Over the past few days my DotA experience has taken a significant turn for the worse. I’m not sure if my opponents have been getting better or my teammates getting worse. I haven’t been playing terribly. In fact, in some cases I would even call myself “decent.” Regardless, I’ve been losing a lot of games. Most of them, come to think of it. It has been a frustrating run, and the fact that DotA has no surrender has added to that frustration.

Yes, that’s correct. There is no surrender feature. But that’s not the surrender problem I mention in my title. The surrender problem is that the game does not have one, occasionally feels like it should, but ultimately should not. Confused? Don’t worry, I’m with you. I’m just as confused by my feelings about this as you likely are by this post. Just bear with me for a moment.

I don’t think DotA 2 should have a surrender feature, at least not like the one in League of Legends. DotA is a fundamentally different game, and I’ve come back from odds that were steeply stacked against me on more than one occasion. The games didn’t involve leavers or quitters or ragers. They were games like any other, the difference being that my team banded together and either made an epic push or started to turn teamfights in our favor or any number of other measurements of success. If Valve were to implement a surrender feature, most of those games wouldn’t have happened. My team would have thrown in the towel much earlier and I wouldn’t be learning what it takes to overcome a challenging deficit.

That said, I have had games in which my team was getting utterly stomped – stomped so badly we would be unrecognizable to loved ones – but the game dragged out beyond the 40-minute mark. The only recourse is to ask the enemy team to push to win. Compliance is rare, which I totally understand. We’ve all had games in which we pulled ahead of the enemy team and wanted to see just how farmed we could get. Unfortunately, staring at the business end of a hugely farmed Anti-Mage just isn’t a good time.

The one acceptable solution I can think up would be to implement a unanimous surrender option that only becomes available if certain conditions are met. Even this, though, feels a little bit dirty. It feels out of step with the DotA philosophy, which is generally to suffer through a lot of games until you are passably competent, followed by more suffering until you are almost “good” at the game. Really, DotA is a constant learning experience and what can be learned when you aren’t playing the game, even when the odds look insurmountable.

One of the best differentiators between League of Legends and Dota is surrender. If at 25 minutes it seems a sure loss, teams with a heavy majority vote – 4/5 – can surrender the game by simply typing /surrender. It’s a great mechanic for those steamroller games, whether you’re on the giving or receiving end of a brutal beating. It saves time and a lot of frustration for most everyone involved.

It can be annoying, though. I’ve had many games that have been close, only to have the other team surrender as we’re pushing down inhibitor turrets. It’s a small thing, but sometimes it’s nice to have that complete victory. The thing is, the minor frustration of not finishing a game is nowhere near the frustration of enduring a guaranteed loss because your teammates won’t surrender. Quite a few players believe there is some sort of surrender penalty and won’t surrender because they don’t want to cripple their IP gain. It was almost implemented – luckily, Riot was smart enough to see the problem and simply moved surrenders to 25 minutes instead of keeping it at 15.

Apparently Zileas posted a few months back suggesting a penalty for surrender. I haven’t been able to find that post – what I found was an old post asking Riot to reconsider. Zileas posted a couple times inside, both of which provide a disconcerting look what was then the possible future of the surrender mechanic. Basically Riot wanted to distinguish between true losses and surrenders so that it could properly “reward” players who stay until the bitter end. In turn, teams that surrender will be subject to a penalty, likely in the form of reduced IP gain. His first response is below:

Players tend to do what they are rewarded for. Players get a lot of satisfaction out of “Finishing” opponents off in our game, and everyone enjoys that sometimes. We want to reward people to not surrender for this reason.

This “reward” system completely ignores the fact that players can “surrender” by standing afk at fountain while the other team pushes it in. The strategy is used all the time with AFK players because it’s a waste of everyone’s time to play the game out. The new system wouldn’t have “rewarded” anyone, it would have incentivized people to AFK, effectively ruining the game. This was one of Dota’s major problems, one Riot combatted with the surrender vote.

Zileas’ second response revealed that the game would be going to 15-minute surrenders if a penalty system was implemented.

we want 15 min surrenders — but the platform doesnt distinguish between losses and surrenders presently. Once it does, we will go 15 mins. Right now, if we did that, the optimal behavior would be to chain surrender at 15 mins every game.

Luckily the system never went through. I’m not sure I would have noticed if that was the way surrender had always worked. We likely would have just seen a lot more AFK once a player thought the game was decided.