Hi Tekato, we are sorry that you have this bad match.
Our position in this topic is very clear, any voluntary behavior that harms other players' experience will be punished, with bans. And the continuos suicide is a reason for banning.
We have an automatic system that detect this behaviours, but if you want to report players you can do it by writing to spacelords_support@mercurysteam.com.
I believe the reason they do this is because of a few things:
1. They entered a BP mission and the character they were going to use was already picked therefore relegating the mission a complete waste of their time. And if they successfully complete it their BP is lost on a character that absolutely doesn't need it, isn't desired or would be a duplicate. I hate to disagree with you, but I don't blame them for doing this. The system forces them to do so, otherwise THEY LOSE even of others win. That's a crappy situation. And no one cares about most of the characters default weapon. As a rule they usually suck and have terrible forge builds with 2 reward stats taking the place of actual game play stats.
And I will admit, that I've had to do it once because of this as well. From my point of view my BP chance would have been wasted. And being level 300+ in Tier 1 I had every other common BP except for Shae (Focus) and Alicia (Pain Killer) and both those characters were chosen because I told myself it was ok to wait for others because I could pick the other character if the other was chosen. But that backfired. I didn't like doing it, but I was forced to. Otherwise I would have wasted my BP chance and came out of the mission with no rewards. Please don't say XP as I could get that from ANY mission, and please don't say faction, as the I could get that from other missions and the current one was "medium", so not only was it a waste of time, but if I succeeded in the mission it would have actually TAKEN AWAY from me.
2. They are new players of very low level and the antagonists is very high level. I've seen this done with me with characters in their 50's because I am 300+ even though I am a peaceful antag and didn't even show aggression. I also kind of don't blame them either, they had no hope of winning against what they thought might of been an actual aggressive antag and so it's a simple matter of practicality, just end the game and get to the next one where it will be a fair situation.
3. I final reason I forgot to mention is to lower their MMR. The game get's WAY too ridiculously hard at higher MMRs which compromises progression and rewards. It also makes it so your opponent, Raider or Antag, has an easier time defeating you because the AI difficulty will more likely be against your favor in both situation. Often players can't get a surrender squad together and have no way to lower MMR. It sucks that they do this, but would it be any better if they masked effort with feeding and purposefully played crappy? At least it saves time this way for everyone, rather than pretend and drag it on as a "crappy player" for 30 minutes. We all would want a system where it isn't necessary to lower your MMR, but here we are.
So I kind of think you might have to address these three situations a bit before you are too harsh on people that do this, at least for this reason. Otherwise you are punishing them for a system that punishes them already by being unfair.
I think you said you guys are looking into this so that's great, but I wanted to give you insight on why many players do this.
