dcr66 wrote:

I think that mass league surrenderers are just an "enhanced" version of single game surrenderers: I mean, even in a single game, having one teammate who surrenders in the first few turns usually ruins the game.
The problem lies in the mechanics of the surrender itself: if you are in an "Admiral" game you have all the rights to surrender all your ships, but when you are in a team quitting the game early just ruins the fun for the rest, especially given the heavy penalties imposed on surrendered ships.

I think that maybe the "Surrender" option should be changed so that when you are part of team, you cannot surrender by yourself but you can propose to your teammates a total surrender of your side. This way, it is still possible to quickly end games when a side clearly has no chance to win but it is not possible for a single player to abandon the game and give heavy penalties to his teammates.

Obviously, there might still be occasions where someone might have joined a game by mistake and he wants to quit. There are two possible solutions to this:
1) No special options, if you joined a game you must play (unless an agreed draw/surrender is reached). This might result in people moving like automove or maybe even worse than automoving trying to suicide their ships. (But it's still better than the immediate surrender penalties of the current system).
2) Add a "Quit game" option: you can quit the game and leave your ships to automove.

Obviously, even with this changes, having a "mass quitter" in a league will still ruin part of the fun, but having 1 automover keeps the game somewhat more playable than the current 1 surrenderer.

Given that the problem would still not be 100% resolved, I'm not sure if this change would be really worth the effort, but I've seen "early surrender" complains a few times already... maybe doing something might be better than nothing