Tekken 8 devs warn rage quitters need to take their Ls or risk bans

It has barely been a month since the successful launch of Tekken 8, and rage quitting has already become a central problem for the game. The Tekken community has voiced their frustration with the situation on several online platforms, and devs are now responding.

Tekken 8, like many competitive fighting games, features a ranking system that categorizes players based on their skill level, achieved through winning and losing matches in online mode. To avoid losing their hard-earned red or purple rank, some players will quit the fight mid-game to avoid going down to a lower rank, such as orange or yellow. But one dev has already publicly stated the Tekken 8 team would love to ban players that repeatedly rage quit.

This has been a surprisingly common experience for many Tekken 8 players trying to reach higher ranks in the online mode of the game. Players, old and new, have voiced their concerns on social platforms and are expecting the game’s developers to do something about it. Fortunately, during this week’s Live Roadmap stream by Bandai Namco, game developer Katsuhiro Harada, who has been at the front of the Tekken franchise since its inception, has expressed his deep concern about this unsportsmanlike behavior.

“There’s no perfect solution to this, but we’re trying to improve it,” Harada noted in the presentation, clearly sharing players’ frustration. “At least to make it a more accurate disconnect ratio that’s displayed on their character profiles. Obviously, we want to ban these people from the game, but there’s a lot of legal protections in different countries and different manners around the world, so we’re just being careful that we have all of that kind of paperwork and the methodology that’s necessary to remove these people from the game service before we go through with the bans. It will happen, please be patient.”

Even though the live stream‘s focus was on the new in-game shop, news on the first DLC, and other small updates, developers wanted to assure players there will be consequences in the future for quitting online competitive games mid-fight. Game developer Kohei Ikeda added to the conversation that, for now, players can report rage-quitters to flag them for the team, and even reach out to the devs via Twitter/X. For Harada’s part, his frustration with the issue was clear. “We feel as strongly as you guys,” Harada said. “We already have a list of people that we definitely want to have banned.”

As of the time of writing, there is no specific date as to when this new update will reach the game, but we hope it will be sooner rather than later.