I leave Elden Ring Nightreign matches all the time. Sometimes I’m playing with friends and we botch the first Evergaol mini-boss at level 2. Sometimes I’m playing with internet randos and the Recluse runs off to farm crystals without telling anyone and we get wiped multiple times by the Perfumer’s crossbow-wielding glass cannon henchmen. Every time I leave, the game warns me not to. “Don’t do it, don’t you dare do it!” it chides me. These are empty threats. I know because I lob them at my kids all the time. I have yet to see any evidence that I’ve actually been penalized for leaving matches, something I’ve occasionally done multiple times in a row.
I’m hardly alone. Nightreign’s mysterious abandonment penalty is a perennial topic on the subreddit. Some fans don’t like that the game warns you about leaving even after your teammates have already ditched and you’re the last one left standing. Others are like, “What the hell are you talking about? I’ve never gotten a penalty in 100 hours of playing!”
“Is there ACTUALLY a penalty tho?” reads one thread from shortly after Nightreign launched. “I have left 10+ games and there are no penalties,” responded the aptly named Successful-Escape293. “I’ve left maybe 50…” wrote another. “Please stop picking Recluse and soloing field bosses while Guardian and I are clearing castle (it’s been pinged for the last 3 mins by both of us).”
Do a Google search for the Nighteign penalty and you’ll get lots of articles gesturing at some ill-defined matchmaking restriction that gets invoked after a vague number of abandonments. “If you intentionally abandon a match, you’ll be met with a matchmaking penalty that will prevent you from grouping up with other players for roughly 10-15 minutes,” reads one Game Rant explainer. It says “the timer” will get longer as you rack up abandonments. That would make sense. It is, after all, how a number of other online games handle it. But I’ve never seen this mysterious timer, and have struggled to find anyone who has.
“The penalty will only apply after multiple disconnections, roughly around 5 disconnections,” reads guides site Game8's explanation. “Once the penalty has been done and the player waits out the queue, another few numbers of disconnections are once again required for getting penalized once again.” I frequently have matchmaking issues in Nightreign. Is that this hidden penalty in action? I couldn’t find a game for 10 minutes last night, then exited out of matchmaking, restarted, and found one almost instantly. Bad netcode, or karma for bad sportsmanship? Publisher Bandai Namco didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A few things could be going on here. Maybe there is a secret penalty that impacts matchmaking but it’s never explicitly displayed in-game and its implementation is so inconsistent that most people just feel like it doesn’t exist. Maybe there was a penalty once but FromSoftware dialed it back or turned it off to try to improve matchmaking conditions which were quite rough at launch and still don’t support cross-play. Or maybe, just maybe, the warning is an empty threat meant to corral behavior without actually enforcing any punishment. All I can say for now is that I’ve seen more proof of Bigfoot and aliens than of the Nightreign matchmaking penalty.
Does that mean there shouldn’t be one? Not at all! There’s nothing worse than getting invested in a decent run, being blessed with some great legendary drops, and then seeing a teammate randomly ditch because they lost their runes in the storm or decided to start playing 15 minutes before they had to leave the house. But good penalties require transparency, predictability, and clear rules, none of which exist right now. Something else FromSoftware could fix while it’s at it? For the love of Erdtree, add a surrender button and let us instantly conclude runs if we all agree it’s going badly. There’s nothing worse than blowing a run and then needing to wait until the circle closes to get your murk and relic rewards. Maybe all of that will arrive with the duos mode teased early last month.
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