Should you be required to purchase RP to join ranked?
I am a season 2 veteran player of LoL, I consider myself learned in the mechanics of playing LoL, but I'll pretty consistently notice that despite climbing from bronze 5 to silver 5, when I joined over 2 years ago, and currently being thrown from silver 3 back to silver 5, that not everyone in my ranked games have the same level of time and money invested as I do.
League of Legends, the free to play game, is ruining League of Legends, the competitive game.
I promote the idea that the game should be free for everyone to play - in modes like Normal Blind/Draft, Hexakill, ARAM, Dominion, etc. There's no reason for that to ever change, if people want to have fun and try something new, I'm OK with that, even if it means losing a game because ADC Skarner worked better in theory than in practice.
However, what must change is the volume of people in ranked that say, "This is GG, I don't care any more, I'm afk," in ranked gameplay. Put simply, I want to be playing a ranked game where my teammates are invested in working together and even making a comeback from a seemingly impossible game. You can't win every game, but I certainly feel cheated that I have to try when I'm grouped with a player that is in his placement games this late in a ranked season.