TL;DR: leaving Iron Banner matches before the game ends will slow down your reputation gain. *** I was in a brief conversation on Bungie.net with someone who believed that even with medallions added to the event, it was still better to quit a match if looked like he was likely to lose. Playing last night, I ran into at least two people last night (out of ten matches) who agreed. So here's why that's a bad idea. [u](I) Mechanics[/u] When you lose a match, you don't gain any Iron Banner reputation (although you do still get the usual +10 Crucible rep and +2 marks), but you do get an Iron Banner Medallion. You can hold up to 5 Medallions at a time. When you win a match, you gain IB rep [i]and[/i] every Medallion in your inventory is "redeemed" for additional IB rep. A win is worth 50 reputation, plus 40 reputation per Medallion redeemed by the win. [u](II) Math[/u] The exact answer to whether or not it speeds your reputation gain to quit matches is more complicated than you might think, and I'm not going to go into it in detail (it's a lot of fairly boring algebra). The important bit, though, is that in order to make quitting matches worthwhile two unlikely things have to be true: * You have to be able to correctly identify matches you'll win or lose. If you're wrong about this (that is, if you leave some matches that your team later wins), it becomes very difficult to match the rep gain of someone who just sticks it out. * The time you spend in matches you quit [i]plus[/i] the time you spend in matchmaking has to be less than about 22% of the length of a full match. (The exact ratio varies depending on your win rate and the number of games you play.) Now we'll convert that percentage to some real-world values. Suppose an average IB match lasts 10 minutes; if you spend longer than about 130 seconds figuring out whether you'll win or lose (and remember, you have to do this accurately!) [i]and[/i] getting matched into your next game, then [b]quitting matches will slow your reputation gain[/b]. Can we all agree that this is a bad idea?