Why is there no loss prevention for games with AFK players?

Hello everyone!

I contacted Riot support with the following question several days ago, and received a thoughtful response from Riot Peacemaker who told me that I might want to post my question on the boards, so here goes! I'm not sure if this is the correct board for this type of discussion, so if it isn't please let me know which one is, and I'll post it there instead.

I recently played a game where a player started flaming his teammates right off the bat. At about 5 minutes in (he was lvl 3), he died, flamed us again, and went afk. At about 35 minutes, the player reconnected (probably assuming we would have lost by that point), and began to flame us again. He then proceeded to die multiple times and we lost the game. After all of this, I lost much of my hard earned LP. This got me thinking, how is there not a system to detect this kind of behavior and award loss forgiveness, or at least lighter LP losses to the losing team?

I think the vast majority of the playerbase would support a system like this. There's nothing more demoralizing than losing a game due to a legitimately inting teammate, or an afk toxic flamer, and seeing all of your hard earned LP and MMR go down the drain. I know for certain that this is a very common occurrence, and it seems like a problem that would be relatively easy to fix. The game can already detect when a player goes AFK, so while I obviously don't know about the logistics of the game behind the scenes, from the outside it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to implement loss prevention (even a few LP less would be nice) for the losing team.

I know the argument is made that "everyone gets feeders or afk-ers in their games sometimes, so it all balances out," but this is an extremely weak argument in my opinion. If a change like this could be made that would improve the gaming experience of all users, wouldn't that also balance out in the end? Ranks are arbitrary anyway, so if this leads to "rank inflation" of any kind, it wouldn't be too hard to deal with that. The player who went AFK would obviously receive the normal amount of LP loss, or possibly even larger LP loss, which would further disincentive this kind of behavior.

In summary, something should really be done about this issue. If a change can be made that would make the game better for everyone, that seems like a no-brainer fix to me. I love this game, and I want it to be enjoyable and successful for as long as possible. Small but meaningful changes like this could be a real signal to all League of Legends players that they are being heard, and that Riot is truly passionate about making League an enjoyable experience for everyone.

Thanks for listening!