The 4v5.

Hello All,

I know this topic has been discussed a lot already however I wanted to throw some MORE thoughts out there on this issue.

Most of us dread the 4v5. When you see that "Player has disconnected" your heart drops and you think, "Oh Shi*" I hope they reconnect because your chances of winning have just fell through the floor. Now winning the 4v5 as we know is not impossible and can be extremely rewarding when pulled off however most of the time the 4v5 is a long, painful death . Mean while, the person who disconnected may have had their router shut off or someone ran into the telephone poll outside and they are now facing a lower priority que if they don't reconnect in time.

The reason I am bringing this up is that with Riot's leaver system and current game set up, it enforces that this game MUST EXIST ASA a 5v5 (3v3) OR ELSE. The person leaving (for whatever reason) is punished, the 4 people they abandoned are now virtually screwed and the other team gets to cruise to victory.

Now why is it that we must continually enforce the 5v5 game and not try and focus on how to make 4v5 more viable? Punishing leavers might work some of the time but it invariably does not fix the underlying issue. LOL is one of the most popular games in the world right now and without a doubt, most of the 4v5's are going to come from dc's/connection issues than trolls/afkers. With this in mind the current system will inevitably punish more "good" players than "bad" players. So instead of focusing on how do we punish those who create 4v5, how can we make 4v5 a more viable option so if someone does leave the 4v5 team is not SOL. Because the issue is in RIOT's terms (You (the leaver) are making the game experience worse for the other players and therefore you must be punished). However, the main reason people hate playing 4v5 is because they know their chances of winning have just gone down the toilet and the other team no longer has a challenge.

Many games have developed a solution that I think is pretty viable for LOL and that is if a player leaves, their resources and strength should be distributed amongst the rest of the team. The money is distributed evenly and their proportionate strength (20%) is divided amongst the remaining champions making them 5% stronger (all stats multiplied by 1.05 except move speed). The main issue with his is that players in LOL can reconnect where as in many other games they cannot. Now before you start jumping to conclusions hear me out.

1. Remove the reconnect ability. If a player is AFK/disconnected for a certain amount of time (lets say 3 minutes) their resources/strength are distributed amongst the remaining players. I don't think this is a bad option with how critical a few minutes in this game are as missing three minute early game can put YOU way behind and missing three minutes mid/late game can result in an easy loss. That person can still reconnect to other games when their connection returns, however to solve a consist dc'er obviously after a certain amount of dc's they can still receive a timer punishment on joining games. However, the person can also know that if something does happen (and we've all had it happen) where their comp takes a dump or the connection just drops, their team isn't up a creek.

2.Now I might get a lot of rage for this one, but allow players in the game to vote to kick a person from the gamer or allow a player to voluntarily leave the game (they choose an option like voluntarily leaving that the other players can agree upon), their resources are then distributed amongst the remaining players and their proportionate strength in the game (20%) is divided distributed amongst the remaining players my multiplying their stats (besides move speed by 1.05). I propose this because we've all had that game where we just suc or and honestly, if our resources are distributed amongst the team, they would probably have a better chance at winning than if were are their soaking up gold/exp that the more fed players could use to snowball. his could also be effective for removing feeders/trolls from the game early without the rest of the team having to deal with them. Now the solution for the leaving player is that if the team wins they can still receive half of the winning IP/exp, however if they lose they still receive the full defeat. This system could easily also be used with the current system to keep track of those who are intentionally making the game worse as a long string of kicks can result in a form of punishment. I know we all have those bad streaks but it is easy to tell if someone is just plain trolling actually trying. You can also argue that a feeder/troll can use this option to gain IP, however there are always flaws in a system and at least if you win they only get half and you get to enjoy a full and fair game where as with a complete feeder you will probably lose and if you win, you just carried a troll/feeder into a higher placement and given them full IP rewards for making your game miserable anyhow.

3. Create a game pause button. a. option 1: Each player gets a 20 second pause button b. option 2: The team gets a max of 2 minutes pause with the maximum a single player can use is like 30 seconds, to keep one player from simply trolling and using up all the pause in the game I think this would be really nice in LOL because it would allow people to adjust for the varying game load times (team spawns at 10 seconds while the fifth player comes in at 1:30) or allow people to deal with the inevitable game crash so they can restart the client without having to come into the game 2/3 minutes late.

Anyway, just some thoughts. let me know what you think. I don't mind criticism and like open thought out discussion so please provide reasons for your answers and not just something like "#3 is stupid". (Someone is going to post that, haha)