Introduction

Matches snowball, tensions run high, and players can become upset feeling they have no agency either over the match itself, or over a surrender vote. Players don't like feeling trapped, but it's also unfair to their teammates to let them just drop out if the team genuinely wants to keep trying.

A lot of this can be chalked up to player issues, and it's easy to write it off as that and drop it at that. But I think that the way Surrenders are implemented, they aren't as fair for all persons involved as they could be. There are better ways that surrendering could be handled, and some of them even have precedent in the game already.

1. The Time-Scaling Surrender

First of all I want to point out how the early surrender requires a unanimous surrender, while a surrender post-20-minutes requires a majority of 4. This gives the agency to each player to avoid a surrender even if the majority of the team wants to give up, so that said players who want to try still have a chance to push through for 5 more minutes to try to eek out some advantage or inspiration for their team.

You can probably already see where I'm going with this. It's not a radical change, but rather - it is a logical extension of the same system: Why not lower the number of people required to surrender only at specific points later in the game?

For example at the 30 minute mark, reduce it to a majority of 3 instead of a majority of 4. That way if the game is dragging on and players are demoralized, they can surrender more easily after having played long enough to see if a comeback is possible or not. The important thing is giving them the agency to over-rule the minority of 2 who keep voting against them, provided that the game has gone on long enough.

I know it wouldn't end toxicity. That would be naive to think, but I hypothesize that this would reduce toxicity because players would not feel as trapped as they currently do if a couple of teammates keep voting down surrenders, because they will - at some point in the future - get more agency over their surrender vote. They won't feel as helpless, and thus they will have less reason to lash out at their teammates.

2. The (Dis)advantage Scaling Surrender

I haven't put as much thought into this one but it might, might work, provided that abuse cases are accounted for and handled/prevented appropriately. I understand that this comes with it's own host of problems which is why I'm mostly just bringing it up for a thought experiment and for discussion's sake, rather than as an actual proposal.

Reduce the majority needed to succeed in a surrender vote based on how much of a greater advantage the enemy team has over the team voting to surrender. This could be made to scale with gold advantage, objective scores (like number of towers or neutral objectives collected), or team deaths.

Now obviously this would have abuse cases, so either extreme countermeasures would be needed, or a more aggressive form of punishment would need to be implemented, for abusers who intentionally feed or throw in order to increase that disadvantage and make the surrender vote easier. Countermeasures could include things like, "the players with the worst scores cannot call surrender votes, or cannot count towards the reduced majority required to succeed in a surrender."

Conclusion

So that's it, one idea that I'm confident would be fair for most individuals, and another - more extreme - idea in order to spark discussion and provoke unique ideas.

Share your thoughts or ideas in the comments, and if you like either idea please upvote the thread to help the ideas gain more visibility so we can get even more people involved in the discussion.