Why is Honor Required for End of Season Rewards?

Why is a merit-based reward gated by how feel-good you make the other players?

This company has a real problem with over punishing players and taking away any reason to play. With how long it takes to build honor, anyone that even gets a chat restriction gets robbed of ALL ranked merit-based rewards if they are banned on the latter half of the year. My reference point is it took 1+ month to 'earn' enough 'honor' to get a single checkpoint and I would get at least 1 a game usually 2 average (not counting premades). I would honor anyone each game just to help farm it up.

The issue is that ranked is supposed to be a competitive place where the players put on their game-face and put it all on the line with the understanding that there will be rewards for their accomplishments. Just like other sports, players are given compensation in some sense to prove they are as good as they say they are. Icons, skins, ect are just visual representations of skill akin to medals and trophies in real life.

So, I ask of you, why do we need to make the entire world feel like special snowflakes to earn our merit-based rewards?! I've never understood this. Being banned should be the punishment. That's the end of it. There should be no long, dragged out punishments like losing merit-based rewards. It makes the game worse. Hear me out.

DISCLAIMER! This is my opinion: When one is climbing ranked for the best rewards possible one is more apt to try to control themselves and help the team win. If they CANT earn rewards they have nothing to lose. This account is already worthless now. The champs don't matter if they can't play ranked and earn rewards (speaking from a competitive point of view which many 'flamers' are). These people have nothing left to grab onto and work towards and they are angry about it and will more likely snap at their teammates, especially since winning/losing no longer matters. These people get perma-banned eventually. Do they quit League? Probably not. Many of us grew up on it and want to play it even if it IS frustrating. So the banned party creates a new account. This plays out 2 ways. They either troll the entire time with nothing to lose now that they have this new, free, account, or they are careful up till level 30 and get into ranked.

Lets say they troll in low levels. They get banned. They dont care. Make new account. Do it again. Rinse, repeat. On my climb from 1-30 I met a LOT of these people. Its crazy how many there are. But they keep doing it. Making newbies live's miserable. Good lord it was terrifying how angry they got. I can understand why. Hundreds to thousands of dollars and hours spent playing, lost. Because someone was mad about words... rough. Ok, maybe they were actually toxic and did a death threat or were over the top verbally abusive. Who knows. My moneys on the former to be honest. Either way, these people are a lost cause. A lot of these folks feel like there's no point in being good because when they tried and err'd as they were human, they lost everything. So why try? No incentive.

Lets pretend they get to 30 and were good. Neat! They found a way to dodge all of the overly sensitive players. Lucky them! Now, they play ranked and say something along the lines of "I don't like your favorite color" or "I think that play you made was not very good" or "You want to quit early? You're mentally weak." Now they have a chat restriction which takes away ALL of their honor, ALL of their ability to get key fragments, and ALL of their merit based rewards. They cycle repeats. This is where I am now. I'm extremely upset with this system and the over sensitivity presented by riot and the vocal minority of the community. I no longer have a reason to play and that makes me really sad because I do love this game and the people that play it, even if they're telling me to die. I just want to have a goal while I play and what good does playing nice do me if I won't get my merit-based rewards anyways?! I'm not saying this is what I'm going to do, but why not just start trolling and inting games to piss others off at this point?! I have nothing to lose anymore and I can see where some people will have this mindset and make the game worse for those who still CAN strive for rewards. Its a bad time for everyone imo.

tl;dr: Separate 'honor' and merit-based rewards. Do what every real sport does and keep the player's skill in the game and the player's character separate entities. This virtue signalling and pretending like you care by constantly banning and overly monitoring the game (poorly with no context and with an AI) and catering to a vocal minority is killing the community. This is a competitive game about killing people. If people didn't get upset here and there I'd be worried that everyone was drugged up.

P.S. ( I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion. I think its quite sad that so many people feel like banning people and ruining their gaming experience for being human, having emotions, and occasionally acting on them. The holier-than-thou attitude really is disheartening.)

EDIT: Can this be moved to General Discussion I misclicked the wrong board. Opps.