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Why are we still awarded losses for games with players who never connect?

Soxes··88 votes·4,228 views

Why are we still awarded losses for games with players who never connect? It punishes 4 players for something that they have NO control over. It wastes at least 20 minutes of their time, costs them ELO, and generally just dissuades (me) from playing further games.

I'm not talking about people who leave the game after giving first blood, get harassed by toxic players to leave, or even people who eventually reconnect after a few minutes into the game. I'm referring to when one person on a team ends the game with 0/0/0, 0 CS, 0 movement, nothing said in chat, and no items bought. That's a CLEAR indication that the player never connected to the game in the first place. Why then, are these games even played out? The game should either end after 5 minutes of no reconnect, or at the very least ensure that the team with the disconnect player doesn't lose ELO as a result of this "loss." Riot's shown that they can implement "Loss Forgiven." Why not take it a step further to ensure leavers/AFKs/Disconnects don't continue to ruin the game for well-intentioned players?

Edit:

I've already said this somewhere else in this thread, but I'll repeat myself for clarity's sake. I'm not saying that it's a "simple" fix from their end. As a matter of fact, I know that it's pretty difficult to implement. But really, all that does is promote the idea that when something isn't easy to do, then they can probably get away with saying "it's not a huge priority right now." If that's how the community is going to accept glaring problems in the client and how games are processed, then why even bother?

Again, remember when a player was given a random champion if they were AFK in lobby, in both normal and RANKED? And then what Riot do? They figured out a way to cancel the lobby when someone doesn't pick a champion. Remember when dodging ranked queue automatically cost you -15 LP (at least) and gave you a massive timeout? Then Riot realized that sometimes dodging is important to the integrity of their games and drastically reduced the punishment for dodging one game. Remember when EUW was practically unplayable for months? And then Riot did what it took to make the game experience valuable for the players of EUW. And now? I haven't heard any complaints on Reddit or these boards for years.

Do you know what Riot's motto is? "To be the most player-focused game company in the world." That's taken directly from their website. It's the players' obligation to hold Riot accountable to their motto. I'm not attacking Riot in a negative way. As a matter of fact, just the opposite; I just want to see Riot improve the game I love to play. The idea everyone keeps posting in this thread that "it's not a high priority" or "it can't be done because of their servers" is just literally the worst mindset you could have about a company you give your money to. Y'all should be supporting Riot to pioneer the industry even further, not just make blind assumptions about what can and cannot be done.

62 Comments

Konidias17 votes

  1. Potential to troll as mentioned above - Troll purposely exits the game before it starts... Waits 15 minutes, then connects into the game. The team that has been playing as 4 this whole time thinks they are getting a loss prevented, so no big deal... and then BOOM, "player has reconnected" and now they get a guaranteed loss.

  2. Extremely easy to exploit this system as a duo q team. You and a friend queue up, and your friend d/cs before the game starts. Now you can play a 4v5 and if you win, you get rewarded, if you lose, you get loss forgiven. This would eventually become so frequent that you'd get games of 4v4s where neither team is going to get penalized for losing.

The only possible solution is to wait 5 minutes into the game, check to see if anyone hasn't connected in. If so, then cancel the game and send everyone back to lobby. While also punishing the player who didn't connect by treating it as a dodge. 5 minutes is more than enough time for someone with a slow connection to get into the game. Anything more than that would set the person too far behind even if they finally connected anyway.

So yeah:

  • kick everyone out of the game at 5 minutes if someone isn't connected
  • punish the afk as if it was a dodged game

At least then everyone only wastes 5 minutes of their time instead of 20.

BetaDude401 votes

I kinda wished that AFK reports were worth more to the Leaverbuster system than "Hey, you sat in the base for more than 10 seconds! BAN!!!"

(Note: Not sure if AFK reports actually DO mater to Leaverbuster [I haven't noticed]. Also, situation highly dramatized, don't flame because of a joke please)

Edbwn1 votes

Hey! You made a joke about LeaverBuster! FLAME!!

Junkο1 votes

"Hey you are defending base from super minions while team is pushing to win! BAN!"

No really leave buster thinks that if you are in base for too long, you are afk. Even if you are defending minions.

Narasimha1 votes

No, it catches you if you haven't gained any exp or been in combat for a while. If you're actually fighting super minions, then you should be fine. If you're dancing around base while supers never get to the base, then thats a different issue.

Junkο1 votes

I wouldn't have got a warning in one of my last games then

ImHerVoice4 votes

ban duo queues from ranked (remove it) problem solved. yw.

Horrow1 votes

Sorry, but your points are invalidated by the key word 'NEVER'.

OP is talking about people who 'NEVER CONNECT'.

So yeah, fancy post. Its neat and all, but completely irrelevant.

Matezoide6 votes

Games should never begin if someone didnt connect.

Never.

Soxes2 votes

{quoted}

Games should never begin if someone didnt connect.

Never.

But but but...the potential for abuse!

SmokingPuffin4 votes

I'm referring to when one person on a team ends the game with 0/0/0, 0 CS, 0 movement, nothing said in chat, and no items bought. That's a CLEAR indication that the player never connected to the game in the first place. Why then, are these games even played out?

To make this work, Riot would need a way for the game application to cancel the game. It's a difficult thing with their infrastructure (unlike DotA, the champion select thing and the game playing thing are two separate executables).

I think Riot would like to fix this, but I don't think it is a big enough problem. Just like in DotA, "early abandons" are not the problem. Ragequits are the 90% case, and dc before connecting to the game is the 10% problem. Then we have to consider that Riot already has systems in place for this. If many people are having connection issues, there is loss forgiven. If a player is regularly dcing before games start, there is LeaverBuster.

Overall, it's annoying when it happens, but I think this is not high on Riot's priority list for good reason.

Riot's shown that they can implement "Loss Forgiven." Why not take it a step further to ensure leavers/AFKs/Disconnects don't continue to ruin the game for well-intentioned players?

There is significant abuse potential. If you let people leave a game at :30 and have it not count, it's going to be 10x worse than the dodge chicken problem.

Soxes4 votes

I mean, are we at the point now where improvement is stifled from outdated code? Hardly a "good" reason. And even if the amount of people who never connect is statistically lower than Ragers/AFKers/Leavers, that doesn't mean that it's not a problem worth fixing. 2 years ago, players who didn't pick a champion were given a RANDOM champion, even in ranked. Does that mean that every game had an AFK in lobby? No, of course not. But it was still worth fixing because it ruined a game for 4 other people and was completely out of control. And like I said, this would only apply to people who never connected to the game, not to games where First Blood was already given or even if players have already shopped/used abilities/done anything else that interacts with the game.

RedTrinketGoneHa2 votes

{quoted}

To make this work, Riot would need a way for the game application to cancel the game. It's a difficult thing with their infrastructure (unlike DotA, the champion select thing and the game playing thing are two separate executables).

I think Riot would like to fix this, but I don't think it is a big enough problem. Just like in DotA, "early abandons" are not the problem. Ragequits are the 90% case, and dc before connecting to the game is the 10% problem. Then we have to consider that Riot already has systems in place for this. If many people are having connection issues, there is loss forgiven. If a player is regularly dcing before games start, there is LeaverBuster.

Overall, it's annoying when it happens, but I think this is not high on Riot's priority list for good reason.

There is significant abuse potential. If you let people leave a game at :30 and have it not count, it's going to be 10x worse than the dodge chicken problem.

That's why you make the punishment for the player that never connected 10x worse. It was their choice to quit the client when they passed champ select, not the teams. And don't even give me the "oh my client crashed BS" it doesn't take you 20 mins to fix a crashing problem, you usually have to reload the games a couple times and you're back in. Idc if it's already 5 mins into the game, just get your ass back in there.

Señor Karthus2 votes

{quoted}

That's why you make the punishment for the player that never connected 10x worse.

That sounds like "yeah, we whipped the victim 20 times, but we whipped her rapist 200 times. Justice was done" I agree with this. People who never connect should get a loss of LP and the rest should have a loss prevented.

SmokingPuffin3 votes

It's not so simple. In Riot's infrastructure, you are talking to different servers for champion select and gameplay. It can easily be that you have a stable connection to the champ select server, but not to the game server; in some cases they are located in different states. I would guess that most players who fail to connect to the game server weren't trolling and really had connection issues.

Riot also has no ability to differentiate between players who legitimately can't connect to the server and players who pull the plug on their modem.

IS1a442cd69a169ed293a391 votes

{quoted}

It's not so simple. In Riot's infrastructure, you are talking to different servers for champion select and gameplay. It can easily be that you have a stable connection to the champ select server, but not to the game server; in some cases they are located in different states. I would guess that most players who fail to connect to the game server weren't trolling and really had connection issues.

Riot also has no ability to differentiate between players who legitimately can't connect to the server and players who pull the plug on their modem.

We should stop giving any feedback in your logic. You know, Riot has no ability to do anything. The differentiation never mattered anyway. Even the current leaverbuster doesn't distinguish whether it's intentional.

SmokingPuffin1 votes

We should stop giving any feedback in your logic. You know, Riot has no ability to do anything.

It's false. Just need to be aware of what Riot has at their disposal when giving the feedback.

Nobody likes the guy who knows nothing about the job you do or the tools you have and then says it should be easy to fix everything.

The differentiation never mattered anyway. Even the current leaverbuster doesn't distinguish whether it's intentional.

Leaverbuster is designed with that limitation in mind. That's why it works the way it does.

Proposals to fix afk players tend to be all about getting draconian on leavers when we don't actually have the information to justify that action.

Zurqal1 votes

To make this work, rito checks to see if a client-to-host keepalive is being sent. If not, see my above post. Welcome to the internet, circa 1953.

SmokingPuffin1 votes

Riot already knows when you close the client.

Riot doesn't know whether you unplugged your modem or it's some routing issue. A keepalive packet doesn't help for this problem.

Zurqal1 votes

Sure it does, you no senda da keepalive, game it a closa, how hard is this? It was coded back in 19fucking53, ffs.

SmokingPuffin1 votes

When the keepalive packet fails to reach Riot, Riot has no way of knowing why that happened.

Is it because the player severed the connection (which we would like to punish severely) or is it because the player's ISP is failing to route the packets (which we would like to pardon)?

iamthegoatofwar4 votes

people who say this is abusable blah blah blah...no just stop arguing. don't hit people with the logic of "probability" and all that other bullshit.

Saevum4 votes

The "Honorable opponent" vote could be used to amend some of the LP loss by 1.

Example:

if you lose due to team or afk trolling, enemy team could have a way to make your loss less miserable: "This guy played right and his team and the afk guy messed him up. ill give him honor to minimize the impact on his LP loss".

instead of you losing lets say "-20 LP", you would lose between -19 and -15 if enemy team Honors your positive struggle trying to win that afk/troll game.

Delioth1 votes

I like this idea. I'd change the numbers a little bit though, just to account for the fact that most of the community leaves lobbies immediately and wouldn't even think of the honorable opponent piece. I'd probably do it on a percentage of the LP loss to improve consistency and have it spike up first and then drop for each additional honor. Something like 25%/35%/40%/45%/50% of LP loss. To your "-20 LP" situation, if one person remembered to do it, you'd only take a -15 LP hit, while the second would drop it to -13. The next 3 would drop it 1 a piece to bring it down to 50% the original LP loss, -10. Abuse would be difficult, as I believe that the honor system already has a limiting aspect (if you give out too many honors, they can't give more out)

slippykitten3 votes

Just like that pothead pointed out. It would require riot do work, and they are very much opposed to that. Does it suck to have to grind mmr twice as hard for situations out of your control? sure, but thats not riots problem. In fact, from a business perspective, if they are getting you to have to play MORE games to get what you want, then they are winning. What profit is it for them to work to improve player experience?

Jryiah2 votes

{quoted}

Just like that pothead pointed out. It would require riot do work, and they are very much opposed to that. Does it suck to have to grind mmr twice as hard for situations out of your control? sure, but thats not riots problem. In fact, from a business perspective, if they are getting you to have to play MORE games to get what you want, then they are winning. What profit is it for them to work to improve player experience?

I am sure more people have quit league over stuff like this over the people who "play twice as much games to reach ranked badge goal"

Customer satisfaction should be the business number 1 priority, not "making money" because then it becomes a blood sucking leech instead of an actual service provider.

But yeah my last 3 games had a DC. That shit really makes me go "You know what, I want to put money into this company now".

MalaceX3 votes

I support this message!

im Just Filling2 votes

too much abusing potential. People can just dodge after they get into the loading screen and then dodge if they didnt get the role they want. No punishment under your system. Besides, your are more likely to get a d/c on opposing team just based on pure probability, I don't know why you are complaining.

Vith1 votes

{quoted}

too much abusing potential. People can just dodge after they get into the loading screen and then dodge if they didnt get the role they want. No punishment under your system. Besides, your are more likely to get a d/c on opposing team just based on pure probability, I don't know why you are complaining.

More like too much potential for toxicity. Imagine a team playing with an afk and they are just dicking around because they know losing is going to be prevented then bam, they reconnect. If I know anything about the majority of this community then everyone would flame the shit out of him/her.

Soxes2 votes

You're talking about potential for toxicity? As if having a 4v5 from the beginning doesn't make the team toxic enough? At least give them a reason to not give up right from the beginning with the hopes of either the player reconnecting OR getting the loss prevented.

The point is that no system is going to be completely void of potential abuses, just as the system is RIGHT NOW.

Extremely easy to exploit this system as a duo q team. You and a friend queue up, and your friend d/cs before the game starts. Now you can play a 4v5 and if you win, you get rewarded, if you lose, you get loss forgiven. This would eventually become so frequent that you'd get games of 4v4s where neither team is going to get penalized for losing.

Now that's just not true. A player has incentive to re-join a game if the disconnect is legitimate if they are duoing with someone. Not to mention most duos wouldn't do it because again, that AFK player would receive a time ban and an automatic loss, just as they do with the current system.

This idea doesn't remove penalties from players who have disconnected/AFKd, it only helps alleviate frustration as a result of unwarranted losses.

bahamutkaiser1 votes

It may suck, but the solutions introduce more problems than resolutions. By averages, players should get free victories on occasion for this or other reasons, it's averaged against all players, positively and negatively, ending every game with an early dc and punishing the missing player is too severe, forgiving losses without denying victories would be abused, denying victory to a player because their foe manipulates the system is less acceptable still.

The short answer is they don't forgive losses because they don't deny victories. And that subjecting everyone to averaged experience of advantage and disadvantage remains fair, emphasizing this specific cause of loss when dozens of unavoidable scenarios exist which ruin games isn't going to solve much...

Soxes1 votes

What other unavoidable scenarios exist as of right now? We're not talking about early DC's, as you pointed out. We're talking about people who never connect; who never make a single interaction into the game that Riot believes they've successfully connected to.

forgiving losses without denying victories would be abused

People keep saying this, yet fail to give a valid reason why. The potential "abusers" would be punished as a leaver currently is punished within the current system. Like I said, this would also eliminate duo queue "abuse."

There's also no victory denial here. No one said anything about victory denial. If it's "unfair" that they win due to a loss forgiven on the enemy team, then certainly it's unfair that they receive a win for playing an uneven game from the beginning (which, if you didn't notice, is exactly how it works right now.)

SmokingPuffin3 votes

People keep saying this, yet fail to give a valid reason why. The potential "abusers" would be punished as a leaver currently is punished within the current system. Like I said, this would also eliminate duo queue "abuse."

If you forgive losses, but still award victories, you have created ranking inflation in your matchmaking system. This does really awkward things to the matchmaker, especially for players who aren't super active.

IS1a442cd69a169ed293a392 votes

How about denying both victory and failure?

SmokingPuffin2 votes

{quoted}

How about denying both victory and failure?

Works fine from the matchmaker's perspective. Main problems you get are player behavior issues.

Zurqal1 votes

This can't be a real argument, is it?

Cause, if you were really trying to understand, you'd figure out 1/2 the people get an unfair advantage.

bahamutkaiser1 votes

Unavoidable scenarios include poor connection or hardware performance causing certain players to play horribly rather than DC, being matched with a disproportionately bad player because someone else is using an account, getting their elio boosted artificially, or are playing poorly impaired, grievers intentionally ruining games, game bugs at no fault to the player, Riot server performance shortcomings, and whatever else. There are many unavoidable circumstances that are inevitable for every player by personal experience or proximity, you will occasionally lose games because of situations, and you will also win some as well, by averages, you should come out even in the end, players just tend to notice unavoidable losses more than free victories.

As for denying victory, there are many reasons why someone would try to scrap a match, if they recognize their foe, or ally, and want to ruin the match,they could try to dc during launch. Making up some exaggerated penalty which would ruin players who DC during launch is not acceptable, denying victory to five players while forgiving 4 and punishing only one leaves room for players to sacrifice one for the team, this might not seem like a functional exploit to the typical players, but people genuinely pursuing the ladder in organizations could easily run competitive smurfs for this purpose.

Just assuming the exploits have a solution and ignoring high priority safe guards toward this one prerogative is immature. I'm all for better player behavior systems, but bringing up a grievance and assuming anything and everything should be done to address it isn't acceptable. There are higher priorities, and pursuit of a solution must be within respects to superior priorities and community needs. "Fix it no matter what!", and "this has to be fixed" are not helpful agendas... As long as the endeavour ignores higher priority and stubbornly denies shortcomings, a solution will remain elusive :-/

Zurqal1 votes

This... can't be a real comment. I'm sure it's a troll.

Right?

Cause, you know, simple statistics and all, tells us, 1/2 the people have more than average number of AFK/unconectees, and they are disproportionately affected by ritos crap game philosophy.

2pudge1cup1 votes

Question: Why do we award wins when it's a 5v4?

SmokingPuffin2 votes

If a 5v4 wasn't a win, we'd have a ragequit epidemic. People that were angry that some supposedly OP champ beat them in lane would quit to deny the opposing laner their deserved win.

Now, you could have a specific policy for cases where a player quit before first blood and before 2 minutes into the game or something. Again, I just don't see this happening often enough to care.

2pudge1cup1 votes

I was being facetious.

SmokingPuffin1 votes

{quoted}

I was being facetious.

Crap. Outplayed lol.

Kersh1 votes

I stopped LOL for 2 months (due to it being a piece of crap) and started again tonight yay. Then I played several games and remembered why I quit.

I did reasonably well every game winning my lane trying to help others never going close to negative and yet I have lost everygame due to the same thing. I have had people leave never connect and just afk everygame tonight. It always happens and I accept that and I'm not mad about I'm just annoyed by it. If it was a game or two ok shit happens but it's been the last 7 games tonight every single one had a afk/leave on my team. Its ridiculous. We all know they won't be even slightly punished. Honestly I want something bad to happen to the game total server deletion giant cash drop so riot tries to fix it Dota 2 does a pretty good job with shit like this. That's ok though spend more money getting musicians to play at World's that makes everything better. It's just really annoying. Its literally things like this that have made me not put any money into the game this year sadly though I put money into tongiht to get a friend a christmas skinand I instantly regret giving them any money.

Corrival2 votes

That's because it's not them trolling. It's a problem with the game that's making people disconnect after champ select.

IStrawhat LuffyI1 votes

This is the same thing I have noticed as well. It seems that EVERY match that I have played in this last week (as far as I can remember) has had exactly ONE person not connecting during the loading screen. The game eventually loads up and starts without them.

Only after everyone else is fully connected (the game actually starts) do they even have a chance at reconnecting to the game. While everyone else is loading in, attempting to reconnect only results in "check your firewall"/"connection error" type messages. For example, I just got out of a match a few minutes ago in which I was the one not able to connect. My PC "loads in" to a match of League in about 7-10 seconds and I was not able to get into the game until about 4 and a half minutes in.

I also believe there is an issue with the "reconnect" button in the GAME client. I have the best results when reconnecting to a game if I press "close" and then use the reconnect button in the main client instead.

Corrival1 votes

Exactly. But everyone then continues to rage at that one person even though it's not their fault.

SeCKS Egai1 votes

I've been given the impression that in Dota 2 if a player fails to connect by the start of the match, the game is disbanded.

Not that it wouldn't be a lot of coding, but when you consider how much poor player behavior is born out of frustration to matches like these... I'd say that it's clearly worth the effort.

I can't believe how many years it's been since I started - it's not like its a brand new game getting its bearings anymore.

Uiru1 votes

The solution to this problem is going to blow your mind.

  1. Remove duo queue. There is no reason for it. Suddenly, all the 'but muh abuse' idiots have nothing to say, and the matchmaker can go back to pretending like it does anything correctly.
  2. Fix the God damn servers. There are lots of disconnects that are completely out of the player's control. Maybe if the game weren't running on dollar store internet explorer build your own moba code and the servers weren't powered by asthmatic hamsters, this wouldn't be happening.
  3. Hire someone at Riot who cares about this problem, because right now there is nobody. Not one.

That Riot continues to allow these VERY COMMON incidents to ruin ranked is pathetic; that the players continue to lie to themselves about averages and other such nonsense is truly sad.

If a player doesn't move off the platform in 90 seconds, the game ends. This would take an intern twenty minutes to do. The game is a wash, the player is temp-banned for an hour (rapidly escalates if it happens again in a week). Of course, this would have to be met with Riot improving their infrastructure enough so that random disconnects don't get people banned, which is probably why it isn't happening (who wants to do work for no RP?). It would be better for this to happen ten times in a row than to suffer through one completely preventable, non-abusable 4v5. ~Uiru

TheKingDodo1 votes

I would feel much better if we got those "2nd place" things in URF.

Soxes1 votes

Bumping for clarity!

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