I have made a few posts about this, and I agree completely that something should be done about it, and I have a solution that, to date, I haven't had anyone give a good reason why it wouldn't work.
First of all, I just want to point out that a 4v5 at any rank is incredibly unfair. I would actually say that if anything, it is more unfair at high level than low level. At high level, you have much more understanding of objective control, map pressure, rotations, itemization, teamfight capability, etc. Bronze games tend to be all over the place with no coordination, but could you imagine a pro game where someone was down one player?
The next thing I would like to stress is just how bad disconnecting from games is. It is in direct violation of the Summoners Code, and could therefore, in my mind, be penalized with account bans (not necessarily permanent ones) immediately. That being said, there are a few situations where it still isn't acceptable, but understandable to disconnect from a game and it is these situations that prevent me from saying that account bans should be the first penalty one receives.
For example, I would consider someone (or something, like a pet) getting injured to a point where they need help an understandable reason to disconnect from a game. Something threatening your home (a robber, a fire, etc) would also be understandable reasons; these aren't things you could plan for (at least one would hope not).
Trying to squeeze in games, playing with a faulty internet connection, playing a game when there is risk of a power outage (brown outs are a grey area, I'm really thinking of queuing up during a big thunderstorm), rage quitting........these are all examples of reasons that are NOT okay to disconnect from a game. However, because it is impossible to tell the difference between these situations and the understandable ones, some other solution will have to be used.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Solution---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you said, the best solution is to give loss forgiven to the other members of the team that had the disconnect. But there is one huge problem with this: the abuse that this system would bring.
What abuse? I could queue up with a friend. If we win, no big deal. If we are in a losing game, however, one of us (we switch off) disconnects from the game and the other person wouldn't lose LP. This would effectively half the LP loss received over the course of the session. If other people on your teams are willing to do the same (I can create situations where this would be the case) then your LP loss on average would be even less. This would be a very serious problem.
Fixing the abuse is a 2 part response. Please note that this solution and, penalties, etc, are only being looked at in the ranked environment; NOT in normals or anything like that.
The first part is to have the penalties from disconnecting from games be increased and become more serious. In other words, the punishment for disconnecting from games needs to happen faster and have a greater effect earlier on. Frequent disconnects should result in bans more easily than they currently do. This is a problem I think Riot is a little too lenient with at the moment when it comes to ranked.
The second part is to put a secondary punishment on every disconnect, independent of the leaverbuster penalties. This penalty would begin as an LP loss for the person that disconnected, with the value being somewhere between 3-4 times the normal LP loss. This LP loss would increase based on disconnect frequency, eventually reaching a point where a disconnect results in a rank demotion (or possibly several).
What is this accomplishing? First of all, just to be clear, this penalty is meant to prevent abuse of the disconnect system; it does not mean that people won't still disconnect. It just means that, for the person that is disconnecting, there is no longer any reason to disconnect to preserve your teammates LP. With this penalty put in place, players would be discouraged from disconnecting to help their team out. The increasing penalties serves to punish anymore that decides its okay to lose 60 LP at a time; in a short number of disconnects, two players would not be able to play with each other (you can't queue with someone more than one division above you). Thus, the only place the abuse could continue to exist is in bronze/silver. To deal with that, I am forced to say that the only solution is to rely on the leavebuster punishments and the (hopefully from the first part of the solution) increased seriousness that will come with the leaverbuster.
Interestingly, I believe this would also have the affect of lowering the number of rage quitters in games (though this is NOT the intent of the penalty). The only way I can see for a person to rage quit is because they decide there is something better to do with their time than play a game they know they are going to lose. As a result, since they know they will lose the 20 LP for the game anyway, they just leave. If they were losing 3 times that, however, it might be worth it to them to stay.
Of course, the problem with this solution is people claiming that it is unfair to punish someone that heavily for disconnecting from the game. Personally, I don't think it is unfair. The way I see it, if you disconnected for one of the understandable reasons above, then that means there are other things going on that are FAR more important than 60 LP; this loss would be one of the last things on your mind. If you are disconnecting enough for this to seriously bother you/impact you, etc, then you probably shouldn't be playing ranked. At that point, its selfish, rude, and in legitimate violation of the summoners code.
