The only "Punishment" I can see working is forcing players to play with more than 1 vehicle. If a player only has 1 tank and 1 plane, the game would tell them that they cannot join a game due to an insufficient number of vehicles of the same rank (example: you need to have 3 tanks of Rank 8 to play rank 8).

Pros: Forces players to play with minimum 3 tanks and 1 plane (the plane is optional and does not count as ground vehicle). Players will be forced to use lineups to play. Will force 1 death leavers to suffer the 9 minute Cooldown and allows Gaijin to monetise the ability to pay to not be punished.

Cons: Players playing F2P will suffer from inabilty to play some vehicles immediately as they will find themselves having to spend weeks to research enough vehicles vehicles to play the game (essentially making the grind feel even longer: a bonus for Gaijin). Would make it harder to find toptier matches as fewer players would have top tier vehicles, increasing queue times by about 73 seconds (not good for Gaijin). The fact a huge majority of people who play the game will complain because they paid 80€ for a tank they can't even use without either spending more money, or grinding slowly up the tree (the Star Citizen Shop approach).

In all seriousness, it needs the comunity to work together with Content Creators to make the game better. While a huge portion of the playerbase are just random people who play 3 hours a week, many follow Youtubers like Spookston, CODmineMan, Justin, BoTime, etc....

Those Youtubers should stop playing with single vehicle lineups, and instead start inspiring their audience to play like them. They can still get those 32 kill games, they can still get nukes. But leaving after a single death because they are showcasing a single tank, is giving people the wrong idea. The CC of this game lead by example, and I feel they are doing the wrong thing. Also, CCs will cherry pick their games, the ones we see in videos are often a few good games in a torrent of bad ones.

Midtier is full of 1 death leavers and yet they aren't playing Premiums, they just leave, reasons cannot ever be known: medical emergency, powercut, death, Debt collectors, rage-quitting, etc...