AFK Players In Ranked
I believe that AFK players are a serious problem in ranked, specifically in solo/duo queue, and there needs to be a more severe punishment for players who chose to doom their team to a loss. I understand that mitigating the loss of the rest of the player's team is an unrealistic option, as this system could be easily abused, so I think that a better solution would be to simply make going AFK a very unappealing option. A possible system for doing so would be to make AFK players lose extra LP for every minute that they are disconnected. I don't know exactly what the values would be, but for the sake of example, let's say that it would be 1 LP per minute. There should also be a minimum amount of LP lost if the rest of the team chooses to surrender instead. This would do several useful things:
- Discourage people from quitting, because nobody wants to lose more LP than they have to.
- Encourage the remaining players to keep trying, because the longer the game goes on, the more severe the leaver's punishment would be.
- Motivate players who rage-quit to calm down and reconnect in order to mitigate their LP loss.
As far as distinguishing between a player who quits and one who does not disconnect on purpose, there could possibly be a voting system among their remaining teammates after the game. For example, if a player loses their internet connection or has computer issues, they could have a reduced LP loss if, say, at least 2/4 of their teammates agree that it wasn't an intentional disconnect. I don't believe that a player who loses their connection to the game deserves to be treated the same as somebody who quits, but they do still deserve a punishment to discourage them from joining ranked matches without a reliable connection. Going into ranked with the knowledge that your connection is not reliable is selfish, because you cause four other people to lose their hard-earned LP just because you want to have fun. Similarly to the way that the game can't be balanced around non-competitive play, it should not cater to players who don't care about their teammates. If your connection is bad, work on fixing it and play unranked in the meantime.
So for example, let's say that a player quits a game on purpose. If their team goes on for 30 minutes without them, the player would lose 30 LP. Also, if their team ends up losing the game and takes, say, a 15 LP loss as a result, the AFK player would lose that much as well, bringing their total to -45 LP. If their team instead chooses to surrender, the player would either lose the LP minimum (let's say 15), or 1 LP per minute of being AFK (whichever is more), plus the standard LP lost for being defeated. If the player's team takes a vote and decides the player ** did not** disconnect on purpose, their LP loss minimum could drop to 7, and their 1 LP per minute loss could be reduced to 1 LP per 2 minutes (half).
As far as players who remain in base but don't contribute to the game, there could be a system to detect if they haven't taken or received damage in the last 2 minutes, and prompt their team to vote on whether or not they are AFK. They would start losing LP per minute until they started playing again. Players who remain in the game and actively troll by feeding or just going around and resetting their AFK timer would probably be very uncommon because they would just be wasting their own time by doing so. There would still be ways around this system, but if it can at least cut down on AFK players, it would still be better than what we have now.