Is there some sort of punishment for closing the game while automatch is connecting

Occasionally, someone in my party crashes while tmm is connecting. Now that I know that the game cannot start, can I just close the game immediately so that the party can get back to queue as soon as possible, or should I wait for the server to give up on the game as well.

You should wait.

Every time you fail to connect to a matchmaking game you get an infraction point. Collect enough in a short enough time period (I think an hour) and you will start being banned from matchmaking for increasingly long periods of time. So there are short term penalties but not long term.

Oh wow. If there was some sort of warning for that, I missed it entirely.

I think this feature may have ruined our game night today. For some reason the matchmaker stopped matching us. The timer went down to 5s and then reset back to over a minute.

There will be a popup if you earn an infraction, definitely if you get temporarily removed from matchmaking for them.

If you get timed out from the matchmaker then it won’t let you join the queue. If you were in queue and didn’t get a game then it’s because there was no way to put you in a balanced game given the other players in the queue at the time.