I understand that it could throw off the ladder system, but there MUST be a way to make this work. I have to play a whole 4v5 game and lose a TON of LP for a loss that was majorly out of my power. How is that fair in anyway?
First, we look at the concept of a zero-sum game. Basically, wins = +1, losses = -1. In terms of win-loss, league of legends is a zero-sum game: 5 winners per game, 5 losers per game. Ladder progression on the other hand, is not zero-sum: The points you gain are not equal to the points your opponents lose (they do not sum to 0). Therefore, a secondary system has to be in place, to regain the zero-sum characteristic of the game, or else as the ladder continues, ranking will become inflated. This system is MMR, ladder clamping, and division jumps.
tl dr: Since there is a secondary system in place to return ladder progression, and LoL as a whole, to zero-sum, reducing the amount of LP lost of teams with fewer players would not change ladder progression at all. The only thing that may happen is more clamping or more jumping around. The only downside to this is people abusing this feature to stall out lost games while a selected player afks so that the team loses fewer LP (like a duo queue purposely not surrendering).
Keep in mind the ladder is set up entirely based on distribution, and disconnects, if treated like outliers or extreme values, affect the population mean very little. Therefore, under large sample sizes, sample distributions won't be affected by afks. Statistically, afks, trolls, and feeders aren't a problem regarding ladder/ranking quality of life.
Just had another ranked 4v5 right from the start. They are so miserable. You play your heart out with high hopes, until that wave of being undermanned finally comes crashing down on you and leaves you no other choice than to give up. Do something about the D/C's and AFKS Riot!!
