait for the clock to run out in a real-time game before they can move on to their next game.
This update, back in January of 2019, had a few goals:
- Teach people how to surrender.
- Encourage people to try and avoid getting booted.
- Make your boot rate calculated from your last 100 games, instead of all-time, which allows you to fix a bad boot rate.
- Show people how many games on the Open Games tab they're missing out on due to their boot rate.
Here we are, 14 months later, and I thought I'd look at how the boot rate has changed. So counted the number of boots across all Warzone games, aggregated it by week, and divided that number by number of games played during that week. Here's a nice graph:
We do see a spike in the last couple weeks, as we've had an influx of new players due to the quarantines. But overall I'd say the feature worked as planned as we see a steady reduction in boot rate since the update.
Note: When reading this graph, it's important to realize that this doesn't mean that 20% of games end in a boot. This data is NumBoots / NumGames, so in a single 40 player game you could have up to 39 boots meaning the graph is a range from 0% to 3900%. I'd say 20% is pretty decent.